Kiss of Death/Jury Duty/Stuart Saves His Family/The Basketball Diaries/The Pebble and the Penguin

Gene Siskel - Host: [reviewing "The Pebble and the Penguin"] And none of the songs is the least bit memorable. I know that you can't hum

[Ebert chuckles]

Gene Siskel - Host: a single one of them. And if you do know how, don't. Now, the stakes on animated features have really been raised as of late, and "The Pebble and the Penguin" falls very short of that standard. But hey, that may be too complimentary. This would've been a bad film if it had been released in the 1950s. You are warned.

Roger Ebert - Host: Now Gene, I agree with everything you said, and I wanna add something else: Why do animated cartoons color code themselves so kids get the subliminal message that if you have a darker complexion, you're the bad guy? This happened in "Aladdin", it happened in "The Rescuers Down Under", it happened here, where all of the penguins, basically they're black around here, but then the good penguins, the rest of their face is white. But the BAD penguin, Drake, the rest of his face is chocolate brown. Now why would that be? I mean, it may look like I'm just looking for something, but I've never ever seen an animated cartoon where all the good guys are kind of dark brown and all the bad guys are white. They have this color coding, and it ought to stop.

Gene Siskel - Host: Well, they'll get that message if they're in the theater, but I think they're gonna be out of the theater buying candy very early in this picture. This is a film from the Don Bluth production company, and he made "Thumbelina" recently, and now this. I really think he has to, uh, connect with his glory days of past, with "The Secret of Nimh" and "The Rescuers", going back twenty years almost. Uh, the stakes HAVE been raised in animation, and he isn't up to speed.