Thursday 21 March 2024

Kronk's Bite of Banality (Disney's Most Inexplicable Sequel?)

It might not be fashionable to admit this, but there was a part of me that, for years, was privately hoping for Moana 2. When Zootopia 2 was first announced, along with Frozen 3 and 4, while the rest of the net was fuming about the woeful lack of originality on Disney's horizon, I was largely just annoyed that we Moana fans appeared to have been overlooked. There'd been a few ominous rumblings about a live action remake, but I'm not sure how many Disney fans, even the ones who watch live action remakes, were sincerely clamoring to see the film redone a measly seven years after the original's debut (stupidest idea ever). So long as we had any possibility of a good sequel, one that expanded on the original's world in a thoughtful and meaningful way and allowed us to spend a little more time with that wonderful cast of characters (including Tamatoa - obviously - but ONLY if Jemaine Clement would return to do the voice) I couldn't say I was totally adverse to the idea. So when Moana 2 was announced a couple of months back, I was genuinely buzzing with excitement. For about a micro-second. Before I read the fine print and realised that this was really just the upcoming Disney+ series edited and repackaged as a theatrical release. A Disney+ series that, by all indications, wasn't even planning to use the original voice actors. And then my heart just sank like a stone. Look, I will ultimately suspend my full judgement until I've actually seen the thing, but I don't think that's a good starting point for any canonical sequel, let alone one to an original as strong and beloved as Moana. (As for Tamatoa, I'm calling it now - he'll appear to some capacity, but it will be a non-speaking cameo that purposely forgoes the need to re-enlist Clement.)

Part of the reason why the basis for Moana 2 fills me with such trepidation is because I feel that we've been here before. Cast your mind back to 1994, when Disney released The Return of Jafar, a direct to video sequel to its 1992 smash hit Aladdin. It too had started life as a television project, specifically the pilot to the upcoming Saturday morning spin-off (Saturday morning spin-offs of hit movies being a staple of the age, and not just for Disney), until somebody had the bright idea to upgrade it and market it as the company's formal follow-up feature (sources vary on whose bright idea, and on whether producer Tad Stones championed this upgrade or opposed it). By its nature, it was not designed to stand toe-to-toe with the original, and it couldn't. The quality of its animation and music were just too significant a downgrade (on a more positive note, it was able to get a lot of the voice cast back, just not the one specific voice who'd been the original's big draw). And yet, it sold very, very well on video (I bought a copy, so I can't exactly complain), ushering in one of the most abominable, nothing-is-sacred eras in the company's history - the era of what has been unaffectionately termed the Disney "cheaquel".

I'll concede that The Return of Jafar is one of the more distinguished of the cheapquel gallery, in that its main raison d'etre, as a story, was to account for why Iago, the secondary antagonist of the original picture, should be part of Aladdin's crew in the series (which, as a quirk of this being marketed as a standalone project, launched months ahead of its upgraded pilot, creating a continuity snafu). It had ideas that were a little more ambitious and forward-thinking than the specimens it inspired, and who doesn't love a nice redemption arc? It's just unfortunate that, in exalting that smart-mouthed macaw, it ends up doing its titular character so incredibly dirty. Jafar is still voiced by Jonathan Freeman, so that much works in his favour. He also gets at least one genuinely great line (his response to Abis Mal questioning if genies can kill - "You'd be surprised what you can live through!" - is absolute gold). The trouble is he dies at the end. And that's kind of a drag, no? Jafar did incredibly well to survive the original Aladdin, given that most Disney foes of his era were sent hurtling to their doom, so for him to have that taken away from him by a film this cheaply constructed is, let's face it, a bit of an insult to such a great villain. The real deal-breaker, though, is that Jafar looks to be in a heck of a lot of pain when he dies. At least with most other Disney villains - Gaston, McLeach and even Sykes from Oliver & Company - it would have been over for them very quickly. Jafar really suffered on the way to death, and I gotta resent that.

