A friendless teenager cries. Her tears fall on what works as a companion for most lonely people—her television's remote control. But instead of destroying the mute option, the salty sadness creates magic. What's that magic you ask? Fat Albert.

Squeezing out of the confines of his 1970's toon land to help the lass, the well-meaning problem-solver jumps the time, space, and TV continuum in a scene that can only be described as one of the most unintentionally bizarre and mildly disturbing of the year. Now if we saw Fat Albert wriggle out of fantasy like some freakish, fat-suited birth we'd probably check ourselves into the local mental hospital (or wonder if David Cronenberg was lurking in our bedroom somewhere). But this is a comedy, and one that, had it been smarter, could have tweaked some postmodern, meta-concept of pop-culture nostalgia with deeper introspection (seriously—it's all here). Sadly, Fat Albert, the movie, is not that clever, instead becoming a fish-out-of-water Austin Powers / The Brady Bunch Movie gag in which Albert (played with incredibly accuracy by SNL's Kenan Thompson) and the rest of his junkyard gang wander North Philadelphia as relics of a funkier, squarer time. Cell phones are weird, bad language is shocking, and not everyone dances their troubles away.

But their aim, the "Free to Be You and Me" '70s mantra of feeling good about yourself is not without merit or good intentions; it's just not delivered correctly. Which is too bad because within some of the brightly fun moments (and many aimlessly dumb ones too) is much that rings oddly touching. One, in the process of attempting to help the teen (named Doris, played by Kyla Pratt), Albert and gang (including Bucky and Mushmouth) become literally weaker, fading as time goes on. They can't live outside toonland and their colors grow fainter each day they're unmoored from the television. With that, Fat Albert isn't entirely real. So the idea of working things out—Albert frequently tries—is not always going to work. And if you're in a certain frame of mind, you'll even feel the picture telling you that life will never be perfect or without sorrow. And when Albert and creator (Bill Cosby) see each other face to face, some of us who were fond of the Fat Albert cartoon get a small lump in our throat.

As directed by Joel Zwick (who also made that other fat and frankly, worse movie—My Big Fat Greek Wedding) and written by Cosby (and co-written by Cosby Mysteries scribe Charles Kipps), Fat Albert is a strange, strange movie that should have either remained in its own time or fulfilled higher ambitions. You may think we're asking too much of Fat Albert but this was a cartoon that made us believe (in one episode anyway) that Fat Albert would feel so terrible about finding a porno mag, he would have to tell his mother. Like Cosby (who's outspoken take on the current black experience is rustling more feathers than other out-there comedians), it was wholesome. Cosby's goodness was its edge. Here, the edge is, sorry to say, much too round.