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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: One Little Indian

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's One Little Indian

James Garner’s first screen appearance was on the debut episode of the TV western Cheyenne in 1955. By 1973, less than twenty years later, his career had already been a rollercoaster ride. He shot to stardom in 1957 when he landed the lead on Maverick. But his big break came back to bite him just three years later. After a writers’ strike halted production on the series, Warner Bros. put their newest star on suspension. Garner sued the studio for breach of contract and won but, needless to say, wasn’t the most popular guy around Hollywood after that.

After leaving Maverick, Garner transitioned into movies. It took a little while but he eventually broke through as a popular and charming leading man. In 1963, he starred in two very different but equally successful hits: the classic adventure movie The Great Escape with Steve McQueen and the Doris Day rom-com The Thrill Of It All. Once again, James Garner’s career appeared to be back on track.

Wanting to exercise more control over his projects, Garner started his own production company, Cherokee Productions. But his next several projects failed to connect with audiences. When the expensive 1966 racing drama Grand Prix made less money than its studio had hoped, director John Frankenheimer threw Garner under the bus, claiming the movie would have done better if he’d been able to cast his first choice, Garner’s old costar McQueen, or even his second, Robert Redford.

With his movie career moving in fits and starts, Garner went back to television in 1971 with the sorta-western Nichols. Audiences expecting another Maverick were disappointed and the series was canceled after a single season. Shortly after Nichols went off the air, Garner signed a two-picture deal with Disney. This says a lot about both the state of James Garner’s career at the time and the state of Walt Disney Productions.

At the time, A-list movie stars were not lining up to sign contracts with Disney. Garner was by far the biggest name to set up shop at the studio in a long time. But he’d once again become a bigger draw after his Disney contract expired. At the moment, he was a fading leading man in his mid-40s whose best days might have been behind him. Garner lent Disney a bit of credibility at a time when talent was giving the studio a wide berth. In return, Disney gave Garner a gig while he regrouped and figured out his next move.

One Little Indian, Garner’s first Disney project, finds the actor squarely in his comfort zone. It’s a western with comedic elements that casts Garner as a possibly roguish but fundamentally decent man of action. True-Life Adventures veteran Winston Hibler produced the film, so if you’re thinking some type of exotic animal will be involved, you’re not wrong. Hibler also brought back Napoleon And Samantha director Bernard McEveety, who had plenty of experience directing episodes of TV westerns.

Unlike a lot of Disney movies, One Little Indian wasn’t based on an existing book or story. The sole credited screenwriter is Harry Spalding. Spalding was a prolific writer of low-budget pictures like Surf Party, Curse Of The Fly and Wild On The Beach. He continued to work for Disney throughout the 1970s and, while most of that was for television, we’ll see him in this column again.

There’s also a new and somewhat surprising name composing the music. Jerry Goldsmith, already a five-time Oscar nominee for his work on such films as Planet Of The Apes and Patton, made his Disney debut on One Little Indian. Disney had a long, long history of relying on its own in-house music department. Seeing Goldsmith’s name pop up so soon after Marvin Hamlisch’s score for The World’s Greatest Athlete makes me suspect the studio was reconsidering the need to keep fulltime songwriters and composers on the payroll.

In One Little Indian, Garner plays Corporal Clint Keyes, a cavalry soldier arrested for desertion. We find out later that he turned against his commanding officer to save the lives of women and children during a raid on an Indian camp. But when we first meet him, he’s handcuffed and riding hellbent for leather across the prairie away from his captors including Sgt. Raines (Morgan Woodward, again reporting for bad guy duty after The Wild Country). Once Raines captures him, he decides Keyes can’t be trusted on horseback, so he forces him to walk, tied to the back of a horse.

After the opening credits, Raines’ party encounters another cavalry unit escorting a ragged band of Cheyenne to the reservation. Raines asks Lieutenant Cummins (the first of several Disney movies for veteran character actor Robert Pine, who you have definitely seen in something if you’ve watched any movies or TV shows over the past few decades) if he can spare an extra man to help with his unruly prisoner. Cummins refuses the request but is pretty sure Raines will meet up with the rest of his unit in a day or two.

Raines rides off with Keyes and the movie decides to follow Cummins and his party back to their fort where Captain Stewart (hey, it’s Pat Hingle!) has been expecting them. Stewart takes stock of his new captives…uh, I mean, guests…and orders the doc to give them a once-over. I probably don’t need to point out that the movie makes zero effort to place any of this business with the Cheyenne into the broader context of the Trail of Tears. These Natives are just part of the background like the mountains and trees.

While the white folks are distracted with the medical exam, a 10-year-old Cheyenne boy sees his chance to escape. He puts up a good fight but is eventually yanked down from a fence, exposing his pale white backside. Yes, it turns out that it’s a white boy, captured by the Cheyenne and raised as one of their own. It’s James MacArthur in The Light In The Forest all over again. I don’t know why Disney decided to go back to this particular well but I’m really hoping this is the last white-child-raised-by-Indians movie I’ll have to sit through. Disney wasn’t equipped to handle this kind of story in 1958 and they still weren’t in 1973.

As in The Light In The Forest, the cavalry is obliged to rip this kid away from the only family he’s ever known and find some well-meaning but misguided stranger to raise him. Here, the fort’s chaplain (Andrew Prine) is that stranger and he’s only too eager to volunteer his services as foster parent. He wastes no time in baptizing the kid and renaming him Mark.

That’s young Clay O’Brien as Mark, by the way. O’Brien made his film debut in the 1972 John Wayne picture The Cowboys. He appeared in a lot of westerns in the 70s, including another one for Disney, before leaving Hollywood to become a cowboy for real. In 1997, he was inducted into the Pro Rodeo Hall of Fame. You just never know where these Disney kids are going to end up.

Mark bides his time for a bit and finally manages to sneak away while most of the fort is attending the Christmas Eve service. He sets off in search of his Cheyenne mother, Blue Feather, but the elements take a toll. He’s practically on his last legs when he’s accidentally shot by our old buddy Keyes, who turns out to be a part of this movie after all. He’s had a busy few days himself, escaping from Sgt. Raines and liberating a couple of camels from the military. Really, he just wanted the one but Rosebud (Rosie, for short) wouldn’t leave without her daughter, who Mark names Thirsty.

Keyes douses Mark with carbolic acid and patches him up, offering to travel with him as far as he can before he cuts out to Mexico. A quick stop for a bath reveals Mark’s true identity to Keyes. A couple of points to be made here. First, who decided that showing this kid’s butt was the only way to show he’s not indigenous? Second and more importantly, what difference does it make? It’s not as if the movie has some point it wants to make about Native Americans. It’s like McEveety and Spalding decided the kid had to be an Indian to justify him running into Keyes and he had to be white to justify him speaking English. Neither of those things are true. They’re just lazy.

