Blue Snake Mambo (Zootopia 2 Teaser Analysis)

It was VH1's Pop-Up Video series that made me aware of the fact that there exist people in this modern and connected world who are not convinced NASA got anyone to the moon. It's also where I learned an embarrassingly high number of people do not think our sun is a star. When I started looking into the whole "lunar hoax" phenomenon, something caught my attention. One of the "gotchas" or "tells" that the entire lunar excursion was filmed on a soundstage is the absence of stars from the photos or the live video feed. 

The reason this caught my attention was because, in all my years of seeing these images, I had never noticed there were no stars. Needless to say, it didn't take me very long to figure out why you can't see the stars in these photos (though there seem to be a few points of light in the one pictured above from Apollo 14). Put simply, you can't see the stars because it's not night time on the moon when the photos were taken. It's literally broad daylight. Otherwise, we wouldn't be able to see the surface or the astronauts. The sky doesn't look like broad daylight because the moon has no atmosphere to color the sky in the trademark hues of a day on the Earth. The story amongst the hoaxers is that the director (who may or may not be Stanley Kubrick, depending on who you ask) didn't like how the stars looked on set, so opted to turn them off, never mind the suspicion this might cause because surely people would expect to see the stars... and I never said this was a good explanation, just one of their talking points. 

Also, it's not like the Apollo missions are the first time we've seen images taken from the lunar surface. The Surveyor program started years before Apollo 11. The Soviets even took photos with their Lunokhod program. Did they also make the same creative decision on their own sets? Were they afraid people wouldn't believe them if they showed stars in an effort to out the Apollo program as a fraud? 

In the words of Ron White, "I told you that story to tell you this one."

Zootopia 2 dropped a teaser trailer a few days ago. Trailers, as a rule, feature scenes from the final cut of the film. Teasers, by contrast, often play by their own rules, mostly because they're shorter, but also because they're made earlier in production. I think the best example of this is Terminator 2, whose teaser showed an assembly line building an army of endoskeletons. This scene is nowhere in the movie and was made entirely for the teaser. Zootopia 2's trailer seems to have gone above and beyond regarding tailor-made content, almost acting like some kind of vertical slice of the finished film. We see a variety of environments as well as a rapid-fire slideshow of the cast, all framed by a trio of hamsters jumping around on a synthesizer to provide our soundtrack. 

The premise seems to revolve around a blue snake that's found its way to Zootopia and is being pursued by the poli---Wait a damned minute.  
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Hold on. 
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Were there no reptiles in the first Zootopia movie? Wasn't there an alligator or a gecko or something like that, somewhere in the background of the nudist colony or the DMV? 

I'm seriously having a bit of an existential crisis here. 

Turns out, no, there were no reptiles in the entirety of the film. There were also no birds (which may well be our hint at a Zootopia 3). From what I could gather, the first Zootopia film was kept strictly to mammals as a way to make the worldbuilding and story less cluttered, letting us focus on the predator/prey dynamic. 

Now it seems we're putting a new wrinkle in the dynamic by examining the relationship between hot-blooded mammals and cold-blooded reptiles. Of course, there are plenty of herbivorous reptiles, that's not the problem. This new separation (segregation) seems to have much deeper roots than the eaters and the eaten. The only concern I have is whether or not we'll just be retreading the same ground as the first movie, only with new placeholders for real world issues. 

While I like the first Zootopia movie, I'm not the most arduous fan of it. It's well-made, very imaginative, and has a great message, but the best part for me was the dichotomy and tension between Judy Hopps and Nick Wilde. This time around, they're obviously on more friendly terms, especially with them both being police officers. I imagine they'll still have their disagreements, and we'll doubtless have situations of the fox's street smarts and the rabbit's book smarts. I only wonder if they'll have an overall smaller role in the main plot of the movie. 

In any case, this is a good teaser. I like that it's mostly original content as a good teaser should be. It gives us a good sense of what we're in for in terms of scope. It certainly preserves the absurdist humor of the first film. Moreover, it made me want to take a second look at the first movie for context. That's legitimately impressive.