Jonathan Daly

Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Superdad

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Superdad

In the 2002 film Auto Focus, Paul Schrader’s biopic of the late actor Bob Crane, Greg Kinnear as Crane receives Disney’s offer to star in Superdad just as he’s discussing his desire to make a big-budget porn movie costarring Stella Stevens with his friend and enabler John Henry Carpenter (Willem Dafoe). A little later, Kinnear’s recreation of Superdad’s waterskiing sequence plays to a bored audience in a mostly empty movie house. I bring this up at the outset partly as a way to broach the topic of Crane’s life and career in a column supposedly devoted to “family entertainment” but also simply because Auto Focus is a much, much more interesting movie than freaking Superdad.

As you may have guessed, Bob Crane’s career was not exactly riding high when he made Superdad. Crane started out in radio, eventually becoming one of the hottest disc jockeys in Los Angeles. In 1965, he landed the lead in Hogan’s Heroes, one of the unlikeliest hit sitcoms ever produced. He received two Emmy nominations over the course of its six seasons. But after Hogan’s Heroes went off the air in 1971, Crane didn’t have a lot of offers lined up.

Crane’s sex addiction and penchant for photographing and, eventually, videotaping himself and his partners was a big reason for this. In the pre-internet age, it was still possible to keep this kind of thing relatively quiet. It wasn’t quite all over the tabloids in 1971. But if you knew, you knew. And at Disney, a studio that prided itself on pretending it was still 1955, nobody knew.

You can see why producer Bill Anderson would have wanted Bob Crane at Disney. Crane had a gift for comedy and an image as an all-American nice guy. For six seasons, he’d made audiences laugh at the wacky misadventures of a group of POWs in a Nazi detention camp. Compared to that, whatever Disney threw at him should be a piece of cake. With a little luck, Anderson probably hoped he had the next Dean Jones on his hands.

Setting aside Crane’s off-screen controversies, there are a lot of reasons that didn’t happen. The main one being that Jones himself would have been hard-pressed to do anything with Superdad. The movie was written by Joseph L. McEveety “from a story by Harlan Ware”. Ware, who died in 1967, had written primarily for radio and the pictures back in the 1930s and 40s, so I don’t know what this “story” is. Hell, I’ve seen the movie and can barely tell you what it’s about.

The director was Vincent McEveety (last seen in this column directing Charley And The Angel). The three McEveety brothers, Joseph, Vincent and Bernard, kind of took over Disney for awhile in the 60s and 70s but this was the first time any of them worked together on a Disney project. Did Superdad have some special resonance for Vincent and Joseph or was it just luck of the draw? I’m gonna assume it was the latter but if any members of the McEveety family can elucidate this matter for us, drop me a line or leave a comment.

Given a title like Superdad and Joseph McEveety’s history with such gimmick comedies as the Dexter Riley saga and The Barefoot Executive, you might expect this to be a movie about a mild-mannered suburban dad who becomes a superhero. I know I did. Well, you and I are both very, very wrong about that. Crane does star as mild-mannered suburban dad Charlie McCready. But his only superpower appears to be worrying about his teenage daughter, Wendy (Kathleen Cody, fulfilling the three-picture deal she began with Snowball Express).

For years, Wendy has run around with a disreputable gang of beach bums and layabouts referred to as The Gang (among others, The Gang includes frequent Disney bit player Ed Begley Jr., who later appeared in Auto Focus). The only employed member of The Gang is Stanley (Bruno Kirby, still going by the name B. Kirby Jr.), who keeps getting fired for using company vehicles like ambulances and delivery vans to haul The Gang to and from the beach.

Charlie’s particularly upset about Wendy’s relationship with her boyfriend, Bart (an increasingly bored looking Kurt Russell). Bart is an underachiever and, like another Bart now owned by Disney, proud of it. Charlie blames him for Wendy’s decision to settle for City College instead of a more prestigious university. He’s convinced Wendy will waste her life hanging out at the beach, playing volleyball and cruising around with Bart, Stanley, Stanley’s massive Saint Bernard named Roly Poly and the rest of The Gang singing songs like “Los Angeles”.