In any event, Sgt. Raines and his team (which now includes tracker Jimmy Wolf, played by Jay Silverheels, last seen in Smith!) catches up to the pair at the watering hole but Keyes turns the tables on them. His plan does encounter a rather significant hitch. Instead of taking their horses for themselves, they end up scaring them away. But at least their pursuers end up on foot while Keyes and Mark still have their camels.

Next there’s some goofy business with Garner trying to sneak into a cowboys’ camp to steal some food only to have Rosie crash the party and spook the cattle. But the next significant thing to happen story-wise is an encounter with a middle-aged widow (Vera Miles of The Wild Country and a surprisingly large number of other Disney films) and her daughter (Disney appearance #2 for Jodie Foster). Doris McIver recently lost her husband and she plans on taking young Martha back to Colorado in just a few days. That suits Keyes fine, since he just wants to rest up, shave and maybe scrounge a hot meal or two for himself and Mark.

Martha is delighted by the camels and tries her best to befriend Mark, while Doris is delighted by Keyes, especially after he shaves. Keyes explains their situation to the widow and confesses that he really doesn’t know what to do with Mark. He can’t bring him to Mexico but he also can’t escort him back to the reservation without putting his own neck in a noose. Doris sympathizes with the fugitives and can’t ignore the spark between her and Keyes, so after thinking it over for all of thirty seconds, she agrees to bring Mark to Colorado with them. Mr. McIver must have been a real catch for his wife to agree to adopt a kid who thinks he’s an Indian on the off-chance it might eventually help her land a new man.

Satisfied that Mark’s in good hands, Keyes sneaks off in the middle of the night. The next morning, Mark is understandably upset. But he can’t pout for long because that mean old Sgt. Raines requisitioned some new horses off the cowboys Keyes tried to steal from earlier and he shows up demanding satisfaction. Mark runs away and soon, both he and Raines are tracking Keyes. As for Doris and Martha, they pack up and head for Colorado as scheduled. This might be the only normal human behavior depicted in the entire film.

Mark turns out to be a better tracker than Raines and Jimmy Wolf. Keyes had grabbed his gear and sent Rosie off alone, so while the bad guys were following a riderless camel, Mark picks up the scent of carbolic acid and catches up to Keyes. Mark is plenty pissed off and Keyes’ explanation that Blue Feather and the rest of the Cheyenne would reject Mark even if he could find them doesn’t help. The dynamic duo is about to split up again when Raines finally shows up. Mark escapes with the camels but Keyes is captured and taken to the nearest cavalry outpost, which happens to be the same one Mark escaped from, which means the chaplain absolutely could have found Mark if he’d put any effort into it.

Captain Stewart returns to the fort and is not amused by the freshly constructed gallows in his courtyard. He demands to see both Raines and Keyes and wastes no time in sizing up Raines as an enormous asshole. Still, orders are orders. Stewart allows Raines to continue with the hanging with the understanding that none of his men will have anything to do with it and Raines had better be on his way the second the deed is done.

As his last request, Keyes asks the chaplain to find Mark and see him safely brought to the McIvers in Colorado. The chaplain agrees, probably just relieved to be off the hook from his impulsive decision to adopt the kid himself, and escorts Keyes to the gallows. Raines slips the noose around Keyes’ neck and is ready to drop him when Mark and Rosie come to the rescue. Keyes drops but the scaffold is destroyed before he’s hung. In the ensuing melee, Keyes is able to escape with Rosie but Mark is recaptured.

Raines takes off in hot pursuit but eventually is forced back to the fort for reinforcements. However, Captain Stewart informs him that the case is officially closed. Raines’ orders were to hang Keyes and Keyes has now been hung. Whether or not he died is irrelevant. Stewart’s not going to hang a man for the same crime twice. The chaplain rides out to let Keyes know he’s a free man and deliver Mark. Sadly, Rosie was fatally wounded in the getaway. After a proper funeral, Keyes, Mark and Thirsty saddle up and head north for what they hope will be a happy reunion in Colorado.

In his memoir The Garner Files, James Garner is pretty harsh on One Little Indian. “I’ve done some things I’m not proud of,” he writes. “This is one of them.” Part of me wants to push back against that sentiment and say it’s not that bad. But I appreciate Garner’s candor and far be it from me to disagree with someone who always seemed to possess a healthy and accurate degree of self-evaluation. He’s right. One Little Indian sucks.

In its meager defense, Garner himself is always a pleasure to watch. I’m not going to say he’s doing his best because I don’t think he was and frankly, the material didn’t deserve his best. Even so, you can’t help but like him no matter how weak the movie. James Garner made Polaroid commercials fun to watch. Of course he elevates this.

The same is true of Pat Hingle, who gets probably the most purely satisfying scene in the movie when he chews out Sgt. Raines. And it’s still fun watching Jodie Foster grow up on screen. In the year between this and Napoleon And Samantha, she’d had a smallish role in the Raquel Welch roller derby movie Kansas City Bomber, starred as Becky Thatcher opposite Johnny Whitaker in the Sherman Brothers non-Disney musical Tom Sawyer, and done a bunch of live-action and animated TV work. One Little Indian would be her last Disney movie for a little while. The next time we see her in this column, her career will be in a very different place.

Unfortunately, everything else about One Little Indian is bottom-of-the-barrel Disney at its worst. The comedic hijinks of the camels aren’t that funny and they’re shoehorned in between mawkish melodrama about Mark’s quest for a real family. As in The Light In The Forest, McEveety and Spalding are either unwilling or unable to admit that Mark’s family was the Cheyenne who raised him. But James MacArthur’s character in The Light In The Forest was older than Mark, so that movie was a bit more interesting in its depiction of the tension between his two sides. Mark’s ten years old. As far as we know, he doesn’t remember his birth parents at all. So if you’re not prepared to address his relationship with the Cheyenne, and Spalding and McEveety most definitely are not, you’re just not engaging with this material in any meaningful way.

Mark doesn’t display much personality at all. He keeps saying he wants to get back to Blue Feather but he doesn’t show it. And we get absolutely no indication what Blue Feather thinks about him. So it’s really difficult to care what happens to this kid, even after the chaplain, Keyes, Doris, Martha and half the camp go on about how much they want to help him. I feel worse for the camels than I do for Mark.

At the end of the day, James Garner wasn’t the only one who didn’t care for One Little Indian. The movie was released June 20, 1973. It ended up making about $2 million which, even in 1973, was not a lot. It came and went quickly, leaving barely a ripple to mark its passing. And yet, Garner still owed the studio another picture. Something tells me he hoped to knock it out and get it over with as quickly as possible.

VERDICT: Disney Minus

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Charley And The Angel

~ electrictheatre
Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Charley And The Angel

Beginning with The Shaggy Dog in 1959, Fred MacMurray and Walt Disney enjoyed a mutually beneficial working relationship. MacMurray’s Disney work gave his career a much-needed jolt. As for Walt, he identified with MacMurray and liked him personally, although I don’t know that they were necessarily close friends. But Walt went to bat for MacMurray more than once, as when he insisted on casting him in The Happiest Millionaire over the objections of the Sherman Brothers.