The reason I'm digging up this particularly soiled patch of Disney history isn't merely because I see it as a worrying precedent for where Moana 2 might be headed, but because I find it helps to keeps things in perspective in terms of Disney's current situation. We all know that Wish is a current favourite chew toy of the internet (make no mistake, it wasn't great), and what a disastrous year 2023 was for Disney on the box office front, at a time when they were almost embarrassingly intent on getting the world to celebrate their centennial. But having lived through the cheapquel era, and some of the other hopelessly bad decisions the company made during the dawn of the 21st Century (the Circle 7 debacle, and Eisner's willingness to cut ties with Pixar springs to mind), I'm not inclined to freak out. These things come in cycles. There was a time, in the mid-00s, when I honestly didn't see a way back for Disney. The rise of 3D animation, and the shifting dynamics of the Hollywood animation industry, had knocked them too high and too violently from their pedestal. I believed the company would live on, but in a diminished form, with direct-to-video knock-offs of past glories as their bread and butter, while Pixar and DreamWorks only swelled into more formidable giants still. It didn't happen, but for a moment there it all seemed frighteningly plausible. If Disney can recover from an ebb as low and as brand-degrading as their cheaquel proliferation - the age of "yes, this is good enough to be marketed as an official sequel to a timeless classic that's stood on its own for generations" - they can recover from Wish, no problem. Heck, if they can recover from Chicken Little, they can recover from Wish, so stop your hand-wringing.

The question is, are we at a point now where we might even be able look back at the cheaquel invasion and laugh about the whole thing? I wouldn't necessarily go that far, but I'll admit that glancing over their last few years' worth of output and noting just how conceptually out of hand the practice was getting brings me just a little in the way of perverse amusement. Basically, everything from 2004 onward. There are some predictable titles in there (Mulan II, Tarzan II), some more questionable entries (Brother Bear 2, an alternate reality Lilo & Stitch follow-up that doesn't mesh with the continuity of the transparent Pokémon rip-off they did two years prior), some very sick jokes (Bambi II), some seriously weird shit (The Lion King 1½, Cinderella III: A Twist In Time), and some borderline inexplicable shit - namely, The Fox and The Hound 2 and the subject of today's entry, Kronk's New Groove. With The Fox and The Hound 2, I guess it will forever amuse me that Disney got round to sequelising a title from their mostly shunned 80s era but left Hercules on the shelf (it's odd that Hercules was the ONLY Renaissance picture not to be exploited in this way, other than The Rescuers Down Under, which was already a sequel, just not a cheapquel). And 2005's offering Kronk's New Groove, which is...well, what even is Kronk's New Groove? It's a puzzle. I have never quite made sense of it.

If nothing else, I think Kronk's New Groove is one of the more harmless DTV sequels. Understand that "harmless" is not a characteristic I would attribute to a great very many of them. I think a number of them are very actively harmful to the movies whose characters and legacies they flagrantly mishandle. The paradox with most Disney cheapquels is that they enter in with the pretence - nay, the delusion - of being wholly reverent to the original, when by their very nature they cannot help but be anything other than grotesquely irreverent. It's like trying to shoot a respectful follow-up to Citizen Kane called Citizen Kane II: The Rosebuddening on your iPhone in your back yard. It can't be done. The Lion King 1½ (2004) marked something of a turning point in that regard - a cheapquel with a smidgeon of self-awareness that its existence amounted to a tampering with the original's legacy, not a meaningful expansion on it, and for once seemed to wear that irreverence freely on its sleeve. It's as if somebody at Disneytoon Studios said, "If we have to keep making this direct-to-video junk, couldn't we at least try having some fun with it? You know, just as an experiment?" I don't look on The Lion King 1½ as a resoundingly successful experiment, but it pissed me off less than Simba's Pride and I'll give it marks for effort. Kronk's New Groove, likewise, is a lot more flippant about its existence than most other cheapquels. It has no pretensions to being a serious follow-up, although that has much to do with the fact that its predecessor had no pretensions to being a serious picture, period, and it needed to follow suit. Switching the focus to Kronk (Patrick Warburton), the villainous henchman from the original, was on paper a solid enough step in attempting to succeed something as gleefully rebellious as The Emperor's New Groove. It meant forgoing the obvious route suggested by the rules of the cheapquel formula - which is to say, a plot about a mature Kuzco parenting a disobedient child who desperately wants to be a llama. You just know that someone pitched that exact outline, however.