No, I don’t mean the song by the seminal punk rock group X. “Los Angeles” is one of three original songs padding out the run time of this 96-minute movie by Shane Tatum. Tatum has been responsible for some of Disney’s least-memorable songs of the 1970s, including “Moreover And Me” from The Biscuit Eater and “Livin’ One Day At A Time” from Charley And The Angel. Country-pop singer Bobby Goldsboro (probably best known for “Honey”, one of the least-enjoyable songs to top the Billboard Hot 100) croons the maudlin “These Are The Best Times” over the interminable opening credits but The Gang handles “Los Angeles”. And I know at least a few of you are thinking, “Wait, you mean this thing has a musical number performed by Kurt Russell, Ed Begley Jr., Bruno Kirby and Roly Poly in an ambulance? I kinda want to see that.” No, you do not. Trust me. It’s not worth it.

Anyway, while Charlie’s fuming about his daughter’s worthless friends, a TV panel show forces him to take stock of his relationship with her. Realizing he hasn’t made any effort to connect with her in years, Charlie decides to tag along and prove what a cool dad he is at the beach. This is where the waterskiing comes in to play. Needless to say, things don’t go well. Not only does Charlie humiliate himself, he’s laid up for a few days to recuperate.

At this point, I’m thinking, “OK, there aren’t any superpowers, so I guess the movie’s about Charlie trying to fit in with the kids and failing hilariously.” Nope! Charlie’s so mad about the beach trip that he forgets all about trying to have a meaningful relationship with his daughter. Instead, he takes the advice of his coworker, Ira Kushaw (Disney movie #2 for Dick Van Patten). Ira’s old classmate at Huntington College is now Dean of Admissions there. Ira calls up his friend and arranges for him to send Wendy a phony letter rewarding her a full scholarship, while Charlie secretly pays her tuition under the table. That’s our Superdad. Using the power of money and connections to save his daughter from herself. What a guy!

Oh yeah, about Charlie’s job. He’s a lawyer or something working for shipping magnate Cyrus Hershberger (Joe Flynn, of course). Throughout the film, Hershberger is dealing with ongoing labor tensions and a serious public image problem that neither Charlie nor Ira come close to solving even though that’s supposedly their jobs. This subplot never threatens to become relevant until a group of environmental protestors join the striking dockworkers. While watching the protests on TV, Charlie sees that Wendy has hooked up with the protestors’ leader, a radical artist named Klutch (Joby Baker, last seen as gangster Silky Seymour in Blackbeard’s Ghost).

Charlie’s ready to head up to San Francisco and haul Wendy back home. But Charlie’s wife, Sue (Barbara Rush), has had enough of his ideas. While she flies north first to talk to her daughter, Bart stops by, equally worried. Charlie realizes he may have misjudged him when he learns that Bart really did win a scholarship to Huntington. He turned it down to stay with Wendy, who applied but didn’t get one. So not only is Bart smarter, more ambitious and more devoted to Wendy than Charlie had given him credit for, it turns out Wendy is dumber than he thought.

Charlie joins the family in San Francisco where he receives some bad news. Wendy and Klutch are engaged, more or less. Instead of a ring, Klutch gave her his best abstract painting and refuses to take it back. This is the way of radical artists, one assumes. Well, Charlie’s not going to take that lying down. He heads off in a taxi to confront Klutch, accidentally losing his grip on the jumbo-sized painting along the way. It’s damaged by a passing cable car, because San Francisco.

Klutch lives and works on a kind of floating commune houseboat surrounded by Disney’s idea of what scary hippies look like (because, again, San Francisco). Charlie confronts him and Klutch freaks out when he sees his broken painting. There’s a big fight using Disney’s weapon of choice, brightly colored paint. Charlie wins round one but Klutch comes back for more, so Bart takes over, knocking the bad guy overboard onto a pile of fish on a passing skiff. Everybody goes home and Bart and Wendy get married, walking down the aisle to a choral version of “These Are The Good Times” even though anyone who just sat through the preceding 90 minutes can tell you these most assuredly are not.

Movies like Superdad were a losing proposition for Disney at this stage of the game. The studio knew how to make movies for little kids but it was on shakier ground with adults and didn’t have a clue when it came to teenagers. Superdad isn’t just a movie that doesn’t know what its audience wants. It doesn’t even know who they are. If Charlie McCready or Klutch ran into some real-life protestors, they’d be eaten alive.

