YMMV / The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure

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• Adaptation Displacement: While Oogieloves is notorious for how bad it is, there's hardly anything on the entire Internet about My Bedbugs aside from a few clips on YouTube and some DVD listings on Amazon.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: As many reviewers have pointed out, the very concept of a film that encourages small children to make as much noise as possible in a movie theatre is not going to appeal to many parents. Your own children dancing around to a movie at home is one thing; dancing around in the crowded aisles of a theatre with dozens of other children is quite another. Though, considering the box office numbers, 'dozens' turned out to be wild optimism. Even tens turned out to be wild optimism.
• Bile Fascination: Its overly-cutesy nature has drawn the attention of snarky viewers from outside its demographic. It is also sometimes targeted by internet critics like The Cinema Snob.
• Cliché Storm: This film copies every cliché from live-action children's shows: Animate Inanimate Objects, randomly introduced songs, and overly eccentric people. Even the Audience Participation, which the film prominently mentioned in its advertising, was already utilized by children's shows like Dora the Explorer and Blue's Clues.
• Director Displacement: One of the most notorious examples — it's known for its marketer rather than its director (Matthew Diamond).
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Cinematic Excrement and Emer Prevost both admit in their respective reviews that Ruffy is their favourite character in the movie. This likely stems from Ruffy being considerably grouchier than the rest of the cast (thereby giving him more characterization than literally every other character involved) and feeling like the Only Sane Man among the Oogieloves (namely, his line "Will this day never end?!"), which makes it easy for non-fans of the movie to identify with him.
• Ham and Cheese: Cary Elwes was clearly having fun playing Bobby Wobbly in this movie. Same with Chazz Palminteri as Milky Marvin, as well as Christopher Lloyd as Lero Sombrero.
• It's Not Supposed to Win Oscars: Kenn Viselman, the marketer, made the exact excuse that this wasn't made to win the Academy Award. Strangely enough, he wasn't the least bit concerned that the movie bombed either.
• Memetic Molester: Bobby Wobbly, an erratic cowboy trucker with an obsession with bubbles who invites children into his furnished truck bed to "wobble" with him. The dance scene also includes them all slapping their own behinds. Every reviewer has made the same "stranger danger" joke about the scene.
• Memetic Mutation: Courtesy of Brad Jones: "DO YOU LIKE BUBBLES?!"
• Nausea Fuel: The flavors of the milkshakes the Oogieloves order, most of which are weird, gross, or silly... or all three.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: Kenn Viselman wasn't deterred by the negative reviews and low box office numbers that this movie earned. In fact, he thought that the film's negative publicity would expand the Oogieloves' popularity, raising sales of Oogielove merchandise and media. Suffice to say he was proven wrong. Especially since there was no merchandise ever made.
• Questionable Casting: For some reason, the filmmakers decided to cast Christopher Lloyd and Jaime Pressly as a Mexican couple.
• Quirky Work: When the least weird things in the movie are a talking vacuum cleaner, an unintelligible pillow and a real grump of a fish, you know you're in for a hell of a ride.
• Retroactive Recognition: Garrett Clayton of Teen Beach Movie and Hairspray Live! fame is one of the diner dancers.
• Sweetness Aversion: This film has a low-stakes plot (with No Antagonist), an overemphasis of The Power of Love (to the point that the day is saved by blowing kisses), and its setting (literally called "Lovelyloveville") populated by cute puppets, eccentric people, and a bright color palette. The extreme cutesieness is probably why it bombed as hard as it did. In fact, many who saw the film being advertised thought that it would turn out to be a parody of overly saccharine kids' films.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously:
  • Even Brad Jones, who called the movie "filth", noted that Cary Elwes gave a great performance. Some even claim that Bobby Wobbly falls under Creepy Awesome instead of Unintentional Uncanny Valley because he fully embraced the insanity of the role.
  • Toni Braxton also deserves credit for fully embracing the opportunity to do some self-parody. Her role as a Comically Serious diva who performs an extravagant ballad about allergies feels like an Affectionate Parody created specifically for Braxton, in a film that otherwise has some bizarre casting choices.

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