Because Walt and Fred were so closely connected, it wasn’t surprising when the actor stepped away from the studio after Walt’s death in 1966. Instead, he focused his attention on My Three Sons, the hit sitcom that had been on the air so long that the sons had all grown up, gotten married and had kids of their own. CBS finally decided to cancel the show after its 12th season. The final episode aired April 13, 1972.

The series made Fred MacMurray very rich. MacMurray’s savvy investments and the fact that he was a legendary tightwad made him even richer. So after My Three Sons went off the air, he didn’t really need to work anymore. Nevertheless, producer Bill Anderson was able to lure him back to the studio one last time with Charley And The Angel. Maybe MacMurray felt he owed it to the studio. Or maybe he just wasn’t ready to stop collecting paychecks yet.

Roswell Rogers, the TV writer responsible for the screenplay of The Million Dollar Duck, based his script on The Golden Evenings Of Summer, a nostalgic collection of semiautobiographical stories by humorist Will Stanton. Vincent McEveety is back in the director’s chair for the third time after working on Million Dollar Duck and The Biscuit Eater. We’ll be seeing his name more and more frequently in this column.

MacMurray stars as Charley Appleby, a hardware store owner in “Midwest U.S.A.”. The year is 1933 and Charley is obsessed with keeping the wolves of the Great Depression as far as possible from his business and his family. But he’s so concerned with the almighty dollar that he’s estranged from his wife, Nettie (the great Cloris Leachman in her Disney debut). Charley dismisses her wish for a trip to Chicago to visit the World’s Fair as a frivolous, expensive waste of time and money.

Charley’s relationship with his kids is in even worse shape. He thinks his daughter, Leonora (Kathleen Cody, back from Snowball Express), is engaged to an upstanding young man named Derwood Moseby (a quintessential Ed Begley Jr. character name that is unfortunately wasted on what amounts to a silent cameo). But she’s really attracted to Ray Ferris, an unemployed good-for-nothing proto-slacker played by the king of good-for-nothing proto-slackers, Kurt Russell. Russell, you may recall, made his Disney debut alongside Fred MacMurray in Follow Me, Boys!, so it’s fun to see them reunited seven years later.

As for Charley’s sons, Willie and Rupert, they’ve pretty much given up on their dad taking an active interest in their lives. They don’t even bother asking for help when attempting to assemble a homemade kite based on the rambling instructions of their favorite radio host. Charley finds out how bad things are later when they sing a “Happy Father’s Day” song to the dad of the kid next door and ask to borrow a couple bucks to chip in on a present for him. That’s cold, kids.

Vincent Van Patten and Scott Kolden play Willie and Rupert. Future tennis pro and World Poker Tour commentator Van Patten made a couple more TV appearances for Disney, including The High Flying Spy and The Boy And The Bronc Buster, but this was his only Disney feature. We’ll see a lot more of his dad, Dick Van Patten, who already popped up once in Snowball Express. Kolden’s acting career didn’t last long. He went on to costar in the nightmare factory Sigmund And The Sea Monsters opposite Disney alum Johnny Whitaker, his costar in the Disney TV-movie The Mystery In Dracula’s Castle. Kolden left acting completely in 1979, eventually resurfacing as an Emmy-nominated sound effects editor. I don’t know why but I really love it when child stars decide acting isn’t their bag and find success behind the scenes.

Charley heads to work and doesn’t seem to notice the unusually large number of near-miss accidents he keeps narrowly avoiding. I had a hard time noticing it myself, to be honest. McEveety rushes through this sequence so indifferently that most of the gags fail to register. After he swerves to avoid hitting a truck in a narrow alley, an older gentleman (Harry Morgan) in a white suit and a black bowler hat materializes on the hood of his car. He claims to be an angel sent to escort him to the great beyond. Having seen how little Charley has done with the gift of life, he assumes death will come as a sweet relief.

Naturally, Charley requires a little convincing that this guy, who can’t remember what his name used to be at first but eventually recalls that it’s Roy Zerney, is really an angel. But not too much. Roy just has to levitate in midair clad in the traditional angel’s uniform of white robe and harp to show Charley he’s the real deal. Roy can’t tell Charley how or when it’s going to happen but his time is definitely up.

Charley blows off his usual lodge meeting and goes straight home, determined to be a better husband and father. Nettie is touched by the flowers and the kids are pretty sure something’s wrong but everyone’s pleasantly surprised by the new Charley. But he’s turned over a new leaf just a little too late. When he suggests a family outing to the movies, no one is willing to change their plans for the night. Even Willie and Rupert, who were going to the movies anyway, would rather go with their pal next door and his dad than with Charley.

Everything Charley does to make things right with his family just makes things worse. He decides to sell the store to make sure Nettie has enough money to live on after he’s gone. But since he hasn’t told anyone about his impending demise, Nettie thinks he’s being crazy. Her suspicions deepen after she catches him talking to Roy. Since nobody can see or hear the angel apart from Charley, Nettie thinks he’s really gone off the deep end.

Things go from bad to worse when Leonora elopes with Ray. Charley tries to get some cash to cover his mounting expenses but a run on the banks causes Ernie the banker (Edward Andrews in his final Disney feature) to close his doors and freeze his assets. When he finds out that Nettie has loaned a hundred dollars to Pete the handyman (George “Goober” Lindsey’s third Disney appearance), he begins to worry that he won’t be able to get his affairs in order before it’s too late.

Burdened with financial worries, Charley has a heart-to-heart with his sons about the value of a dollar and the virtues of earning an honest living. Heeding his advice, the boys get jobs at a junk yard. They’re unaware that the owner, Felix (Larry D. Mann, last seen in Scandalous John), has a side hustle as a bootlegger. He acts as a middleman between the mob and local roadhouse owners like Sadie (Barbara Nichols, whose picture should appear in the dictionary next to the word “floozy”).

While the boys are working in the yard, Felix’s driver, Buggs (if there’s a gangster in a Disney movie, you know it’s gotta be Richard Bakalyan), shows up. The cops have seen through his “cooking oil deliveryman” disguise and he needs to stash the hooch. Felix isn’t about to lose a sale, though. He recruits Willie and Rupert to drive an old junker Model T over to Sadie’s place and deliver the “cooking oil”, figuring the cops would never pull over a couple of little kids who are way too young to drive. I’m not sure Felix’s reasoning is altogether sound but it turns out he’s right and the boys embark on a lucrative new career.