It sort of feels like Joe McEveety’s script topped out around 45 pages and, when brother Vincent complained it felt a little thin, Joe just wrote more scenes without giving a second’s thought how they’d fit in to the movie. There’s a sequence that follows Charlie on campus, trying to find Wendy at Mother Barlow’s Boarding House. The reasons don’t matter particularly. It’s just an excuse to introduce Mother Barlow (Judith Lowry), the beer-drinking, pool-playing, motorcycle-riding octogenarian who runs the co-ed housing. If this movie came out 15 years later, Mother Barlow one hundred percent would have rapped. No question.

A little later, Wendy hitches a ride home with an older student, a Southern prep school snob named Roger Rhinehurst. Roger’s the kind of boy Charlie approves of but The Gang’s unexpected arrival scares him off before he can even register as a potential rival to Bart. The whole bit is just more spinning wheels and killing time.

That’s Nicholas Hammond as Roger, by the way. Hammond had been one of the von Trapp kids under Julie Andrews’ care in The Sound Of Music. A few years after Superdad, Hammond would find…well, maybe not fame, necessarily…as Peter Parker on the live-action CBS series The Amazing Spider-Man, a pretty lousy show but one I watched religiously. I’m sure I’m not the only one who believes Marvel owes this guy at least a cameo in the next Spider-Movie.

Superdad would have been a tedious, unfunny movie no matter who starred in it but Bob Crane didn’t do himself any favors on set. He had a habit of showing off his photo albums full of past sexual adventures to anyone who asked to see them and plenty of others who didn’t. If he’d been able to keep his private life private, he probably could have survived one bad Disney comedy. Lots of other stars certainly had. But a Disney set is no place to flaunt your swingers’ lifestyle, especially back then. Bob Crane will be back in this column but in a very diminished capacity.

Given what they now knew about Bob Crane, Disney wasn’t sure what to do with Superdad. They shelved the movie for a time before releasing it in Los Angeles on December 14, 1973, and not as part of an Oscar qualifying run. It went into general release on January 18 and went out of it shortly after. Critics and audiences finally found something they could agree on: Superdad was a dud.

VERDICT: Disney Minus

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Million Dollar Duck

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Million Dollar Duck

There’s a reason there’s not a lot of movies based on Aesop’s Fables and you probably don’t have to be a film major to figure it out. The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs, the fable that provides the jumping off point for The Million Dollar Duck, is all of three paragraphs long. Four if you consider the moral to be its own thing. Not that it really matters in this case, since the folks behind Million Dollar Duck decided to cut the moral and just leave the eggs. As a result, this is a movie that literally has no point.

The Million Dollar Duck was written by Roswell Rogers from a story by Ted Key. Key started his career as a cartoonist, creating the single-panel gag cartoon Hazel for the Saturday Evening Post. He also worked for Jay Ward, creating the Mr. Peabody and Sherman segments for The Rocky And Bullwinkle Show. One of the other segments on that show was Aesop And Son, one of the few sustained adaptations of Aesop’s Fables in pop culture. As far as I know, Aesop And Son never tackled The Goose That Laid The Golden Eggs. Did The Million Dollar Duck start off as an unused Rocky And Bullwinkle concept? I don’t know for sure but it would make sense.

Producer Bill Anderson gave the film to director Vincent McEveety. This was the first of a dozen movies McEveety would direct at Disney over the next decade. He’d started out as an assistant director, working on Westward Ho, The Wagons!, Zorro and other TV productions. Since then, he’d built an extensive TV resume, helming multiple episodes of Star Trek, Gunsmoke and many others. Practically the entire McEveety family worked at Disney at one point or another. Vincent’s brother, Joseph L. McEveety, was also an assistant director who turned to screenwriting with The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. His other brother, Bernard, will be in this column soon.

This was Dean Jones’s first movie back at Disney since the massive success of The Love Bug in 1968. In the meantime, he’d gone off to Italy to make the gimmick comedy knock-off Mr. Superinvisible. That movie was released in the States by K-Tel, who proved to be better at selling records and Veg-O-Matics than movies. It was an inauspicious attempt at kick starting his non-Disney career. You can see why Jones opted to return to Burbank.

Jones’s leading lady was a rising star named Sandy Duncan. Like a lot of Disney stars, Duncan had made a name for herself on Broadway, winning Tony nominations for her performances in the musicals Canterbury Tales and The Boy Friend. The Million Dollar Duck was only Duncan’s first movie but Hollywood really wanted to make her a big star. That same year, she also starred in the Neil Simon movie Star Spangled Girl and got her own sitcom, Funny Face (which would be retooled and retitled The Sandy Duncan Show for the 1972 season).

