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It's wrong to decide whether a movie will be good or not based on the trailer. I think we can all agree on that. At the same time, the studio puts together the trailer and is responsible for the way it chooses to market the movie. Thus, as long as you acknowledge what you're doing, it seems entirely in range to talk about how they're making the movie look, whether that turns out to be accurate or not.

Today's subject is the Jim Carrey comedy Mr. Poppin's Penguins, which opens June 17. I saw the trailer attached to X-Men: First Class this weekend, and I noticed a few things.

It contains two (2) Jim-Carrey's-crotch jokes, one featuring a soccer ball and one featuring a penguin's beak, plus a down-Jim-Carrey's-pants joke. It contains Vanilla Ice. It contains a scene where a fancy party is interrupted by marauding animals breaking the dishes.

And here's the thing: This two-and-a-half-minute trailer features two (2) fart jokes. This is the kind of thing I always find oddly intriguing, because one of two things has to have happened. Either the movie contains two fart jokes and someone said, "We need to make sure, in these two-plus-minutes, that our entire complement of fart jokes is included," or there are more than two fart jokes in a movie about a family man who adopts a bunch of penguins. I don't know how many is the correct number, but more than two seems like it would be a lot, so I can only conclude that despite having less than three minutes to work with, they chose to include both of the jokes of this kind that appear in the movie, PLUS the crotch jokes, PLUS the pants joke.

In short, this seems like a trailer that is quite devoted to the idea that if you put a lot of waist-to-knees material in a movie that's kid-friendly, you might as well make sure it's all in the trailer.