As fellow SUNY Oswego Graduate Al Roker chronicles, it’s a horrible feeling growing up as the ‘fat kid’ but the impending effects of continuing such eating habits accompanied with lack of physical exercise is much more lethal.

Couple that with an estimated $10 billion spent anually to market fast foods to children and youth and you have a true danger zone.

Latest Media Example to Make Roker’s Point

Panda Thumbs Down: a kiddie animation that markets “a get-fit and save-the-day boot camp plot” to well-meaning parents wobbles short of the mark.

With childhood obesity rates showing that every fourth child in a movie theater seat amply fills the space near you, I’m not sure now is the time for a hero who saves the day by not only being fat, but being rewarded repeatedly for it.

That’s “Kung Fu Panda” in a coconut shell: a movie geared towards the fattest, laziest youth to have ever lived on earth.

It’s a China-set, animated action/comedy with self-deprecating, pudgy panda Jack Black as the voice of Po, a rotund restaurant worker whom the village elders improbably designate as the warrior chosen to defend their homes against the prophesied return of a fearsome fighter.

To add layer to the cake, Po heads off to a kung-fu temple for special training under a Yoda-like mentor voiced by Dustin Hoffman named Shafi. However, the lumbering joke that won’t offend many in the audience is that clumsy, hungry Po can’t stop eating or goofing around long enough to complete his training.

Po wins support through the sheer force of his likeable personality (and his secret noodle soup), and his kung fu improves when Shifu — discovering him binging in the kitchen — realizes that Po will do anything for a cookie.

A hero whose power is an admixture of sloth and gluttony?

Nearly missed this part, because I was dallying out in the lobby refilling my super-sized soda and getting extra butter ladled on the kernals of corn so I’ll refrain from any further comment. Anyway, Po does declare (after his mastery dumpling chasing training) that he’s no longer hungry and uses that extra-body-surface-area to effectively vanquish his foe.

The concluding message: nope not the danger of type II diabetes or the redeeming benefits of a healthy heart fitness program. It’s that one’s fat liability can transform into one’s fattest ass-et.

Though you can bet Kung Fu Panda will be enjoying that Happy Meal (with the Panda surprise) sans his new-found Furious Five friends. They’ll be back in the gym training.

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