In the greener days of the internet, a proto-meme image bouncing around forums and chat boards depicted a crudely computer-animated Marmaduke sitting at an Italian restaurant, getting yelled at by a bearded man: “SIGNOR MARMADUKE! WHATTA YOU DOIN’ IN LUIGI’S PIZZA PLACE WHEN YOU A DOG AND NO PEOPLE?” This man, presumably Luigi, then notices that something in Marmaduke’s red, pitiless eyes has transformed both his hands into Santa Claus heads, which laugh in Japanese and act as rocket thrusters propelling him into space.
My working theory is that the team responsible for Netflix’s new feature-length Marmaduke vehicle had no knowledge of the messy-yet-lovable great Dane’s nearly 60-year comic strip, and instead took as their source material this hallucinatory webcomic most likely thrown together by some lunatic in 20 minutes. In the carelessness of its slapdash construction, the off-putting flatness of its style, its brazen resistance to basic foundations of logic, and its hostility toward conventional humor that borders on the avant-garde, the new film (a term generously applied to this haphazard sequence of moving images) has far more in common with the hectic, ugly delirium of online obscurities than the newspaper’s funny pages. Premiered without fanfare and tucked away in the dustiest crannies of the Big Red N’s content library, it’s now right where it belongs, a digital oddity so minor and off-brand it could barely be said to exist at all.