But Sandy Duncan also had to deal with her share of hardship in 1971. That fall, she had surgery to remove a brain tumor from behind her left eye. The procedure was successful but left her blind in that eye (contrary to urban legend, she does not have a glass eye). Fortunately, she recovered quickly and went on to more Tony nominations and TV appearances, including the epic “Return Of Bigfoot” crossover episodes of The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman. Well, epic to me in 1976, anyway. At any rate, Sandy Duncan will be back in this column.

Tony Roberts, the other actor making his film debut this week, also costarred with Sandy Duncan in Star Spangled Girl. But he won’t be back in this column. In 1972, he starred alongside Woody Allen in Play It Again, Sam. He’d appear in several more films as Woody’s best friend, which probably saved him from spending the 1970s playing Dean Jones’s best friend.

One of the things I’ve consistently enjoyed about Disney’s gimmick comedies are the frequently playful and innovative opening title sequences. Movies like The Shaggy Dog and The Misadventures Of Merlin Jones not only kept the animation department busy, it allowed them to experiment with different styles like stop-motion. The Million Dollar Duck opens with hand-drawn opening credits by Ward Kimball and Ted Berman, which sounds great in theory. The fact that they’re so utterly pedestrian is the first sign that this is not going to be one of the studio’s best efforts.

Playing against a blue background, the titles show an animated duck crossing back and forth along the bottom of the screen, slowly building a row of six eggs. At the end, he adds a dollar sign, a 1 and a couple of commas, transforming the eggs into “$1,000,000”. That’s it. I mean, come on. This is Disney, for Pete’s sake! The best you could come up with was about five seconds of animation flipped and repeated six times? I get the feeling nobody is bringing their A-game to this project.

Jones stars as Albert Dooley, a professor and researcher in animal behavior at an unnamed university that might just as well be Medfield College. Dooley was once voted most likely to succeed by his graduating class but now he’s struggling to make ends meet. His finances are so bad that he has to deny his son Jimmy’s request to adopt a puppy. Lee Montgomery also makes his film debut as Jimmy. A year later, he’d be best friends with a rat in Ben, the sequel to Willard. And in a 1974 Easter Egg that probably meant very little to audiences at the time, he played a kid named Steve Spelberg in an episode of Colombo.

Dooley’s wife, Katie (Duncan), is doing her part to help out by making her own homemade applesauce. Katie’s too dim to realize that you shouldn’t put garlic, curry powder and mustard in applesauce and Albert’s too polite to mention it tastes like garbage, so he’s sent off to work with a tub full of the toxic sludge. This applesauce is actually a plot point later on, so I hope you’re paying attention.

Albert arrives at the lab, where a chimp tries to steal his lunch. Even the chimp won’t eat the applesauce, so he pawns it off on his neighbor, the duck. The duck happily scarfs it down, just before failing another battery of simple tests designed by Albert’s boss, Dr. Gottlieb (Jack Kruschen). Gottlieb’s had it up to here with this furshlugginer duck and orders it out of the lab for good. The duck wanders into the radiation lab across the hall where it’s bombarded with science rays. Albert retrieves the bird and decides to take the radioactive idiot duck home to his son.

Now a duck’s not the same as a puppy but Jimmy is so desperate for a pet of any kind that he names his new friend Charlie. (Like Clint Howard in The Wild Country, Jimmy’s one of those kids that give every animal the same name for whatever reason.) Albert’s not too thrilled about that. He had planned on giving the duck to a local farmer or something. But Katie cautions him against widening the “generation gap” on the whole pet issue. Gotta love it when Disney tries using zeitgeisty buzz words.

While Albert and Katie are hashing this out, Charlie gets into the next-door neighbor’s pool. Joe Flynn plays the neighbor, Finlay Hooper, adding uptight treasury agent to his repertoire of uptight deans and uptight network executives. Hooper’s dog barks repeatedly at the duck, causing Charlie to lay an egg every time. Katie’s ready to whip up an omelet but Albert, briefly remembering that the duck is radioactive, puts the kibosh on that idea. He tells her he’ll bury the eggs in the backyard under cover of darkness. As one does, I suppose.

