Most people feel that children's videos should be educational as well as entertaining. I'd say that it's desirable, but the media do better in some areas than in others.

One area of childhood education that is often neglected today is that of demonic summoning, possession and control. How can we expect our children to function in modern society without these skills? What if they are audited someday? Required to deal with US Customs? Bothered by telemarketing calls?

You may laugh, but I assure you that educating children about these techniques is a hell of a serious business. There are many demonic influences in children's lives today; they are constantly menaced by the threat of demon possession. When they play Little League, for example, many of the parents watching the game become possessed by demons. The danger is very real, just as demons are real.

While I am not a parent, I am an uncle many times over. I'll be honest: I would not want my nephews and nieces to voluntarily summon demons. (Why go to all that hassle, candles, circle, etc. when we can go eat at Chuck E Cheese's.) However, should they find themselves confronted with demons, I'd at least want them to have these vital skills.

Note: no demons were actually summoned, controlled or allowed to possess anyone during the authoring of this review. While I have recently begun playing D&D (Dungeons & Dragons, a role-playing game primarily devoted to evil devil worship) again, the old demon summoning skills--which served me so well in my youth--have long since faded. However, I find that I can still control a rogue demon or two if it gets a little lippy. This is useful when dealing with my company's advertising providers.

With this in mind, I purchased and evaluated We're Back!, a children's animated movie by Steven Spielberg. It boasted impressive voice talent and had a reputation as a diabolically inclined movie, as recommended by some very sophisticated film critics.

Plot: I'm going to give full details here on the grounds that most adults choosing viewing material for their children don't really care about avoiding spoilers. My side comments on the plot, especially as regards matters demoniacal, will be in italics.

The show begins with Buster, a 'mama's bird', about to run away from the nest and join a circus. However, Buster lands on the honker of a golfing Tyrannosaurus Rex, who tells him a tale he probably won't soon forget:

Back in the Cretaceous period (or whenever it was that big monstro dinos ran around, eating other dinos the size of Hondas and taking dumps the size of modern cattle) dinos were stupid and aggressive, sort of like high school football players. They ate whatever they could get their claws on, kind of like me as a lad when we used to go to my grandparents' house.

One day a spaceship shaped like a bloated seal with bat wings landed, and a little green guy in a propellor headgear got out. Brandishing a type of cereal called 'Brain Grain', the little guy enticed four dinos into the spaceship: a sultry pterodactyl named Elsa, a demonic-looking triceratops with extra horns named Woog, Rex (a younger and leaner version of the golfing tyrannosaurus), and one named Dweeb who looks a lot like that dragon Yosemite Sam used to ride before Bugs Bunny became 'too violent for children' (though the evening network news, with its live-in-colour bloodied corpses, did not) and was buggered of all significance.

What disturbed me here is that the dinos did not take the threat of alien abduction seriously. This has the potential to lull children into a false sense of security concerning the very real threat of such abduction. Clearly, the dinos are an analog for demons.

Soon the dinos are fed this Brain Grain, which enables them to talk and become cute and nice, rather like Barney. They discover that they are in a circle having a chat. The circle looks a lot like the summoning circles I used to use as a young lad to hustle up a demon or two when I came up short in the crap games or couldn't pay my bookie. I felt a faint stirring of the old power.

The ship is run by Captain Neweyes, the inventor of Brain Grain, who looks like a painting of a supreme being. In a very Orwellian touch, he also managed to rig up a 'Wish Radio', which enables him to spy upon the dreams of children of every culture and ethnicity you could imagine. I hope he knocks it off when they hit puberty, that's all I can say, or he's going to be one sad cat. He feels no compunction about listening in on the kids, the majority of whom apparently want to see an authentic dino, and who equally apparently don't reckon that the dino would have a hard time differentiating between them and a buffet restaurant.

Neweyes wants to grant them their wish, if the dinos are up for it. (Now that they have the power of speech, it's rather easier to establish consent.) He warns them that his brother Screweyes is a naughty boy, prone to shenanigans; they should not hang out with him. Well, as we know, all dinos would like to make kids' dino dreams come true if they got the chance, so they are gated into modern New York City (where they at least won't be too obvious).

