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The Return of Chotta Chetan!

The cast of the original Chotta Chetan. Click for bigger pic!

Remember someone thrusting a gargantuan rose in your face, making you cringe in your seat? Chhota Chetan had all the delights of a 3-D fantasy -- it was young, possibly puerile, but nevertheless immensely watchable. It was also unreal -- everything was so real. The accompanying adults, whether they admitted it or not, enjoyed the experience as much as the kids.

Now, more than a decade later Chhota Chetan rises again. This time round it has some embellishments, primarily one with the oomph to stimulate imagination in 3-D -- Urmila Matondkar.

Producers Nitin (Prithvi) Manmohan and Jhamu (Rangeela) Sughand will release the film in Bombay. "Urmila is a magician. The kids in the film go to her for help in getting back Chhota Chetan," says Manmohan.

So is the film a sequel?? Manmohan falters.

"Not exactly a sequel because we have retained parts of the old film in this one. But everything else is new," he says.

Oomphy additive Urmila Matondkar. Click for bigger pic!

Urmila is not just an add-on to keep the adults happy, he claims, pointing out there are other actors like Satish Kaushik and Shakti Kapoor in this version. He himself enjoyed the film when he saw it in Malayalam, though he didn’t have a clue about what was being said on the big screen. More important, he noted that there were only adults in the theatre.

The current version of Chotta Chetan will make use of all modern technology available, thanks to special effects whiz Appachan of the Navodaya Film Company, the Malayalam film's producers.

"He has the equipment to make a 3-D film; in fact, he’s the only one who has it," says Manmohan, who swears he is not planning to get fulltime into the business of making high-tech movies.

"I don't have the infrastructure," he admits. "Plus, the amount of work involved, the special screen, the special lenses, the glasses and the security required… It is too much. Navodaya is the king of Kerala because they have everything anyway," he says.

Sughand, who will distribute the film in Bombay, says the idea was originally Manmohan’s.

Manmohan discovered that the new look Chhota Chetan made almost Rs 25 million in Kerala. Couldn’t it, like the original CC, have the turnstiles spinning, he wondered.

And he was banking on the fact that the kids who saw the original had grown up, leaving a virgin new audience for the sequel. "They will have a ball, I am certain," he says.