Instead, Kronk's New Groove follows Kronk's endeavours, post-Yzma, to land a wife and become a homeowner. If those strike you as awfully prosaic plot goals following a first installment where the lead character gets turned into a talking llama after a failed assassination attempt, you would be dead on. Kronk's New Groove plays less like The Kronk Movie then The Alternate Reality Kronk Sitcom - the narratives in which it places Kronk play conspicuously like the kinds of trite situation in which the protagonist of a nondescript sitcom is likely to find himself. I say "narratives", because there are actually three of them playing out in succession. Kronk's New Groove belongs to a particularly cynical subcategory of cheapquel known as the anthology cheapquel, in which a triad of individual 20-minute stories were strung together to create a single feature. Whenever you got one of those, it was usually a safe bet that you were looking at the upcycled remains of an abandoned television series. Atlantis: Milo's Return (2003) was one such Frankenstein creation, comprising three episodes of a TV spin-off that was canned when its predecessor nosedived at the box office. Before that, there was Belle's Magical World (1998), an unsightly glimpse into a Beauty & The Beast cartoon show that never made the grade. Cinderella II: Dreams Come True (2002) was hotly rumored to have been salvaged from yet another discarded television project, but I don't know if this was ever confirmed. (If so, then little mystery as to why it was discarded. Holy shit, was that thing dull. The most interesting thing that apparently happened after Cinderella married the prince was Jaq becoming human so that he could bone Cinderella - while she was still married to said prince, no less. Come to think of it, a scenario that steamy has no business playing out as tediously as it does.) So it follows that we would approach Kronk's New Grove with a similar level of suspicion. Was this also an abandoned TV project? Are we indeed watching a spin-off Kronk sitcom that might actually have been in another universe?

I have to admit I'd find that hard to fathom. I'm not sure how far into development a prospective Kronk sitcom could get before conventional wisdom kicks in that Kronk is, simply put, not a strong enough character to front his own series. Comic sidekicks in general don't tend to thrive in the limelight, which is why they were made the sidekicks to begin with. True, Timon and Pumbaa might be considered an exception - they had their own TV show long before they landed their own cheapquel - but they were also  a duo with an established Ren & Stimpy dynamic. They had one another to play off. Kronk was hilarious in The Emperor's New Groove, but he was hilarious primarily as a foil to Yzma - his slow wit and artless pride in his home cooking provided the perfect contrast to her extravagant fury. Remove Yzma from the equation (or at least, greatly diminish her presence) and Kronk as a whole suddenly becomes a lot less fun. As it happens, there's barely enough to be mined for a one-off feature; his stand-alone quirks run out of steam distressingly soon into this film's 72-minute running time. But if Kronk's New Groove isn't an upcycled television project, then it begs the question as to why on earth it should play like one. My take would be that there had already been enough anthology cheapquels by now for the format to have become a formula unto itself. And while it would probably be giving Kronk's New Groove a mite too much credit to suggest that it was consciously conceived as a send-up of a lost TV spin-off, there are at least sparse moments where the film seems attuned to its sitcom-esque triteness and positively revels in it. Bare in mind that the entire thing is building up to that very hoariest of sitcom scenarios - the predicament where one character has to pose as another's spouse in order to ward off some intruding relative. Anyone with a television set will have seen over a dozen variations on this particular storyline. Even a sitcom as intelligent and ground-breaking as The Simpsons couldn't get further than its ninth season without resorting to it. This is the enigma of Kronk - the way it hangs between a state of half-parody and half not being hip enough to get the meaning of its own jokes.

The intruding relative in question is Kronk's father, Papi (John Mahoney, who was also Frasier's dad and by extension Sideshow Bob's). He sends an urgent llama-gram (llamas, for their significance to the original tale, are worked in only arbitrarily here) to announce that he'll be paying a visit to see the new life his son has procured for himself - a life that, so Kronk's prior communication has led him to believe, includes a wife and a grand abode. Kronk was in fact jumping the gun when he told his dad he had either of those things, and spends the next two acts recounting to Matta (Patti Deutsch), the waitress from the first movie, how he came to acquire a house and then lose it, and how he met the love of his life only to royally alienate her. So far, so very like watching a clip show to a garden-variety series that never existed. What's truly devastating to Kronk is the thought of missing out on his opportunity to finally secure Papi's approval - growing up, Kronk was never able to impress him with any of his talents (his baking and his squirrel whispering) and has since craved the infinite validation of receiving a thumbs-up gesture from his dad. So when Papi shows up, Kronk resolves to bluff his way through the situation, as sitcom characters do, by convincing local villager Pacha (John Goodman) to dress in drag and act like they're married.