That night, Albert accidentally cracks one of the eggs and discovers what appears to be a solid gold yolk. The next day, he has the yolk analyzed and sure enough, it is gold, albeit with some peculiar imperfections like pectin from apple peels. A quick consult with Dr. Gottlieb provides all the pseudo-science Albert needs to go into the golden egg business with his best friend, lawyer Fred Hines (Roberts).

Albert and Fred want to go about this the right way, setting up a corporation and making sure not to spend so much that they’d call attention to themselves. But a call from the bank about some bounced checks rattles Katie. When Charlie lays another egg, she takes it straight to the bank and tries to deposit it. The bank manager advises her to take it to a refinery instead. She cashes in the egg, squares her account at the bank, and buys herself a swell new hat as a reward.

At first, Albert’s mad that Katie just waltzed into a bank with a hunk of gold. But Fred thinks she may be on to something. Basically, Katie is such a guileless idiot that she can go anywhere with a pocketful of golden egg yolks and cash them in. Even if she’s questioned, she can just tell the truth and nobody’s going to believe her anyway. It’s the “don’t ask me, I’m just a girl” theory of scams, crimes and petty larcenies.

Fred’s plan doesn’t work quite as well as he’d hoped, however. Even though Katie spreads the gold around town, people do start wondering where all these egg-shaped gold nuggets are coming from. The Treasury Department, under pressure from President Nixon himself (or at least a guy who vaguely resembles him from behind), launches an investigation. Unfortunately, their only lead is the list of aliases Katie’s used at the different refineries. Except they’re not aliases. They’re all variations of her actual name. But that’s too tough a nut for the T-Men to crack. All except Hooper, of course, who lives right next door to the perpetrators. He decides to engage in a little old-fashioned snooping to figure out what’s going on.

But all is not well at the Dooley household. Albert’s been so obsessed with egg production that he’s failing as a father. Things are so bad that Jimmy and Charlie have started hanging out with dune buggy-driving slackers Arvin and Orlo (Jack Bender from The Barefoot Executive and Billy Bowles). The egg scheme isn’t going according to plan, either. So far, Albert has resisted the temptation to spend money but Fred has swooped in and picked up a sporty yellow convertible. The very car Albert had his eye on, of course.

Hooper finally tricks Jimmy into showing him how Charlie lays golden eggs. Even though Katie manages to snatch the egg away from him, Hooper still reports what he’s learned to his boss, Mr. Rutledge (James Gregory). Rutledge leads a raid on the Dooleys but Jimmy runs away with Charlie and we all know what that means, don’t we? Yep, it’s time for the Wacky Disney Car Chase of the Week (sponsored by Big Al’s Auto Body of Burbank). This one involves a garbage truck, the convertible, Arvin’s dune buggy, a cherry picker, a parking garage and, as always, wet paint. Albert saves Jimmy from falling to his death and realizes that his family is more important than mutant duck gold.

Albert is arrested for violating the Gold Reserve Act. But when Hooper tries to get Charlie to lay an egg on the stand, he’s unable to duplicate the trick. Albert volunteers to show the court how it’s done, even though he could have done nothing and let everyone believe Hooper was crazy. When Charlie lays a perfectly ordinary egg (evidently all the radiation and applesauce has worn off), the case is dismissed for lack of evidence. Hooper points out that the defendants have thousands and thousands of unexplained dollars in the bank but the judge says there’s no law against getting rich, as long as you pay your taxes.

Alternate poster for Million Dollar Duck

For the record, the moral of Aesop’s fable is, “Those who have plenty want more and so lose all they have.” The moral of The Million Dollar Duck appears to be, “There’s no law against getting rich, as long as you pay your taxes.” Personally, I think the original is more universally applicable but there’s nothing like that here. Albert doesn’t lose the duck out of hubris or because he’s trying to get more than the duck can produce. It just stops working. Plus, he gets to keep everything he made up to that point and fix his relationship with his son. Sounds like Albert came out ahead all around on this deal.

Gene Siskel admitted to walking out on a screening of The Million Dollar Duck, one of only three movies he couldn’t make it through in his professional career. His future partner, Roger Ebert, presumably made it to the end but referred to it as “one of the most profoundly stupid movies I’ve ever seen.” He wasn’t wrong but let’s face it. A lot of these Disney gimmick comedies are pretty dumb. That can be forgiven if they’re also funny. This one ain’t.