This bothered me quite a bit. I don't want my nieces and nephews learning that you can just wish for a demon and summon one, or that this would even be a good idea. Of course the dinos seem nice; all the demons I used to summon, stir and call up in the basement of our middle-class home were all perfectly polite, too, until I tried to get them to mow the lawn for me. I tell you, no gratitude.

Moreover, when gating in demons, you have to use the correct colour candles, or all hell breaks loose (so to speak). The video makes no mention of this.

There's a young street punk named Louie (who needs dental work) rafting about in a river adjacent to NYC in something that looks kind of like a Chinese junk, and unfortunately, the dinos he has summoned come plopping in from on high and swamp his ride. (Some days just suck, Louie.) Luckily, the dinos help him get to shore, but Rex is having a rough go of it. Good thing there's a backhoe on the dock--just the thing for hoisting a stray dino out of the Hudson so they can go visit someplace with a Dutch name.

This is better information. Kids need to know that if they summon demons, they're responsible for them. "The demons did it, Mom!" is usually not a good enough excuse. Although I never had much luck with backhoes, I know some people that did. The lesson of control is underscored when Elsa the pterodactyl decides it's time for Louie to go flying, without asking him, and takes off. He soon gets her under control, but the movie doesn't show his technique, rituals, etc. What good is this to the juvenile diabolist? Feh.

Elsa, clearly the matchmaker, takes Louie to meet a blond latchkey gal named Cecilia Nuthatch (let's call her 'Cecenut' for short). Cecenut is sitting around in the condo, but her parents are too busy jet-setting it to take her to soccer practice or Girl Scouting, so she sits around and wishes someone interesting would show up, such as a street tough. Louie and his mount scare the hell out of Cecenut at first, but she adjusts and decides to amscray with Louie and Elsa, who by this time amount to a sort of demonic cult.

(Great message for kids: run off with the first demon summoner that comes along. Don't even interview him to see if he knows his stuff. Should be one of the Ten Stupid Things That Women Do To Mess Up Their Lives. A new book: Diabolists Who Barge In On Women, And The Women Who Run Off With Them.) Off they fly on Elsa. However, the dinos hunger...

Our boy Louie, who like most New York City street thugs is well versed in the delicacies of Southern culture, decides that Cecenut is a 'debutante'. She seems to find it easier to agree with him than to attempt to reason with him, which sends the same message you find in Home Ec textbooks dated about 1950. (Cece does look a little bit like a youthful June Cleaver.) Suddenly, Louie and Cecenut are controlling the dinos in a big tickertape parade from one of those big elephant rajah canopy things, and Cece, the little wanton, is inside Louie's overcoat.

Same objection as earlier. Now the demons are under control...but how? They're just walking around like leashed golden retrievers, for Pete's sake. What's Louie's secret? Everyone knows you cannot control demons just by telling them "heel, boy!". (Not even "hell, boy!" will do the trick. This should be obvious even to non-diabolists. I sheesh in their general direction.)

In any case, the dinos (like any other dinos) are doing a 1940s song and dance routine when one of them pops an apatosaurus balloon with a stray claw. (The implication is that the dino, Dweeb as it turns out, is feeling a little amourous. Who says dinos didn't enjoy inflate-a-dates?) Rex comments that he'd like to eat a human. Boy, is Louie in deep pooop™ as the dinos run amuck!

The NYPD comes, but the dinos and Louie and Cecenut have seemingly heard enough about the NYC cops that they aren't hanging around to be booked and body-cavity searched with a nightstick, and they unass the parade route and book off in all directions. Townspeople who see the dinos in the streets are a little disturbed and tend to run screaming. The dinos ride the subway and show up at a robbery in progress, but neither situation fazes the urbane New York dwellers. The cops radio that it's donut and coffee time (I mean it) and bag the chase.

(This, to me, proves the diabolic nature of the film. As everyone knows, most real dinos were herbivores (or they wouldn't have lasted for millions and millions of years). Sensible people would not be afraid of a triceratops. Thus, the analogy for demons. If you were scoffing at me, insisting that this is just a fun kids' flick, I hope you are enjoying that plateful of crow. Demonic possession and control is not something to fiddlefart around with.)

