When a film is obnoxious enough to call itself the first of an unplanned series you really hope it fails. So it's a pleasure to know Doug's First Movie, a tired cash-in on the Nickelodeon TV series about a school kid and his crazy adventures (nothing like a bit of originality for children to lap up) ended up being Doug's Only Movie. That Doug got a movie at all is something of a marvel - it's not exactly the top drawer of TV cartoons - and it should come as no surprise it was initially going to be direct-to-video. Nickelodeon had been trying hard to get feature-length projects off the ground for years and this one had eventually gone into production, with the VHS tapes being prepped. Then The Rugrats Movie, a film based on a much better property, hit big and suddenly big screen spin-offs of kid's cartoons were all the rage. There were plenty of imitators (Recess: School's Out, The Wild Thornberrys), but Doug had a distinct advantage of striking while the iron was hot in that the film was already in production. Judging by the finished project (TV-level animation, short run-time) little effort was put in to actually make the jump.