The kids find out what they’ve really been delivering when tough guy Frankie Zuto (Mills Watson from The Wild Country) arrives from Chicago. At the same time, the police have let Charley know that they’ve heard a rumor that Willie and Rupert are delivering booze to Sadie. Why is Charley talking to the police? Because he’d heard that Ray had taken Leonora to Sadie’s, gone out there to find her and ended up in jail after the cops raided the joint. I’m getting a lot of this out of order but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t make a lot of sense while it’s happening, either.

The upshot of all this is that Charley heads to the junk yard to get his kids just as the police are descending on Frankie Zuto. Frankie and Buggs take the boys hostage in the Model T. Charley winds up chasing them in Frankie’s car but gets knocked out, so Roy the angel takes the wheel, giving Disney another excuse to trot out the old self-driving car gag. Charley is arrested a second time when the cops stop the car and figure he must be a bootlegger since he’s in the bootlegger’s car.

With the town closed off by roadblocks, Frankie and Buggs force the kids to bring them home so they can lie low until the heat cools. Meanwhile in jail, Roy lets Charley know that the heavenly committee has reviewed his case and made their decision. They appreciate Charley’s efforts to be a better person but it hasn’t been enough. Tonight’s the night Charley will die.

It isn’t long before everyone has gathered at the Appleby house and I do mean everyone. Charley gets out of jail, Leonora and Ray return home after Ray’s out-of-town job offer falls through, even Pete the handyman pops his head in. Everyone pulls together to defeat the gangsters but in the midst of the scuffle, a shot rings out that seems to narrowly miss Charley. But in the end, the good guys prevail in a big way. The Applebys collect a big cash reward for capturing Frankie Zuto, Pete repays the hundred bucks he owes (with interest), the bank reopens, and the townsfolk even chip in an extra thank-you for some reason: an all-expense paid trip to Chicago and tickets to the World’s Fair. As for that bullet that was meant for Charley, Roy decided to cut him a break and intercept it. Apparently low-level angels are allowed to make their own judgment calls in Disney movies.

Charley And The Angel is an odd duck of a movie. Imagine It’s A Wonderful Life if Clarence was sent to visit Mr. Potter instead of George Bailey, sort of It’s A Miserable Life. Nobody seems to like Charley very much. Even Roy thinks everyone including Charley will be much happier after he’s dead. And this is the guy we’re stuck with for the duration of the picture.

For a time, I thought Charley And The Angel would turn out to be a riff on A Christmas Carol, where the threat of his impending death inspires Charley to be a better person. Sure enough, that’s Charley’s first impulse after hearing the news. But unlike Scrooge, who learns it’s never too late to turn over a new leaf, Charley finds out his ship has sailed and his family has moved on without him. That’s a more realistic life lesson. Sometimes it really is too late. But it’s a little bleak for a Disney movie.

If the movie focused on Charley learning how badly his inattention has damaged his family, it might have been a small gem. Fred MacMurray is just the guy to play a stern, stand-offish husband and father and he expresses some real hurt when his family rebuffs his attempts to reconnect with them. But the earnest, emotional core of the movie is awkwardly surrounded by some of the laziest broad comedy imaginable. After the kids start working for the gangsters, it becomes clear that nobody has the slightest idea what the movie’s even supposed to be about.

Charley And The Angel opens with a groovy new graphic, announcing the film as a 50th Anniversary presentation from Walt Disney Productions. The studio had undeniably come a long way since the Alice Comedies in 1923. But Charley And The Angel is an underwhelming way to celebrate this milestone. Everything about it says it’s just another live-action Disney comedy destined to be forgotten.

That’s pretty much exactly what happened. Charley And The Angel wasn’t a huge success at the box office and critics weren’t enthusiastic. Cloris Leachman somehow managed to snag a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress in a Motion Picture (Comedy or Musical) out of it. She’d won an Oscar a couple years earlier for The Last Picture Show, so maybe she was still riding on the collective good will generated by that film. She’s fine but really doesn’t have much to do in Charley And The Angel. In any case, she lost the award to Glenda Jackson, who also won the Oscar that year for A Touch Of Class.

Charley And The Angel marked the end of Fred MacMurray’s long association with Disney. Afterward, MacMurray appeared in two TV-movies and made one last big-screen appearance as part of the all-star ensemble threatened by killer bees in Irwin Allen’s The Swarm. He retired after that film and suffered from various health issues, including throat cancer, leukemia and a stroke. He recovered from most of these scares but eventually passed away from pneumonia on November 5, 1991. He was 83 years old.

Not all of Fred MacMurray’s Disney movies were gems. Even Walt himself didn’t always make the best use of his talents. Follow Me, Boys! and The Happiest Millionaire both would have benefited from a different leading man. But it’s impossible to imagine Disney without him. With movies like The Shaggy Dog and The Absent-Minded Professor, he helped set a tone and style for live-action Disney comedies that the studio would follow for years. It’s too bad that Charley And The Angel couldn’t have been a victory lap for Fred MacMurray. But then again, if it had ventured too far from what audiences had come to expect, it wouldn’t be Disney. In a way, it makes complete sense that Fred MacMurray’s final Disney movie in 1973 feels like it could just as easily have been his first back in 1959.

VERDICT: Disney Minus

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The World’s Greatest Athlete

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The World's Greatest Athlete

When I saw the title The World’s Greatest Athlete pop up in the Disney list, I first thought it was the third entry in the Dexter Riley series. I soon realized I was confusing it with The Strongest Man In The World, a movie we’ll get to soon enough, and that I had no idea what The World’s Greatest Athlete was about. When I read Disney’s official synopsis, my heart sank a little bit. Here it is. See if you can figure out why.

“Discovered in Africa by two U.S. college sports coaches, Nanu, a blond boy raised by natives after the death of his missionary parents, is an incredible athlete. Entered in a Los Angeles NCAA track-and-field competition, he wins all the events despite voodoo magic being used against him.”

Sounds like a recipe for some good old-fashioned casually racist stereotypes, doesn’t it? Well, the good news is that The World’s Greatest Athlete does not sink to that level. In fact, the movie refuses to engage with its complicated racial politics on any level, which is its own problem. But the biggest issue is that apart from a couple of scattered highlights, the movie simply isn’t that funny. Considering some of the talent involved, that’s a real disappointment.

The World’s Greatest Athlete was an original screenplay by comedy veterans Gerald Gardner and Dee Caruso. Gardner and Caruso had been head writers on the classic spy spoof Get Smart, created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, and had written for The Monkees and That Was The Week That Was. They were A-list TV writers but their only other feature credit had been the little-loved Jerry Lewis vehicle Which Way To The Front? This would be their only Disney credit and it seems likely they had little to do with the picture once the studio bought the script.

This would also be the only Disney feature for director Robert Scheerer, although he did have some experience with the studio. Scheerer started his career as a dancer, performing with the group The Jivin’ Jacks and Jills. He moved into directing in the early 1960s, focusing on variety shows and TV specials for acts like Spike Jones, Danny Kaye and Fred Astaire. In 1971, Disney hired him to produce and direct a 90-minute special for the grand opening of Walt Disney World featuring such stars as Julie Andrews, Buddy Hackett, Bob Hope and many others.

