YMMV / Racing Stripes

• Aluminum Christmas Trees: There is an actual racetrack in Kentucky called Turfway Park, albeit with a dirt course instead of a turf course.
• Cliché Storm: Girl gets horse/zebra, girl wants to enter horse race, parent forbids it due to other parent's death, girl and horse/zebra enter race and win against all odds to prove everyone wrong.
• So Okay, It's Average: Seems to be the overall consensus of this film's quality. While there's not a lot about it that's considered outright awful, it's such a Cliché Storm that it doesn't stand out much. Other movies have played similar storylines out much better, such as Babe (underdog story about animal succeeding in sport they normally don't participate in in Real Life) and Balto (outcast animal struggles with his heritage and wants to be accepted by others of his kind).
• Special Effects Failure:
  • The flies look too cartoonish to be believed.
  • The horses in dialogue scenes were puppets, and several of the behind-the-scenes clips show shots that were cut for looking too fake.
• Squick: One of the flies fly up Sir Trenton's nose, causing him to sneeze him out and make him land on a boombox.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Despite being heavily featured in the promotional material, Lightning the Bloodhound seldom appears in the film at all. He just lazily sits on the porch. He doesn't even interact with Stripes or even the other animals at any point. And pun aside, what was the point of casting an A-list star like Snoop Dogg when he barely has any dialogue?

---