As strange as it might sound, Kronk's New Groove is the DTV entry that merits the most direct comparisons to the Echidna of all cheapquels, Return of Jafar. Tonally, the two would seem utterly non-comparable (Jafar took itself seriously as an adventure story, while Kronk does not take itself seriously on any level), but the premise is remarkably similar. The villainous sidekick of the original, having parted ways with the primary bad, is plopped in the protagonist chair (Kronk is simply more upfront about this move than Jafar), and tasked with reaffirming their commitment to the path of innocuousness when their ex-boss sneaks back into their lives and tries to lure them with another nefarious scheme. The main difference being that, with Kronk, that's only one third of the conflict. Some might argue that Kronk, unlike Iago, was never truly evil to begin with, but let's not split hairs - the man might be a lovable goofball, but he is an attempted murderer. He knowingly put poison (or what he assumed to be poison) into Kuzco's drink. And his "redemption" in the original film was, by design, entirely shallow. He had the occasional quibble about the morality of what he was doing (hence the interjections from the shoulder angel/shoulder demon), but his final reason for turning against Yzma was because she bad-mouthed his spinach puffs. From there, everything he did to help the heroes was basically by accident. With that in mind, I can't help but feel that the opening to Kronk's New Groove slightly misrepresents the events of the original. The first musical number, "True To Your Groove", tells us that Kronk lost his groove "when he fell in with a woman who wanted to take over the world" (Did she, though? I don't remember Yzma saying anything about global conquest in the original, she just wanted to usurp Kuzco as emperor). Kronk also claims, in the prologue, that he "helped save the emperor", and technically that's true, but definitely overstates his role in the predecessor's resolution. Kronk's New Groove opens with the premise of Kronk now being a universally beloved and accepted pillar of his community, and while I'm all for magnanimity, there is something about this set-up that's kind of disingenuous. At least Iago's crimes weren't totally disregarded, and not 100% pinned on Jafar.

Then suddenly Yzma returns (having largely, but not entirely reversed her feline-isation from the first movie) and like Jafar before her, she's the character done the most flagrant disservice by the cheapquel - although, also like Jafar, they did get her original voice, Eartha Kitt, to reprise the role, so it isn't a total wash. I am not sure which villain is ultimately treated worse. Yzma does slightly better than Jafar in that she doesn't die. (Maybe...the film ends with a brick joke where she's attacked, now in rabbit form, by a couple of newly-hatched condor chicks, but since we don't actually see them finish her and the situation is played wholly for laughs, I don't find it overly ominous.) Jafar, though, still had the basic dignity of getting to be the single greatest threat to Aladdin and co for the entirety of his cheapquel, even whilst making bad Psycho references. Yzma barely qualifies as a threat this time round. Her scheming peaks with a hackneyed plot to fleece a bunch of old folks with a fake youth tonic (working in a left-of-field bid for her to become emperor again, which the script openly acknowledges as utterly nonsensical), before she's removed from the action after only the first flashback. Again, there's a smidgeon of self-awareness in the distinctly glib fashion in which Kronk attempts to gloss over her thwarted intrusion ("Let's all reflect on these lessons on our way home tonight"), but it doesn't cover these sins any more aptly than would the glibness of an actual sitcom. Really, the most interesting thing we have to reflect on is how remarkably unsubtly the youth tonic plays as an allegory for heroin addiction, with the old folks selling all of their worldly possessions to fund their habit. I also want to make note of a joke where Yzma announces that she's come to Kronk with a proposition, only for Kronk to screw his face up in disgust before she specifies she means a business proposition (yep, that old chestnut). Based on the nature of their interactions, I'm not sure just how well the cheapquel cottons on to the subtle implication that Kronk, in the original, was basically Yzma's gigolo. You might recall that one of the animators in the documentary The Sweatbox explicitly introduced Kronk as "Yzma's boyfriend." Which honestly tracks with the sardonic way Kuzco describes him in the movie proper ("Every decade or so she gets a new one. This year's model is named Kronk.") and that intensely awkward dinner table conversation in which Kuzco probes Yzma about Kronk's age  ("He's what, in his late 20s?") To circle back to Wish for just a moment, you'll have heard by now that the original plan was for Magnifico and Amaya to be partners in crime, and mutually evil, as countless fan artists and YouTubers lament the loss of what could have been Disney's first villainous couple. I'd say that's only true in the sense that they'd have been Disney's first open villainous couple. Before them, there were at least two antagonistic pairings who could be easily interpreted as physically intimate behind the scenes. Yzma and Kronk are one. Prince John and Sir Hiss from Robin Hood are another.