Throughout his Disney career, Dean Jones was frequently stuck with animal costars. Cats, dogs, monkeys, horses, you name it. He could be a lot of fun in these movies but it seems as though the stars had to align perfectly for them to work. If he’s just a little too arrogant or too dense, you get something like The Ugly Dachshund or Monkeys, Go Home! or this movie. Albert doesn’t seem smart enough to be a scientist and his rocky relationship with his wife and son makes him tough to root for on a personal level. You know a character is unlikable when you hope that he’ll lose his battle with the IRS.

As for Sandy Duncan, she’s saddled with the unenviable task of playing a character so pathologically stupid that it’s a wonder she’s able to make it through the day. It would be one thing if she was simply ditzy or scatterbrained but Katie appears to be a genuine moron. She’s really difficult to take but I can’t entirely blame Duncan for that. I’m hard-pressed to think of any actress who would have fared better with this material.

The Million Dollar Duck came out June 30, 1971, and most critics seemed to agree with Siskel and Ebert. The movie was not well-loved and it did so-so business at the box office. It did somehow manage to snag a couple of Golden Globe nominations. Sandy Duncan was nominated for Most Promising Newcomer – Female, which kind of makes sense if you take the rest of her work that year into consideration. Ironically, she lost to Twiggy in Ken Russell’s film of The Boy Friend, one of the shows that brought Sandy to prominence in the first place. (Incidentally, the other nominees were Cybill Shepherd for The Last Picture Show, Janet Suzman for Nicholas And Alexandra, and Delores Taylor for Billy Jack. What a weird year.)

Dean Jones, on the other hand, was nominated for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Comedy or Musical. He was up against Bud Cort in Harold And Maude, Walter Matthau in Kotch, Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, and the eventual winner, Topol in Fiddler On The Roof. In a career full of silly Disney comedies, this was the one Dean Jones performance singled out by the Hollywood Foreign Press as worthy of a Golden Globe nomination. I don’t know, maybe there just weren’t a lot of comedies and musicals in 1971.

In any event, Dean Jones’s return to Disney gave him a little bit more freedom to pursue outside projects. Later in 1971, he produced and starred in a Prohibition-era sitcom called The Chicago Teddy Bears. It only ran three months before CBS yanked the low-rated show off the air. Naturally, Jones bounced back from that by heading back to the House of Mouse. Dean Jones will return.  

VERDICT: Disney Minus

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Rascal

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Rascal

Animals had been a huge part of Walt Disney’s aesthetic even before he’d started making live-action films. The studio temporarily became a veritable zoo during the production of films like Dumbo and Bambi as real elephants and deer were brought in for the animators to study. And if there was anything Walt liked more than animal pictures, it was the honey-glazed, Norman Rockwell-style nostalgia for smalltown America in the early years of the twentieth century.

Even though Walt had been dead for a few years, the studio that bore his name was still very much guided by the interests and tastes of its founder. So while a movie like Rascal feels out of step with the prevailing trends of late 1969, it makes perfect sense as a Disney movie. The problem is that it doesn’t exactly feel like a Walt Disney movie. Instead, it feels like a faded carbon copy of earlier successes.

Walt surely would have related to the subtitle of the book that provided Rascal’s source material. Sterling North’s Rascal: A Memoir Of A Better Era was published in 1963 and it went on to win a shelf-load of children’s book awards including the prestigious Newbery Honor. Walt may well have been familiar with the book himself. He’d based his 1948 live-action/animation combo So Dear To My Heart on an earlier North book. Everything about Rascal fell directly into Walt’s wheelhouse.

Former animator and True-Life Adventures veteran James Algar produced Rascal. Norman Tokar, most recently responsible for The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit, handled the directing duties. The screenplay was written by Harold Swanton, whose only other Disney credit was on the Wonderful World Of Color two-parter Willie And The Yank (released theatrically overseas as Mosby’s Marauders).

Like so many other live-action Disney features, Rascal takes place in the bucolic American Midwest (Wisconsin this time) in a 1918 seemingly untouched by outside forces like World War I. That’s not the case with the book. The movie cuts out an absent older brother, away fighting in the Great War, as well as a sequence where young Sterling contracts the Spanish flu. The presence of a Stanley Steamer is just about the only thing left that gives the setting any specificity.