The group rallies in Central Park and discovers the Dr. Screweyes circus, but they seem to think it'll all be ok anyway if they check it out, so in they go. Some thugs accost them, but Louie (who is half their size) tells them more or less to get bent, and they actually do. (Dr. Screweyes is the precise opposite of Dr. Neweyes, lacking only the little goat horns, which makes me think he's more of a necromancer than a diabolist.)

Soon they are in an abandoned, ghostly circus that just screams 'undead' in a darkly Gothic way. The bad Doctor shows up with a blank contract for Louie to sign in order to join the circus, and Louie is either a total moron or is under mind control (in which case why bother with a contract?) and signs with a single drop of his blood. Cecenut also agrees to serve this diabolical figure, at which point the contract fills in and is something like a Microsoft licensing agreement: they must serve hell's legions forever. (Bummer.) Dr. Screweyes isn't exactly gracious in triumph and, caught up in the moment, he rustles up a bunch of ghostly beings and undead.

(This part at least I can vouch for. When I was a fresh-faced, precocious kid learning to get demons to drill holes in the wall between our locker room and the girls', and I actually got the damn varmints to mind me, I used to do the same thing just as a show of exuberance. "Hey, I just got a glimpse of Sherrie McCullough's bra. Let me celebrate a bit, ref.")

Now, the dinos didn't do much to interfere with the contractural proceedings, though they did insist that they'd just as soon take the kids to the Museum of Natural History as see said kids sell themselves into undead slavery. Dr. Screweyes, however, also has a radio; this one enables him to see what people fear rather than what they wish for. It spouts Mephistophelean steam (either that or a vacuum tube just blew).

By the time the dinos figure out that they have slacked off, and Screweyes is hitting them with 'Brain Drain', his own cereal. (Terrible. Of all the tactics that I tried for the general control of the demons I summoned, feeding them cereal was one of the dumbest. They often even ate the cheap plastic toy.) The Doctor rolls out the big guns of paleontological regression, changing the kids to anthropoids (mostly interested in monkey stuff, though neither of them for example begins publicly exploring their own body cavities) and the dinos to the roaring giants of the Cretaceous (or whenever).

However, a Faustian bargain is coming. Dr. Screweyes, who likes to toy with his prey, offers the dinos a deal: he'll turn the kids back to kids if the dinos'll let themselves be chained up as monsters for tonight's show. (He used to sell used cars.) They go for it, and the kids awake in a summoning circle being served breakfast by a clown, Stubbs, who cracks them up. Stubbs is a disgruntled employee and disloyally gives in to Louie's demands to see the dinos.

(Stubbs is clearly an analog for a summoned non-demonic servant such as a djinn, beholden to the summoner provided s/he doesn't mess up and get devoured. At least that's what I always figured. I never got devoured, though one time in college I had a couple memorable nights of I&I with one.)

Showtime! The kids are in little ape/demon costumes (Cecenut even has a two-tine pitchfork, hubba hubba), just sort of blending in with the real demons. Screweyes MCs the show, promising that it's going to be rokken (thank you, emptywishes, for the reference), and summons some liches and ghosts and other undead just to avoid boring the crowd with his speech. A big pyramid is uncovered after an elephant parade, revealing Rex in full Cretaceous predator mode and all chained up. Screweyes uncorks his mind control on him, and Rex is just succumbing when a crow decides this would be a good time to shut off the power to the mind control hardware.

(I definitely wouldn't want my kids thinking it's that easy. Demon control requires a lot of concentration. Relying on electronics for it has never worked. If it had, I wouldn't get so much spam from those worthless buckets of mucous at insight.com. Plus, look what can happen. All your plans undone by a four-pound bird. I mean, come on, for crying in a bucket.)