The World’s Greatest Athlete would be one of Scheerer’s few theatrical features. He continued to be a prolific television director, including work on Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager. He briefly returned to Disney in 1988, directing Harry Anderson in a reboot/sequel of The Absent-Minded Professor for the recently retitled Magical World Of Disney.

Perhaps the most surprising name in the opening credits is composer Marvin Hamlisch. When The World’s Greatest Athlete came out in February 1973, Hamlisch was very much on the way up. He’d written some hit songs for artists like Lesley Gore and dabbled a bit in film with scores to movies like The Swimmer and Woody Allen’s Take The Money And Run and Bananas. By the end of 1973, Hamlisch was everywhere thanks to his work on two blockbuster soundtracks: The Sting and The Way We Were. In 1974, he won three Oscars for those two films, setting him on the road to show business’ coveted EGOT hat trick. Hamlisch continued to dominate the 1970s with Broadway shows like A Chorus Line and songs like “Nobody Does It Better” from The Spy Who Loved Me. His only Disney project is now a minor footnote in a huge career.

The star of the show is John Amos as Coach Archer, even though he receives third billing behind Tim Conway and Jan-Michael Vincent. Amos was an eleventh-hour replacement for Godfrey Cambridge, who had appeared in Disney’s The Biscuit Eater a year earlier. Cambridge fell ill during the first week of shooting and was forced to bow out. He never did return to Disney. In 1976, he suffered a heart attack during production of another film, Victory At Entebbe, and died at the age of 43.

Honestly, The World’s Greatest Athlete may have worked better with Cambridge. John Amos was still early in his career, gaining attention as weatherman Gordy Howard on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Around the same time The World’s Greatest Athlete hit theatres, Amos appeared as Esther Rolle’s husband on the sitcom Maude, a role that would soon be spun-off to the series Good Times. Amos has an authority and amiability well-suited to situation comedies but he was not a comedian. An actor like Amos is only as funny as his material, whereas naturally gifted comedians like Cambridge can mine laughs out of a less-than-stellar script.

Given all that, it’s no surprise that most of the laughs in The World’s Greatest Athlete come from top-billed Tim Conway. Conway shot to stardom as the scene-stealing Ensign Parker in McHale’s Navy, which ran from 1962 to 1966 including two feature films. When McHale’s Navy went off the air, Conway starred in a series of television flops: the comedy-western Rango, the self-titled sitcom The Tim Conway Show (costarring Disney regular Joe Flynn) and the similarly titled sketch comedy The Tim Conway Comedy Hour. The World’s Greatest Athlete came along just at the right time for Conway, who really needed a hit.

Golden boy Jan-Michael Vincent stars as the Tarzan-like title character. Vincent started acting in 1967 and he’d been plugging away in movies and TV shows without really breaking through. He began to gain momentum in the early 1970s, first as a hippie draftee trying to make it through boot camp in the TV-movie Tribes, then earning a Golden Globe nomination for his role in the film Going Home. Vincent was still trying to find his screen persona in 1973. Nanu is not the kind of role you take after you’re an established movie star. But he’d go on to star in such cult hits as White Line Fever, Damnation Alley and Big Wednesday.

Sadly, Vincent went through a whole series of rough patches as he became more famous. He struggled with addiction throughout his life and found himself behind bars on more than one occasion. In 1992, he was involved in a near-fatal car accident, the first of three very serious car crashes in the 1990s alone. In 2012, his right leg was amputated after it became infected due to peripheral artery disease. Jan-Michael Vincent died on February 10, 2019, at the age of 74. It’s difficult to reconcile the perfect physical specimen we see in this movie with the drug-and-alcohol ravaged man he became.

Scheerer doesn’t waste much time setting up his movie. Coach Archer presides over the losingest teams in college athletics. All of them, from football to baseball to basketball. I’m no sports nut but perhaps they’d do better with individual coaches with particular specialties? Anyway, fed up after his latest loss, Coach abandons his post at Merrivale College (not to be confused with Dexter Riley’s Medfield College or Merlin Jones’ Midvale College) and goes on safari in Africa to get back to his roots.

When assistant coach Milo (Conway) points out that Archer was born in Cincinnati, Archer clarifies that his great-grandparents came from this part of Africa. And that is the extent of that discussion. It’s a Disney movie, so Archer’s ancestors were just regular old immigrants chasing the American dream like everybody else and let’s speak no more about it.

Archer catches sight of Nanu outrunning a cheetah and can’t believe his eyes. As he admires Nanu from afar, Archer envisions how easily his natural gifts could transfer to the various sports he coaches. He offers the jungle boy a full scholarship but Nanu is perfectly happy right where he is. Not willing to take no for an answer, Coach resolves to get Nanu out of Africa one way or another.

After he learns that tribal custom dictates a man who saves another man’s life becomes beholden to that person, Coach comes up with a scheme to get Nanu to “save” his life. Nothing works and, on one of these attempts, Nanu takes Archer to see the local witch doctor, his godfather Gazenga (Roscoe Lee Browne, a distinguished character actor known for dozens of film and television appearances but will forever be best known to me as the narrator of the album The Story Of Star Wars, a record I played into the ground in the days before VHS). Gazenga sees right through the coach’s ruse but allows Nanu to believe he must go with him anyway. Gazenga studied abroad himself and thinks it’s time for his godson to broaden his horizons.

Back home, Archer and Milo first have to figure out how to move Nanu and his pet tiger, Harri, into their no-pets-allowed boarding house under the nose of their landlady, Mrs. Peterson (TV legend Nancy Walker, who surprisingly did not appear in any Disney features after this one). Fortunately, Mrs. Peterson’s eyesight is so bad that simply dressing Harri in a trenchcoat and a hat is enough to persuade her that he’s just another student.

Next, Archer sets Nanu up with a tutor, comely coed Jane (see what they did there?). Model Dayle Haddon makes her film debut as Jane. When The World’s Greatest Athlete was in theatres, Haddon was also on newsstands on the cover of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Later that same year, she posed nude for Playboy, all of which may have something to do with why Haddon didn’t make any more movies at Disney. She hasn’t acted recently, today focusing on philanthropic causes like UNICEF and her own organization, WomenOne. She seems pretty awesome.

Nanu’s burgeoning relationship with Jane catches the jealous eye of the dean’s weaselly son, Leopold (Danny Goldman, whom you may recognize as the weaselly medical student who needles Gene Wilder about his grandfather’s experiments in Young Frankenstein and later went on to become the voice of Brainy Smurf). Leopold vows to get rid of his rival and arranges for Dr. Gazenga to deliver a guest lecture at the college.