Former Lost In Space star and future Dr. Demento mainstay (thanks to Barnes & Barnes’ all-time great novelty song “Fish Heads”) Bill Mumy stars as young Sterling North. Walter Pidgeon, who had previously appeared in Tokar’s boy-and-his-dog drama Big Red, narrates as the older Sterling. It’s the beginning of summer vacation and the North family is still recovering from the recent death of Sterling’s mother. His older sister, Theo (Pamela Toll), has been taking care of things for their frequently absent father (Steve Forrest), whose work takes him on the road from state to state.

On the last day of school, Mr. North picks up his son and takes him out into the country for a surprise. A lynx has wandered down from Canada and made its home in the Wisconsin woods. The lynx surprises a family of raccoons, who manage to get away but leave the youngest behind. The young raccoon wouldn’t last a day with a lynx on the hunt, so Sterling brings the little fella home, naming him Rascal.

The Norths’ neighbors are less than thrilled by the new pet. Garth Shadwick is afraid Rascal will spook his prize horse, while Cy Jenkins warns that his old coonhound will chase him off the second he looks at his corn patch sidewise. But all the animals seem to get along just fine and Sterling vows he’ll “de-varmint” Rascal to ensure Cy’s corn remains untouched.

By the way, the great character actors Henry Jones and John Fiedler made their live-action Disney debuts here as Garth and Cy. Fiedler had joined the Disney family earlier, providing the voice of Piglet in Winnie The Pooh And The Blustery Day, a role he’d stick with right up until his death in 2005. Both Jones and Fiedler will be back in this column.

Theo has to return to her own job in Chicago, so she lines up interviews for a potential live-in housekeeper. Mr. North agrees to meet with Theo’s favorite, the no-nonsense Mrs. Slatterfield (Elsa Lanchester, making her fourth and final appearance in this column, although she’d go on to appear in the Wonderful World Of Disney two-parter My Dog, The Thief). But after realizing that both he and Sterling crave a bit of nonsense, Mr. North dismisses her and decides they can take care of themselves.

Mr. North soon returns to his life on the road, leaving Sterling on his own to have the best summer of his life with Rascal and his dog, Wowzer. He builds a canoe in the middle of the living room. His concerned schoolteacher, Miss Whalen (Bettye Ackerman), stops by with Reverend Thurman (Jonathan Daly) to see how he’s getting along. Fortunately, Mr. North makes it home himself, just in time to get everybody drunk on homemade cider. Most of all, Sterling writes copious letters to his sister, assuring her that Rascal’s just fine and pretending that Mrs. Slatterfield actually got the job.

Of course, the summer isn’t all cider and canoes. Rascal gets loose in the general store and trashes the place, turning everyone in town against Sterling and his raccoon. The local constable (Robert Emhardt) issues a citation for keeping an unlicensed varmint or something and threatens to hold Sterling responsible for damages unless he keeps Rascal caged up.

Sterling is just about to set Rascal free when Mr. North butts in. Turns out that Garth has made a not-entirely-friendly wager with local auto enthusiast Walt Dabbett (Richard Erdman) that his horse-and-buggy can beat Walt’s Stanley Steamer in a fair race. A lot of folks, including the constable, have bet good money on Garth to win. But things aren’t looking too promising until the Norths arrive with Rascal. Garth takes the raccoon as a passenger and that’s somehow enough to spur the horse on to victory. Now everybody loves Rascal again. Well, everybody that matters, anyway.

Everything goes back to normal until Theo comes home for Thanksgiving with her new beau, Norman (Steve Carlson). She hasn’t even made it to the house when she learns that Mrs. Slatterfield hasn’t been working for the family at all. Enraged, Theo abandons Norman and heads home. She’s appalled by the mess and finally has it out with her irresponsible father, reminding him in no uncertain terms that he still has a son to raise and no one to help.

That same night, Rascal hears the mating call of a female raccoon through the window. He predictably goes nuts and tries to escape through Theo’s room, waking her and everyone else. When Sterling goes to grab him, Rascal bites his finger. Sterling’s more sad and surprised than seriously hurt and realizes that now it really is time to let Rascal go be the varmint he always was. At the same time, Theo’s heart-to-heart has the desired effect and Mr. North decides it’s time to grow up and be a real father for a change.

