Poopy... I mean Gooby

I discovered Gooby several months ago. I watch all the movie trailers Apple posts and was terrified by this particular one. It claimed to be a family film, but the frightening title character seemed like the kind of thing I was most afraid of as a child; Gooby is a giant bear, he has fangs and claws, and he's foreign.

Willy is an imaginative (schizophrenic?) eleven-year-old who is neglected by his career oriented parents. At many points in this movie I wondered why these people had a child because they clearly hate everything about him and usually treat him like a nuisance. They move into a new bigger house and Willy worries this will bring strange, new, frightening hallucinations. His useless parents hire a wrinkly British nanny to watch him afterschool, but she doesn't play a huge role and is usually just in scenes where she is sleeping in the living room while antics ensue in the background. Willy had left behind an old teddy bear of his at his old house which magically is electrified to life (great special effects) to grow into the 8 feet of terror that will soon haunt Willy's daily life. Gooby shows up and scares the crap out of Willy. The two become fast friends and seal their friendship with a hotdog fight and farting contest. Willy sets him up a sweet hideout in the shed in his backyard. Eugene Levy (WHY ARE YOU IN THIS MOVIE?!) emerges as a new teacher at Willy's school. I expected him to be the villain, but really just turns out to be suffering from severe Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, which is displayed when he opens his briefcase in one scene and a cleanly creased stack of paper napkins are revealed as the only thing inside. There is a GREAT chase scene in a grocery store where Eugene is chasing the two around with a camera and the following things happen: Gooby tears the shit out of the cereal section, Willy has a fantastic green screen shot of him being pulled through the air by his bear counterpart, and the guy wearing the Gooby suit clearly can't handle the supermarket tiling and falls (this DEFINITELY was NOT choreographed to happen). I was really confused a lot during this movie because the storyline didn't seem to exist beyond Willy and Gooby having a rocky love/hate relationship. In the end Gooby gets Willy's parents to give a shit about him by taking him into the woods and hiding in what seems to be an abandoned crack den.

Why Gooby should NOT be trusted around children:

-he builds Willy a go cart so he can get him to sit on his "comfy" lap

-he takes Willy and some of his friends to see an R rated movie

-he could easily just be some guy in a bear costume who hides in a shed in a little boy's backyard