Today Is the birthday of one of the biggest flops in animation history. Mars Needs Moms was a Motion Capture CGI film from Disney, and the film is best known for losing over 100 million dollars in the box office because everything about the film sucks. The animation is detailed yet sucks to look at, the plot is somehow both overly-simple and over-explained to establish a sort of lore that doesn't do anything interesting. It's just a creepy and boring space trek with questionable CGI and bad audio mixing.
One particularly odd thing about this movie besides how bad it is is the fact that the lead voice actor was changed after the movie was already finished. Originally, the child main character was voiced and motion captured by Seth Green of Robot Chicken fame (and everything else he's done), but it was decided after the first trailers for the films were public that he sounded way too old to be the pre-teen protagonist. His voice performance was then replaced by a child actor's performance. Frankly I think the film was bad enough that it really didn't matter, and changing the voice was like a bandaid on a gnawed off limb.
[ASSOCIATE NOTE: for a while it was believed that the Seth Green cut of the film was lost. turns out there was a hidden track for it on the official Blu-Ray release of the film; it's just that nobody checked there before. To give credit where it's due, it's said the version of the film Green's performance is said to be slightly better, but it doesn't make it a film worth watching unless you are looking for a very expensive stinker.]
Man, I haven't watched Mars Needs Moms in a long time. Maybe I should find it online...
Found another surprise: The movie is based of a book written by "Bloom County" cartoonist Berkeley Breathed. Unsurprisingly the book is actually pretty good with a much simpler plot and far better aliens. Even if nothing else changed, the movie would of been tremendously better if it was in Breathed's distinct visual style.