How did a group of five obnoxious young men – the type no one wants to run into on the streets – make it into the hearts of young people across the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany? With coarse language and gratuitous violence, that’s how! New Kids started as a web-based comedy skit show with episodes only a few minutes long back in 2007. It was a popular online cult hit, and it soon attracted the attention of several Dutch TV networks. In 2009, it got picked up for its 3rd season (1st season on TV) by the Dutch Comedy Central. The jump from the Internet to television gave them a bigger audience, and they were an overnight sensation. With time, the screen and the audience got bigger, and on December 2010, the movie New Kids Turbo premiered in cinemas across the Netherlands, and five months later a German dubbed version was released in Germany.
New Kids Turbo takes on the daunting task of adapting a TV series to a feature-length film, which is especially difficult in this case since the series’ episodes never really had a plot, just short scenes with the five protagonists, whose tastes in music, clothes, and cars were stuck in the 1990s, and who loitered around town acting anti-social and drinking beer. The film does a good job of developing the characters. We learn more about their background, their jobs (or lack of them), and their desires. There’s a thin plot: they all lose their job or source of income and inadvertently start a protest movement refusing to pay for anything anymore. This provides a backdrop for the delivery of their trademark jokes. The harsh visual humor – such as people getting mowed down by speeding vehicles or blown up – which was popular in the series, is here done in even grander fashion for the big screen. The more subtle jokes, though, do feel like they were dug out from the bin of rejected ideas for the TV show.
"New Kids Turbo takes on the daunting task of adapting a TV series to a feature-length film, which is especially difficult in this case since the series’ episodes never really had a plot"
However, what makes the movie memorable above all is the use of language. It is set in the small town of Maaskantje in the southern province of Noord Brabant. The actors, who are all natives of the area, speak a dialect of Dutch known as Brabants, which is one of the Netherlands’ main dialects and is also spoken in large parts of Belgium. In particular, their way of swearing soon caught on with fans. Phrases like “verrekte mongol!” (you darn mongoloid) and the less politically incorrect “koekwous” (crazy person) were unheard of in most of the country, but were soon echoed in school yards everywhere. The film ends with a beer truck crashing into the scene, which is as standard to this franchise as the boys from Brabant signing off with “houdoe!” (bye).