Gazenga arrives, acting more like he’s workshopping material for a gig in the Catskills than a visiting scholar. (A typical exchange goes something like this: “We don’t have as many doctors in Africa as we would like but we are currently building new facilities to attract more.” “Oh, more hospitals?” “No, more golf courses.” Gazenga, ladies and germs! He’ll be here all week!) Leopold corners the witch doctor and expresses his concern that Archer and his publicity machine are having a bad influence on poor Nanu.

After temporarily shrinking Milo down to three inches in a hotel bar for reasons so contrived I can barely remember why it happened, Gazenga finally tracks down Nanu and exposes Archer’s lie. Nanu is so disillusioned that he’s ready to walk away from the NCAA Track & Field Championship, where he’s poised to make history competing in every event. But after Archer gives him a pep talk comparing him to Jim Thorpe (someone Nanu definitely has never heard of), Nanu agrees to give it the old college try.

Nanu immediately wins his first few events, with Jane and Harri (in his person disguise) cheering him on from the stands (and Disney regular Vito Scotti throwing popcorn all over the place behind them). But Leopold convinces Gazenga that Nanu must lose if he ever wants him to set foot in Africa again. So Gazenga uses his occult powers to throw some bad juju at Nanu, who begins losing spectacularly.

Archer and Milo realize who must be behind all this and begin searching the grandstand for Gazenga. They’re unable to track him down and things look grim until Milo remembers he’s carrying a voodoo doll Nanu made earlier. Sticking a feather in it to turn it into a mini-Gazenga, they turn the tables on the witch doctor. Free of the curse, Nanu wins the final race, then keeps going to re-do all the other events one right after the other. Nobody is more impressed than the announcers in the booth, Howard Cosell (giving one of the funniest performances in the film as himself) and Buzzer Kozak (played by Joe Kapp, who was a real-life pro football player but evidently not famous enough to play himself).

Nanu and, by association, Coach Archer appear to be set for life. But Nanu doesn’t get what the big deal is. He’s had a taste of fame and found the whole thing hollow and meaningless. He gives Archer a call, letting him know he’s decided to return home to Africa. Archer and Milo race to the airport but Nanu’s mind is made up. He, Jane and Harri leave Merrivale for good, while Archer does what he always does in times of stress: grab Milo and board the first plane that’ll take him the farthest possible distance. This time, they end up in China where Archer spots another young man outrunning another wild animal. Here we go again!

On the one hand, I have to admit that I’m relieved that the fact that The World’s Greatest Athlete blithely ignores the racial dynamics of its story isn’t a bigger issue than it is. There’s a time and a place for everything and I recognize that a G-rated Disney comedy probably isn’t the venue for a nuanced look at the history of slavery or the exploitation of college athletes. There is an interesting and funny movie to be made about a Black man who exploits a promising white athlete he discovered in Africa. This is not that movie and that’s OK.

However, the casting of John Amos or Godfrey Cambridge or any African-American actor in the role of Coach Archer does feel like an attempt to kill any conversation about race rather than start one. It’s easy to imagine how badly a movie about a white coach recruiting a Black player from Africa would go. Actually, you don’t even have to imagine it. Just watch the 1994 Kevin Bacon flop The Air Up There from Disney subsidiary Hollywood Pictures (or, better yet, don’t). The World’s Greatest Athlete presumes that making the coach a Black guy makes everything OK. The movie is so naïve about these issues, it’s almost cute.

As I said at the outset, the bigger issue here is the lack of laughs. If one of the funniest performances in a comedy comes from Howard Cosell, you may have a bit of a problem. Incidentally, Cosell is just one of several real-life sportscasters who appear, including Frank Gifford, Jim McKay, Bud Palmer and Olympian Bill Toomey. The announcers all work for UBC, the chimp-run network from The Barefoot Executive. If this movie had taken place at Medfield College, it would have blown the whole shared Disneyverse wide open.

Considering this is a movie about sports, there’s a surprising lack of actual sportsmanship on display. Scheerer relies heavily on montage, which is standard operating procedure for most sports movies. But they’re all very quick and don’t do a great job selling Nanu as the world’s greatest athlete. It’s even worse during the championship sequence when Nanu starts losing. Scheerer obscures everything with optical effects showing the action in the stands, making it difficult to even figure out what’s happening on the field. Robert Stevenson did a much better job staging his slapstick track meet in Blackbeard’s Ghost.

At least Tim Conway scores some laughs with his deadpan physical comedy. But the elaborate setpiece where Milo is shrunk down is strangely not Conway’s funniest scene. The special effects and oversized props are impressive but they literally overshadow Conway’s performance. He’s funnier in quieter scenes, like when he’s slowly submerged in quicksand or flown around the background of a scene thanks to Nanu’s voodoo doll.

Most critics did not have a good time with The World’s Greatest Athlete but audiences sure seemed to. It went on to become one of the most popular movies of 1973 and the Disney studio’s second highest-grossing film of the year. (We’ll get to their biggest hit of ’73 in a few weeks, which means we’ve got a couple of potential duds to get through first, so hang in there.) In 1974, it was re-released as a double feature with last week’s movie, Snowball Express. Somewhat surprisingly, Disney has never attempted to remake it, even during that window in the 90s when they seemed obsessed with redoing their entire live action catalog for TV. Probably just as well. I do think the right filmmaker could make something smart and funny from this material but I have no faith that Disney would allow it to happen.

Most of the folks involved with The World’s Greatest Athlete were one and done with Disney after this. Even longtime stalwarts like producer Bill Walsh were getting close to the end of their Disney careers. The one exception, of course, was Tim Conway. After several years of flops, Conway had finally landed a hit. In 1975, he cemented his star status when he officially joined the cast of The Carol Burnett Show, a series he’d been a popular guest star on since 1967. That same year, he returned to the Disney lot. We’ll see him again soon.

VERDICT: Three or four laughs do not a Disney Plus make. It’s a Disney Minus but at least not for the reasons I feared it would be.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Run, Cougar, Run

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Run, Cougar, Run

Because Disney is a for-profit business that enjoys making money, the studio has a better track record than most when it comes to the availability of their library. Between Disney+, digital rentals and purchases, and physical media formats from video cassette to 4K Ultra HD, you can track down the vast majority of titles from Disney’s fabled vault. (They also rival George Lucas when it comes to altering the past with post-post-production tweaks and edits but that’s another issue.) When a Disney movie is simply unavailable, such as (ahem) The Southern Movie, that’s usually a deliberate decision and not an oversight. So when I run across a movie like Run, Cougar, Run that does not appear to have released on any home entertainment format, my first thought is, “Hoo-boy, what’s wrong with this one?”

Run, Cougar, Run is another mix of True-Life Adventure-style nature footage with actors in a fictional narrative. James Algar, who had directed most of the True-Life Adventures and had worked on other animal movies like The Legend Of Lobo and The Incredible Journey, produced Run, Cougar, Run. Algar had joined the studio as an animator on Snow White all the way back in 1934. This would be one of his last feature credits before retirement, although he did work on a few more TV productions.