Well, irony-challenged Rex comes out of the mind control in a bad humour, and decides to chow on Dr. Screweyes. Louie and Cecenut, kind little souls that they are, decide to try and talk him out of it. Cuteness prevails, and Rex puts the erstwhile necromancer down without even a nibble. This frees the other dinos, who also are smart and friendly again. (Again, too easy. They always told me to 'go to hell' when I tried that tactic.)

Everyone else having cleaned up his mess for him, Neweyes shows up. He's pretty teed off at Screweyes (who wouldn't be?) and sends him to bed without any pudding. Cecenut snags Louie, and through coquettry and guile, gets him to kiss her. Captain Neweyes loads everyone into his ship. Stubbs does what we have all wanted to do and quits his job after ranting out Screweyes, who rejects Neweye's suggestion to change, and ends up looking like an Alfred Hitchcock movie with crows all over him pecking away.

The dinos, now fully controlled, wind up being exhibited at the Museum to children who love to play with them. (Nice trick. I couldn't even get one to stand me a game of Stratego.) Finally the little bluebird goes home. The taunts of the other chicks no longer matter. Golfing Rex dances off into the sunset. Boo-yah.

Plot: ridiculous. Not particularly complimentary to the intellect of children, even those whose philosophical or religious beliefs prohibit them from summoning or working with demons. Too many unexplained and implausible connections.

Entertainment: not very. I pleaded for this movie to end sooner, in fact. I kicked myself four times for failing to note the time when I started it. I would have preferred reading the automotive 'advertorial' in the Tricycle Herald.

Animation: well, I've seen much worse (every time I turn on Cartoon Network to anything made after 1970, for example) but this ain't the Lion King, folks.

Voice talent: pretty good. They had Walter Cronkite, Julia Child, Little Richard, Thomas Dolby, and Jay Leno in on this, plus some dimmer lights.

Music: by James Horner. This I consider interesting given that the entire movie is obviously an analog for demon summoning and control... 'Horner'? Come now. In any event, the music is unremarkable.

Production crew: alarmingly, contains a number of 'animators' of various types. About a battalion of them, in fact. An animator is somewhat like a necromancer except that an animator raises only corporeal undead, as all otherwise good children seduced into the world of diabolism by D&D are well aware.

Tea Lady: the incomparable Malek Jamal. The observant animated children's film connaisseur can see her creative touch throughout the movie as surely as if it were branded with her monogram. (Don't tell me you haven't heard of her. Do you live in a dishwasher box in east Pasco, or what?)

Demonic control: it is with regret that I have to Not Recommend the movie to children for this reason. If you are going to teach your child to properly handle demons and other entities from the Lower Planes, you need a better how-to guide than this. This film shows a lot of end results, both successful and failing, but very little about the actual techniques used to wrangle or summon a demon. The aspiring young diabolist could make dangerous assumptions about the discipline based upon this movie.

The best way is to have them read Aleister Crowley and play D&D, like I did. By the time your little tyke or tykette hits puberty, s/he should be able to harness a demon or two any time it would be advantageous. Using these skills, as an adult, s/he will surely do well in long business meetings, getting his or her shopping cart around Costco, and handling dog owners who let their pets jump on innocent passersby and crap in other people's yards.

Overall: while We're Back! is clearly intended as a sort of Sesame Street/Barney for young demon summoners, it's not a very successful one; it isn't even always clear who are the demons and who are the summoners. I cannot endorse it.

In any event, if parents want to teach their children to summon and control demons, they need to be more directly involved. Take them to Charter Cable's customer service desk, or to a public campground during a holiday weekend, or to the Benton County Auditor's office.

There really is no substitute for good, old-fashioned family values, the way we used to do it back when everyone was moral (except a couple of people we all looked down on), back when drugs had not even been invented (except for peyote which only Indians did), no one had or wanted any money (except for bankers), everyone was the same religion (except for Jews, who were not but it was ok), and kids not only always behaved in school (except a couple of trashy ones) but sat up straight or got tolchocked a good one.

Yessireebob, those were the good old days.

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Pooop™ is a trademark saying of Hard_To_Please, one of the funniest writers on Epinions. He publicly told me I could use it all I wanted. (He has probably since come to regret his generosity to an Epinions newbie, four months ago.)

Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older