Alas, we move on swiftly from Yzma, and to a story centred on Kronk's newfound calling (cemented at the end of the first film) as a Junior Chipmunks scout master, heading a troop that includes Pacha's two older children, Chaca (Michaela Jill Murphy) and Tipo (Eli Russell Linnetz). Here, he encounters the prospective new woman in his life, Ms Birdwell, who unfortunately happens to be the leader of the rival troop on course to beat them in the camp championships. You know how it is. First the bitter competitiveness, then the realisation of the bubbling erotic tension. By all rights, this should be the most tedious section of the movie - no Yzma, a trite conflict that's played mostly straight, and a standout candidate for the script's most insufferable joke (Chaca and Tipo debating whether the correct term is "spit and polish" or "snot and polish"). Yet it's propped up immeasurably by the casting of Tracy Ullman as Birdwell, doing a sweeter variation on her Emily Winthrop voice from the Simpsons episode "Bart's Dog Gets an F". It's a strong vocal performance, enabling Birdwell to sound appropriately sensitive in a scene where she helps one of her charges overcome their fear of the water, but officious enough that she'd initially rub Kronk the wrong way. Ullman is a very good match for Warburton, and while it's nowhere near as fun as the dynamic he had with Kitt in the first film, it works well for the purposes of this story. This episode also contains what has to be the film's most mind-bogglingly weird sequence, a protracted interlude where Kronk and Birdwell, having admitted their feelings for one another, are dad dancing to "Let's Groove" by Earth, Wind & Fire. As in, the actual song, not some cover version performed by the characters in-universe. And that's jarring as hell. Anachronistic humor is part and parcel to The Emperor's New Groove, I know, but there's something about having the characters jive to a real-world disco track (or post-disco, if you please) that completely disrupts the reality of their world. I will give it a pass (just) on the grounds that its presence is presumably non-diegetic (the characters are clearly reacting to it, but the sequence is largely a shorthand for their mutual euphoria, is it not?), but it's still bafflingly out of place. Also, it literally now occurred to me that they used this song (as opposed to "September") because it has "Groove" in the title. Anyway, the goodwill between Kronk and Birdwell predictably doesn't last, when Tipo sabotages Birdwell's troop's entry in the camp cheerleading contest, and Kronk admits to having previously encouraged the impressionable kid to resort to cheating. Alone again, naturally!

You might have noticed that the one character from the original I have yet to say anything about in relation to the cheapquel is Kuzco himself. He is in the spin-off, and is still voiced by David Spade, but has easily the biggest downgrade of all the main players, popping up only intermittently to provide a running commentary from some weird space outside of the story's reality. Here, he's every bit as self-obsessed and obnoxious as he was in the original, but his lack of direct involvement in the narrative action means that we get no functional sense of his development in the previous adventure being undone. Honestly, that's a pretty smart move that allows Kronk's New Groove to have its cake and eat it with regards to Kuzco. The problem is that his interjections become increasingly superfluous and annoying as they go. The most interesting, and telling, thing that Kuzco gets to do is to flash up a sample of preliminary concept art for the film's DVD cover, which seems a lot more honest about the nature of the feature than the cover we eventually got (see several paragraphs above). The final cover shifted emphasis away from Birdwell, Chaca and Tipo, putting all of the focus instead on the returning fan favourites. It's move that's downright deceptive, given how very little time we get with Kuzco and Yzma in this installment. Heck, Bucky the squirrel has less screen time here than he did in the original, and contributes nothing that's functional to the narrative progression, besides showing up to warn Kronk about the presence of a rival troop. One character who does get a hugely increased amount of screentime, besides Kronk, Chaca and Tipo, is Rudy, the elderly man defenestrated on Kuzco's orders at the start of the original. As a presence, he doesn't exactly benefit from the expansion, but this at least enabled his voice actor, Disney veteran John Fiedler, who died a few months before the film's release, to go out on a substantial enough closing note.

