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The stay-at-home dad: A 4-year-old and and 37-year-old on ‘Paw Patrol: The Movie’

by TYLER WILSON/Coeur Voice contributor
| August 25, 2021 1:00 AM

Forget your jungle cruises, furious cars and Marvel superheroes. In my house, the most anticipated movie of the summer was “Paw Patrol: The Movie.”

Our 4-year-old son loves the Nickelodeon series about talking rescue dogs who protect and serve a sleepy coastal town called Adventure Bay. The other kids have (mostly) aged out of enjoying the show, but the siblings still made sure our little “Paw Patrol” fanatic knew a feature-length movie would be releasing soon.

Honestly, if not for his big brother constantly reminding him of the release date, we could have just popped in a random “Paw Patrol” DVD, selected “play all” and the 4-year-old would’ve been just as satisfied.

So, last Friday, “Paw Patrol: The Movie” arrived in theaters as well as on streaming (thanks to the still-lingering pandemic). So we could save money, dodge viruses and stay home… we just had to fire up the Paramount Plus app and…

Wait, what the heck is Paramount Plus? Do we even subscribe to that? Let’s run through all the apps on the TV… Netflix, Disney, Hulu, Nick, Pluto, MLB TV, Pandora, PBS Kids, Amazon Prime, Peacock…. jeez how much am I paying for streaming services these days?!

Anyway, we found the movie and all the kids seemed to enjoy it to some degree. It’s a CGI adventure compared to the traditional animation of the TV show, and you know it’s fancy because they corralled Kim Kardashian and Jimmy Kimmel to voice side characters with maybe five minutes of total screen time. For the kids?

The most important audience member, my 4-year-old, seemed happy with the movie… I guess. Honestly, he seemed more excited to play with his “Paw Patrol” toys and fire up his favorite disc of episodes (that’s “Mighty Pups,” in which the dogs boast superpowers) rather than rewatch the movie at any point this week.

As for this 37-year-old viewer? I have questions.

Like many kid-targeted shows, “Paw Patrol” is super weird. Rather than spend tax revenue on real emergency services, the town of Adventure Bay instead relies on a rich kid named Ryder and a litter of puppies (they’re not even full grown) to handle all public services, including fire, police, water/air rescue, construction and, most oddly, recycling.

I guess I shouldn’t expect much from a town with a mayor who has a bizarre attachment to her pet chicken, Chickaetta. In one episode, Mayor Goodway and the Paw Patrol strike gold, and, rather than utilize the riches to develop a real infrastructure in the town, she opts to build a giant gold statue of her chicken in the town square.

Oh well. Adventure Bay is a pretty sleepy town, and if not for the frequent calls by that moron Captain Turbot, the Paw Patrol wouldn’t have much to do anyway.

The “Paw Patrol” movie largely abandons Adventure Bay for a, um, quest in nearby Adventure City, where the dastardly Mayor Humdinger (formerly the mayor of the rival town of Foggy Bottom) has been quietly snatching up all the dogs… because he’s a cat person. I don’t know, there’s some kind of weather machine that breaks and the police dog Chase deals with abandonment issues. Look, I played a crossword puzzle on my phone for part of it and I don’t think I should be expected to remember every detail.

Nothing about the movie really stuck out to me, good or bad, except that maybe I thought it focused too much on Chase and left the rest of the Paw Patrol with little to do. As you might expect, that recycling dog just kinda hangs out the whole time. I wanted to see a subplot where Rocky runs around the city complaining about how people keep putting the wrong garbage into the blue bins. “It’s for paper products! No, you can’t put glass in there!”

My critic brain could find more things to gripe about, but the movie isn’t really geared to me. I enjoyed watching how excited my son got in the days, hours, minutes and seconds leading up to us firing up whatever streaming service I said earlier.

The key to enjoying any inane children’s program is to focus on how much the kid enjoys it. I don’t watch “Paw Patrol;” I watch my 4-year-old watch “Paw Patrol.” And all the questions just fade away.

Except what is the deal with this mayor and her chicken? Like, fine, enjoy your pet or whatever, but does it need to be pecking around City Hall all day? Maybe without the distraction of a FARM ANIMAL in the office, you could hire a real construction team to fix the road instead of relying on some unlicensed bulldog who isn’t even potty trained.

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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer and stay-at-home dad to four kids, ages 4-10. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.

photo

Image courtesy of PARAMOUNT PICTURES/SPIN MASTER