animated film called big's adventure

Nice to see this being brought up.

This is a mystery that’s been with me for 16 of the 26 years of my life. I’ve never brought it up on here before, I guess because I was waiting for the right time. Well, I guess that time has come.

Here’s my story.

In November 2004, I saw trailers for two animated films for 2005—Cars and Bigg’s Adventure. The former, I saw at a showing of “The Polar Express”; it was a straightforward trailer for a film by Pixar about a world of Cars. (I believe it was advertised for 2005, but if not, I highly doubted they would advertise something that wouldn’t be released until 2006.)

The second, which I saw a week later at a showing of “The Incredibles”, was very different; it was a series of trailers that began before any of the other ads. It began with a CGI animation of some kids sitting on branches of a tall tree. It panned around and upwards, with the kids calling, “Biiig...where are you?” As the camera was on one boy, suddenly the eye of some giant creature appeared, but the boy was just like, “Oh, hi, Big.” Then the screen went black with the ominous-sounding words, “He’s coming...in 2005...” And then it switched to an ad about sports. I was like, “What was that?” But it didn’t end there. This was followed, in between ads for various others things, by a whole series of ads for “Bigg’s Adventure”, all of which kept both the film’s plot and the appearance of the ”Big” character very ambiguous. The only one I remember was of a mouse in a footprint. Afterwards, I remember discussing it with my mom and sister; my mom thought the way the series of trailers were shown was very cool; when I mentioned that I thought Big might be a bear, she said she thought he was something else.

Okay, so what happened in 2005? Well, in April, we went to see the CGI film robots, and there was a very brief ad, about 5 seconds, for BA, once again showing the giant footprint. About a month later, we rented “Incredibles” on DVD, and it featured the Cars trailer we’d seen in theaters.

And then...nothing for the rest of 2005. It was like the movies had disappeared.

But then, in the summer of 2006, Cars finally happened! I didn’t get my hopes up, but this was the closest thing to a sign of hope that Adventure would still be happening.

Which it never did. I haven’t thought about it much since; I think maybe I tried googling it once at some point during the last 14 years, which obviously would have led to nothing.

But with the creation of this forum and me becoming a member, I’ve found a place to properly share my story. Even before the creation of this thread, the idea of bringing it up here was in the back of my mind.

Now that it’s been brought up, I’ve done some digging on this mysterious, seemingly non-existent film which, now, feels like something out of a different lifetime altogether. From reddit posts like the one you shared, other people have shared very similar stories. One difference is that the animation—-being CGI, which I equates with Pixar at the time—-still looks good in my memory, but most people say it looked low-budget. Others say they found the series of trailers obnoxious, which I guess it was a little, but it also all felt like part of something...well, big!

Unfortunately, it seems likely that these may have just been a series of adverts used for matinee showings of children’s films. A clip on YouTube—-which seems to be what I saw at “Robots”—-claims Big’s Adventure is the place to be for matinees. Someone on one of the reddit posts speculates the same. Another website seems to list it as a defunct Regal Theaters brand, and a TV Tropes page claims that it was just an early version of “Kidtoons”.

But I’m still not 100% sure. Either way, this is a big, 16-year-old mystery that deserves to be solved!!

Here you go: m.youtube.com/watch?v=Vq0DjZ6-Dok

No, the animated film advertised after the brief promo at the beginning isn’t Biggs’ Adventure.

You did? Wow. I’m not sure I’m ready to watch them again, it’s been so long. Fun fact—-I saw Incredibles 16 years ago today. What a coincidence that the trailers are uncovered on this day.

EDIT: I clicked on the link so I could at least read the comments and realized what the video actually was. Haha, good one!

The following was originally taken from this NeoGAF thread, and is perhaps one of the most detailed explanations of the many trailers I've seen so far:

Although I can’t say I heard of it, I’m guessing it was a brand of kids matinee movies, and not an full length film. Similar to Regal’s Summer Movie Express.

Apparently it was scrapped: uspto.report/TM/78578683