Christmas 2004 was a season of mixed blessings, movie-wise. We got "The Aviator" and "Hotel Rwanda" and "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" -- but we also got "Meet the Fockers," "The Phantom of the Opera," and "Fat Albert."

Oh, "Fat Albert." How I hated you. It takes a very special movie to make Bill Cosby -- one of the most admired, beloved and respected entertainers of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s -- seem like a self-important, self-serious schmuck. The movie version of his TV cartoon, of which new episodes were produced irregularly from 1972-85, assumed a level of reverence for the show that simply didn't exist in the moviegoing audience. But how do you tell Bill Cosby that nobody's as invested in his characters as he is?

The film did poorly at the box office ($48 million) and got bad reviews. According to Rotten Tomatoes, only 23% of critics spoke favorably of it. I'm amused to note that a lot of those "Fresh" reviews had to bend over backwards to praise it:

"Pure of heart, devoid of toilet humor, it sticks close enough to Bill Cosby's cartoon series to pass muster." -- Chris Vognar, Dallas Morning News.

"There are no bodily function jokes in 'Fat Albert,' and not one disbelieving or stupid parental figure. As family fare goes, that alone may be worth the price of admission." -- Liz Braun, Jam! Movies.

"An innocuous high-concept comedy." -- Gary Thompson, Philadelphia Daily News.

To summarize: It's innocuous! And it doesn't have any potty jokes! EIGHTY-SEVEN HUNDRED STARS!! A++++!

On the other hand, few of the "Rotten" reviews were as end-of-the-spectrum negative as mine was. In fact, a lot of the "Rotten" quotes at Rotten Tomatoes aren't much different from the "Fresh" ones:

"The movie is sweet and gentle, but not very compelling." -- Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times.

"Squeaky-clean but uninspired." -- Richard Roeper, Ebert & Roeper.

"Frivolous but flat family fare." -- Frank Ochieng, Movie Eye.

Was I too harsh on it? Now that 7 1/2 years have passed and the wounds have healed, let us reconsider Mr. Albert and his junkyard-dwelling friends.

What I said then: "The 'Fat Albert' movie has carved out quite a dilemma for itself. The only people who might find it funny are under the age of 10 -- but anyone that young won’t be familiar with the TV cartoon it’s based on and therefore won’t get all the jokes. So really, this movie is for people who are above the age of 30 but who have the sense of humor of a 6-year-old.... What they’ve come up with is among the two or three worst screenplays of the year. It’s an utter wreck of a film, completely laugh-free and mind-bogglingly misguided....

"They evidently think the audience is full of people who have vivid, fond memories of the 'Fat Albert' TV series, because they have gone to great pains to re-create it faithfully.... I respect Cosby’s lifelong mission to provide wholesome entertainment for children and teach valuable lessons and whatnot, but good intentions are not an excuse for dull entertainment, just as a desire for simplicity is not an excuse for simple-mindedness. 'Fat Albert' fails in every possible way -- fails to be funny, fails to be interesting, fails to speak to its potential audience. It is, as Mushmouth would say, a pebeece of crabap." Grade: F [Here's the whole mean review.]

For your amusement, here's my description of the title character: "Fat Albert (Kenan Thompson), a polite, obese teen who says 'Hey, hey, hey!' approximately 75,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 times per day, is driven to help people solve their problems. He is obsessed with it, in fact, perhaps due to his own guilt over some long-ago transgression, perhaps something filthy and degrading, though I am only speculating." I got robbed at the Pulitzers, I'm telling you.

The re-viewing: The opening credits are in the Comic Sans font, so we are not off to a good start here.

But it gets better. Since the film came out, Kenan Thompson has become a large and polarizing presence on "Saturday Night Live." (He was on the show in 2004, but only as a supporting player.) Viewers tend to either love him or hate him, and I love him. The fact that he plays essentially the same character -- himself -- in almost every sketch, regardless of who the character is supposed to be, has become an ongoing source of entertainment for me. He does it with such cheerful indifference!

Thompson has that twinkle in his eye as Fat Albert, especially when he can drop the character voice and cut loose with some dancing or high-speed running (which looks about as cartoonishly dumb as it sounds). Albert is always positive, upbeat, and simple and there's a certain charm to that. Not comedy, mind you, but charm.

The fish-out-of-water/time-travel jokes are even worse than I remembered them. Albert and his buddies have never seen a cell phone or a laptop before, ha ha. But they also don't know what a "mall" is, even though shopping malls were quite popular by the time their TV show stopped existing in 1985. And one of them expresses surprise that there's a video arcade inside a mall -- which is complete nonsense, because if you know what an arcade is, you're gonna know what a mall is.

Yeah, yeah, this all amounts to about 10 lines of dialogue in the movie. But it's 10 lines of dialogue that would have been easy to do properly rather than 100 percent wrong! I'm looking sternly at you, Mr. Cosby.

I feel like the mean kids are missing the point when they make fun of Fat Albert's weight, considering he introduces himself as "Fat Albert." He's obviously not self-conscious about it. In my day, the mean kids were better at detecting which of their peers' flaws would make for good bullying fodder.

I am perplexed as ever by the basic illogicality of the world the film takes place in. Little kids recognize the Fat Albert characters when they see them, but no one else does except the main character, Doris. She's the only person in her age group who watches "Fat Albert" reruns on TV (which might be accurate) -- and, what's more, the only person her age who has even heard of the show. Doris' peers don't bat an eye when Fat Albert shows up, looking exactly like Fat Albert from TV, and introduces himself as "Fat Albert." Nobody says, "You mean like the cartoon?" And the adults -- who would, in real life, be far more likely to know Fat Albert than young children would -- are totally oblivious. So in the world of the film, "Fat Albert" was once a popular TV show that is now completely wiped from everyone's memory, except in the form of reruns that still air every day but are only viewed by toddlers and Doris.

Here is the thing in "Fat Albert" that made me laugh out loud: when Albert goes to Bill Cosby's house and Cosby answers the door and Albert says, "I'm looking for Bill Cosby. Are you his dad?"

Do I still hate this movie? No, I've moved up the scale into "strong dislike." These days, I try to reserve my F grades for movies that are not just inept, but aggressively, actively, annoyingly bad. "Fat Albert" fails at just about everything it tries, yet it does so good-naturedly, with only a handful of scenes coming across as downright irritating. I didn't find it burdensome to watch this time, in the comfort of my home, on a screen much smaller and less obtrusive than the one at the theater. Hey hey hey, you're not quite as awful as I once thought! Grade: D