Sterling sets out in his homemade canoe to return Rascal to his old stomping grounds. (By the way, Wisconsin experienced then-record snowfall during the Thanksgiving of 1918, not the balmy Indian summer weather Sterling paddles through here.) Rascal quickly locates his lady racoon (or a lady racoon, anyway) and they go off to make little Rascals. But before Sterling leaves, that lynx spots the happy couple and attacks! Sterling starts back to help but Rascal and Mrs. Rascal don’t need it. They outwit the lynx, sending him tumbling into the water. Looks like they’re gonna be just fine.

Rascal quad poster

It’s interesting that Rascal was Disney’s very next movie after Smith! Both films are quiet, low-key affairs that amble along at their own pace, seemingly unconcerned with sending the audience to sleep. They also both have acoustic, folksy theme songs by Bobby Russell. Unfortunately, while Russell’s “Summer Sweet” does indeed include the lyric “You Rascal You”, it only makes you wish you were listening to the Louis Armstrong song of that name instead.

Of the two, Rascal is certainly the superior film, although, considering what a waste Smith! ended up being, that is the faintest of praise. Sterling North’s book sounds pretty good and I think an interesting movie could be made from it. Steve Forrest’s character remains frustratingly two-dimensional until the end. But after Theo lets him have it, you can see the complexities that a richer film could dig into. A suddenly single parent mourning the loss of his wife in his own way, who very much loves his son but has never really been there for him? That’s an interesting character.

Forrest does the best he can with what he has to work with, although he’s more comfortable as the glad-handing dreamer than the wounded, irresponsible father. This would be Forrest’s only Disney feature, although he did make a couple of Disney TV appearances. Television became Forrest’s bread and butter in the 1970s, starring on the show S.W.A.T. and appearing in loads of guest shots, TV-movies and miniseries. He’s a charismatic screen presence. I’m sorry we won’t be seeing him back in this column.

Bill Mumy turns in a nicely restrained performance as Sterling, probably more nuanced than someone like Tommy Kirk would have given had this been made a decade or so earlier. But to my eyes anyway, he seems a little old for the part. In the book, Sterling would have been around 11 or 12. Mumy was 15 when Rascal was released, maybe 14 when the movie was shot. Not necessarily a huge difference. But to this Gen-Xer, when Sterling is left alone, my first thought was, “What’s the big deal? I was left on my own all the time at that age.”

Mumy seems like the sort of kid who would have been right at home on the Disney lot, especially in earlier movies like Old Yeller and Big Red. But this will also be Bill Mumy’s only appearance in this column. He’d earlier appeared in a couple of TV projects, Sammy, The Way-Out Seal and For The Love Of Willadean. But by 1969, I guess the studio was going all in on Kurt Russell as their resident juvenile lead and didn’t want to split their attention. Besides, Mumy was already fairly established thanks to growing up on TV in shows like The Twilight Zone and Lost In Space. Disney always preferred their young stars home-grown.

My biggest problem with Rascal is that there just isn’t much to it. For some folks, this might not be a deal-breaker. It’s pleasant and unchallenging and, at a brisk 85 minutes, is never in danger of overstaying its welcome. But it’s never a good sign when you have to really think to remind yourself what happened in a movie you just finished watching. When I sat down to write this column, all I could remember was the canoe in the living room, Rascal wreaking havoc on the general store and something about a horse racing a car. And I wasn’t too sure about that last one. For all I knew, my brain was mashing up The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit and The Love Bug. The perils of watching too many Disney movies, I guess.

Rascal was released on June 11, 1969, making this the last movie in this column to come out before I was born. Ouch. It didn’t have a huge impact, although it was the first movie ever reviewed by Gene Siskel in the pages of the Chicago Tribune (he didn’t like it). But a later adaptation of Sterling North’s novel would have a major effect on Japan, of all places.

In 1977, an anime adaptation of North’s book, Araiguma Rasukaru, began airing in Japan. The series was wildly popular. As a result, Japanese kids began begging their parents for racoons, an animal indigenous to North America. But just like Sterling, these kids eventually realized that racoons make terrible pets and they released them into the wild. So many racoons were imported that they eventually became a real nuisance, destroying crops and cultural landmarks. The government moved to ban the import of racoons but it was too late. Japan had been infested with an army of Rascals.

Back home, Rascal has its champions but it remains fairly obscure. It isn’t currently available on Disney+ and the studio has never done much with it on disc. Unless someone decides to remake it, I don’t foresee a huge resurgence of interest in Rascal any time soon. There are just way too many other places to get your coming-of-age-with-a-cute-animal fix these days.

VERDICT: Disney Minus

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