That's the other weird thing about Kronk's New Groove - the way it's caught between the slavish need to recreate the familiar beats of the original whilst feeling entirely disconnected from anything that actually happened within the original's world. It plays overwhelmingly like a calculated effort please the cult following Disney had surely noticed Kuzco and co acquiring in the five year gap between the two features (I assume that Kronk's New Groove was created off the back of that following; this was blatantly not a sequel rushed into production before there'd been a chance to gauge response to the original, which is presumably how Brother Bear 2 came to be). Switching focus to Kronk, the breakout character, was already a massive act of fan service in itself (though given the massively reduced roles of Spade, Kitt and Goodman, I haven't ruled out the possibility that Warburton simply had greater availability). For much of the time, the film is looking to very consciously evoke the experience of watching the original, right from the prologue, where a distraught Kronk promises to fill us in on how he came to be covered in cheese like a human pizza, just as Kuzco promised to account for how he came to be a llama (Kuzco, obviously, has the juicier story to tell). Fan favourite gags are recycled at every turning, a few of which work - I have to admit I chuckled at Yzma telling Kronk to pull the lever, reassuring him that "I worked out the bugs" - but most of which feel like superficial bids to replicate its predecessor's charm. It's of no surprise that the shoulder angel and shoulder demon should reappear wherever Kronk is on the verge of a moral dilemma - which in this movie happens regularly enough for the characters to rapidly wear out their welcome, but more fatally still, they're used in ways that suggest an intrinsic failure to understand their appeal the first time round. There, the joke was that the angel and the demon were both equally incompetent and had zero clue what they were each doing. Here, the angel consistently makes valid points and always has the upper hand over the demon (no fun). It's also noticeable how much more timely and unsubtle the appetite for popular culture references had gotten in the post-Shrek world. Consider that in the original Emperor's New Groove, the most explicit movie reference was a shout-out to the 1958 film The Fly (the fly screaming "Help me! Help me!" before being devoured by a spider). In Kronk, Rudy does a direct impersonation of Gollum as portrayed by Andy Serkis in the Lord of The Rings series, which immediately dates this feature to the mid-00s, when everyone and their grandma was doing impersonations of Gollum as portrayed by Serkis. Elsewhere, Kronk gets a couple of personal assistants called Marge and Nina, purely so he can spin a groan-worthy Andrew Lloyd Webber pun out of their names (which I won't spoil here, on the off chance you haven't figured it out).

It goes without saying that Kronk's New Groove is in no way a meaningful expansion on The Emperor's New Groove, but to be fair, it's not as though The Emperor's New Groove was the kind of picture that warranted meaningful expansion to begin with. It too was light and silly. The difference being that it was light and silly in ways that seemed daring and subversive - a full-on deadpan farce at a time when Disney was renowned mainly for its epic melodramas. It was lightning in a bottle, which was really nothing short of miraculous given the tortured conditions under which it was made. What Kronk represents is a commodification of all of that, the taming of this utterly spontaneous Disney world into something altogether safer and more familiar. What we get is a window into an alternate reality in which a once distinguished character becomes a vehicle for weekly outings with banal stakes and pat resolutions. Like the hackneyed comedies it's recalling, it's just about inoffensive enough to make for a pleasant(ish) time-killer. I doubt that the phantom Kronk sitcom it's inexplicably peddling would have racked up even 13 episodes before its inevitable cancellation, but it wouldn't have been completely intolerable if you had absolutely nothing else to do. What I find both intriguing and frustrating about Kronk's New Groove is how, every now and then, it does appear to be on the verge of doing something a little more knowing and playful with this omnipresent mundaneness. There is, notably, a point during Papi's third-act visit when the spiralling farce that obviously ensues swells to mind-boggling proportions, with everyone in town chiming in and attempting to pass themselves off as Mrs Kronk. Here, the cheapquel does, if only evanescently, feel like it's somewhat in on the joke, in making a winking concession to how overly familiar a jam this all is. Just as Kuzco manages to weasel his way into the climax (also posing as Mrs Kronk), so too does a trickle of the original's subversive spirit. Right before it culminates in an unconvincing moral reflection where Kronk, drenched in the physical manifestations of a lie blown up in his face, realises that the people he's helped and the friends he's made along the way are the real wife and house he was seeking all along, and enough to earn him the coveted thumbs-up from Papi.

And then he gets to marry Birdwell anyway, albeit as mainly an afterthought. She shows up at the end with Tipo, who's apparently managed to straighten things out with her off of screen. An epilogue plays out over the end credits, showing us what happens in the immediate aftermath for Kronk and Birdwell by way of a series of holiday snapshots. We see that they spend their honeymoon in France, where they visit the Eiffel Tower and...hold up guys, you do know the Eiffel Tower wasn't built until 1889, right? Unless the implication is that Kronk and Birdwell gained access to a time machine on their travels, then these anachronisms have officially gone too far.

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