Director Jerome Courtland was a former actor who appeared in Disney’s 1958 western Tonka. He went on to direct a couple of Wonderful World Of Disney TV-movies like Diamonds On Wheels and Hog Wild (which is apparently an inspirational tearjerker about a pig farmer who’s crippled by an angry hog and not a wacky comedy). Courtland will be back in this column as a producer.

Louis Pelletier based his screenplay on the book The Mountain Lion by Robert William Murphy. This would be Pelletier’s last Disney credit in a career that stretched from 1962’s Big Red to Smith! in 1969. His next and final writing credit was on a 1978 episode of The Love Boat. Pelletier passed away in 2000 at the age of 93.

The star of the show is Seeta, a female mountain lion supervised by Lloyd Beebe, the longtime Disney hand who’d also trained Charlie, The Lonesome Cougar. But the human actors are more recognizable here than they were in movies like Nikki, Wild Dog Of The North. Stuart Whitman had been nominated for an Oscar about a decade earlier for his work in The Mark. Since then, he’d appeared in some good films like The Longest Day and Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. But by 1972, his career had taken a hard turn into television and exploitation movies like Night Of The Lepus. His only other Disney credit was opposite Darren McGavin in the Civil War TV-movie The High Flying Spy. Whitman retired around the turn of the 21st century having amassed a fortune thanks to smart real estate investments. He passed away from cancer at the age of 92 in 2020.

Alfonso Arau from Scandalous John costars as Etio, the Mexican sheepherder. This would be Arau’s last Disney film for quite some time. He went on to appear in movies like Romancing The Stone and Three Amigos! He also established himself as a director, helming such films as Like Water For Chocolate and A Walk In The Clouds. In 2017, he finally returned to the Disney fold as the voice of Papa Julio in Pixar’s Coco.

Like so many other Disney nature pictures, Run, Cougar, Run relies on a folksy narrator to propel the plot whenever the humans aren’t around. This time, it’s Ian Tyson, the Canadian folksinger and songwriter. Tyson was half of the folk/country duo Ian & Sylvia, alongside his wife at the time. Ian & Sylvia perform the opening song, “Let Her Alone”, written by “Bare Necessities” songwriter Terry Gilkyson. The song sums up the movie’s pro-conservation theme but unless early 1970s folk music is your jam, it probably won’t send you on the hunt for old Ian & Sylvia records.

Ian introduces us to Seeta, the mother of three young kittens, and her mate who I guess we’ll call Tom. Seeta and her family live in the American Southwest (the movie was filmed mostly in Arches National Park in Utah). She watches over the adorable young’uns while Tom roams the countryside hunting for food. Every so often, she visits Etio, a sheepherder who works for rancher Joe Bickley (Douglas Fowley, last seen in this column all the way back in Miracle Of The White Stallions). Etio appears to have a Snow White-like effect on the local animals. When he’s not tending his sheep, he’s strumming his guitar and singing to his furry and feathered friends.

Etio’s tranquil routine is disturbed by the arrival of Hugh McRae (Whitman), a hunting guide who leads tourist parties out to shoot big game. McRae has a couple of businessmen from Denver (played by Frank Aletter and Lonny Chapman) coming in who want to bag a mountain lion. Etio reluctantly tells McRae that there are a few cougars in the area but since they’re a gentle family raising kittens, it would be best to leave them alone. McRae scoffs at this. He’s firmly of the belief that the only good lion is a dead one.

McRae’s plan isn’t very humane or even sporting. He plans to capture one of the cougars, keep it penned up at their base camp overnight, then give it a little bit of a head start and let the two city slickers pretend like they’re hunting. Maybe if there’s still time after they can shoot some fish in a barrel while they’re at it.

Unfortunately, McRae’s first attempt goes very badly. He manages to shoot Tom with a tranquilizer dart but the cougar is still able to escape. Pursued by dogs, Tom tries to leap a gorge. Groggy from the tranquilizer, Tom misjudges the distance and falls to his death. This makes Etio more determined than ever to stop the hunt. Now if McRae kills Seeta, the three kittens will be left to fend for themselves. Killing Seeta will essentially kill them all.

Inevitably, McRae does capture Seeta and cages her up at Joe Bickley’s place. The night before the big hunt, Etio serenades her with his trademark animal-soothing melodies. Seeing this, one of the business jerks begins to have second thoughts about this whole deal. Not his buddy, though. He seems ready to strap the cage to the back of his truck and drive straight to the nearest taxidermist.

The next morning, Etio decides to take matters into his own hands. He approaches the cage unarmed and sets Seeta free, despite McRae’s warnings that the cat is likely to turn on him. Instead, Seeta allows Etio to escort her to the edge of Joe’s property and heads back to find her children. Furious, the bloodthirsty tourist forgets all about giving Seeta a head start and opens fire. His companion, on the other hand, has had a change of heart. He opts to hang out at the ranch while his friend chases after Seeta. McRae heads out too, although mostly just to make sure the tourist doesn’t shoot his own foot off.

Seeta leads McRae and his dogs on a spirited chase, eventually ending up at the same gorge that cost Tom his life. The cougar makes one last, all-or-nothing leap and a reprise of “Let Her Alone” signals that everything’s going to be OK. Well, at least until McRae leads another crew of rich assholes after her.

For those of you filling out your Forbidden Disney Bingo Card, Run, Cougar, Run has an unsavory premise (big game trophy hunting), wildlife footage (potential animal cruelty) and Alfonso Arau as a Mexican sheepherder who spends most of his time playing the guitar and napping (potential racial stereotyping). On paper, any one of those could be the reason why Disney isn’t doing anything with this movie. But none of those elements are extreme or troublesome enough to warrant locking it in the vault permanently.

Let’s start with the last of those potential objections. Arau is one of those actors who perpetually seems on the edge of caricature even on his best day. His exaggerated accent and broad, ingratiating smile are always just on the cusp of turning him into a cartoon. That said, Arau had a much cringier role in Scandalous John and that movie isn’t too difficult to find. Etio’s a genuinely sweet character and a nice showcase for Arau’s talents. I can honestly say I’ve never seen someone play a guitar with an owl perched on the headstock before.

Most of the animal action, produced as usual by Ron Brown’s Cangary Limited, is standard Disney fare. The cougar kittens get up to cute kitten shenanigans, Tom wrestles a bear…you know the drill. Tom does kill an elk, which is mostly kept off-camera, and Seeta does mourn over her mate’s dead body but there’s nothing in here that you can’t find in virtually every other Disney nature movie.

As for the premise itself, hunters have never enjoyed a particularly positive reputation in Disney films. But these guys are right up there with the unseen hunter who killed Bambi’s mom on the scale of unlikable jerks. The movie’s anti-sport hunting message is a good one but maybe Disney figured parents would rather not have to explain to little Susie and little Johnny why somebody would design a whole vacation around shooting a cat in the face.

At the end of the day, the most likely reason Run, Cougar, Run has been forgotten is the simplest one: it’s pretty boring. Disney made a LOT of movies like this over the years and it doesn’t take much for a successful formula to turn into a deeply trodden rut. There’s nothing here we haven’t seen many, many times before at this point. The animals are cool and the scenery is lovely, even if the Spanish subtitled transfer somebody uploaded to YouTube fails to capture it. The human actors all do their work admirably (the movie also gives a small role to western character actor Harry Carey Jr., not seen around these parts since The Great Locomotive Chase). But it’s a meal we’ve been served once too often and it’s grown stale.

Disney recognized the diminishing returns of their True-Life Fantasies. Run, Cougar, Run opened on October 18, 1972. It would be one of the last films of its type. Not that Disney was done with animals, of course. But from now on, they’d take more of a back seat to their human costars. The days of building an entire movie around animals just being animals were coming to an end.   

VERDICT: Disney Minus.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Boatniks

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The Boatniks

If you ask me (and since you’re reading this, you kind of did), Ron Miller doesn’t get enough credit for his contributions to Disney history. He was related to Walt by marriage, having married Walt’s daughter Diane Disney in 1954. A former pro football player for the Los Angeles Rams, Walt offered him a job at the studio because he didn’t want the father of his grandkids getting hurt on the field. Miller could have gone into acting but Walt wanted him to learn the production side of the business. He worked his way up from second assistant to first assistant director to associate producer.

In 1980, he became president of Walt Disney Productions and CEO three years later. During his tenure at the top, Miller dragged the studio kicking and screaming into the late twentieth century. He shepherded such innovative and non-Disney-like films as TRON and The Black Hole through production. In 1984, he established Touchstone Pictures to produce the kind of adult-oriented films the studio never would have touched before. Not all of his decisions paid off right away and shareholders voted to replace him later in ’84. But at least he was willing to try something new, just like his father-in-law before him.

You can see Miller trying to gently nudge the company toward more grownup fare even in his early films as a producer. Both The Boatniks and his previous feature, Never A Dull Moment, were comedic crime movies with nary a cute animal or precocious child in sight. Sure, neither one was all that successful, either artistically or financially. But it’s still kind of a weird kick to see a G-rated Disney take on a traditionally PG-or-higher genre.

The Boatniks was written by Arthur Julian from a story by Marty Roth. Both Julian and Roth spent the vast majority of their careers in television. Roth had written several McHale’s Navy episodes among many other shows and would go on to co-create the cult Saturday morning sci-fi show Ark II. Julian was a writer, producer and sometime actor who’d worked on F Troop and Hogan’s Heroes, again among many others. He’d later become head writer on The Carol Burnett Show and would write for such sitcoms as Maude, Amen and Gimme A Break!

The prolific Norman Tokar, who has been in this column a bunch of times, most recently on the boy-and-his-racoon picture Rascal, is once again in the director’s chair. For those of you keeping score at home, this is the tenth of Tokar’s fifteen Disney pictures. Hopefully he got a free sandwich at the Disney commissary for filling out his punch-card. Tokar started his Disney career with animal adventures like Big Red and Savage Sam. But Miller must have noticed that he’d shown a knack for wacky comedies in movies like The Ugly Dachshund. From here on out, Tokar would specialize in that genre.

Today, star Robert Morse is probably best known as Bert Cooper on Mad Men. But in 1970, he was famous as the Tony Award winning star of the Broadway musical How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. He reprised that role in the 1967 movie version, starring alongside Michele Lee from The Love Bug. He’d also starred in one of my favorite movies, the 1965 black comedy The Loved One. The Boatniks would be his last leading role in a movie but he would continue to be a major stage star and make TV appearances throughout the 70s and 80s.

Morse’s leading lady, Stefanie Powers, had been on screen since the early 60s. In 1966, she starred in the short-lived spy spin-off The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. The show didn’t last but it was enough to put her on the map and today it has a cult following. We’ll be seeing Powers in this column again.

Miller surrounded his stars with an impressive array of comedic talent, including the great Phil Silvers. Silvers became a major star in the 1950s as Sgt. Bilko on the self-titled The Phil Silvers Show. He’d also appeared in such comedy classics as It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. The Boatniks was Silvers’ first Disney movie but it won’t be his last.

Also appearing in the film were such familiar faces as Norman Fell, Wally Cox (seen previously in The One And Only, Genuine, Original Family Band), and in cameos, Al “Grandpa Munster” Lewis and Silvers’ old costar Joe E. Ross (also seen in The Love Bug) as “Nutty Sailor”. Miller even got Don Ameche, who hadn’t done much film work since the 1940s ended, to appear as the eternally frustrated Commander Taylor. By Disney standards, this was a fairly star-studded cast.

UK Quad poster for The Boatniks

The movie is set in and around Newport Beach’s Balboa Peninsula and, except for some interiors, was shot there, as well. That makes for a nice change from Disney’s usual practice of filming as much as possible within walking distance of the studio. Granted, you can drive from Burbank to Balboa in less than two hours on a good day but the change in scenery helps open things up.

Morse stars as Ensign Tom Garland, an accident-prone sailor taking over command of the Balboa Coast Guard from Lt. Jordan (Joey Forman, another Borscht Belt comic). Jordan is burnt out from dealing with the drunks and amateur sailors who descend on Balboa every weekend. Commander Taylor served with Garland’s war hero father during WW2, so at first he’s thrilled to welcome the young man. But when Garland falls off the boat mere minutes after his arrival, Taylor begins to suspect that the apple has fallen quite a ways from the tree.

Garland also meets cute with Kate Fairchild (Powers), a sailing instructor and owner of a boat rental company, by accidentally dousing her with a can of yellow paint. She gets her revenge later on when Garland’s boat runs aground during a routine rescue operation. Kate tows the stranded Coast Guardsmen back to the pier, humiliating Garland in front of the entire marina and Commander Taylor. But they fall in love later that night when they’re forced to share a table at a crowded restaurant. Hey, these things happen, right?

Amidst all this, the police are searching for three jewel thieves (Silvers, Fell and Mickey Shaughnessy, returning from Never A Dull Moment). With the roads blocked, they’re unable to drive to Mexico. So they buy a picnic basket, hide the jewels in the bread, pickles, chicken and what-not, and charter a boat from Kate with the intention of sailing south of the border. Of course, none of them has ever sailed before, so they have a hard time just getting out of the harbor.

It isn’t long before the thieves get lost in the fog and Garland accidentally sinks their ship. Garland continues to encounter them as they attempt to retrieve the picnic basket from the bottom of the ocean, growing increasingly suspicious as their schemes become more outlandish. When all else fails, the thieves contact an acquaintance in Japan to bring in a pearl diver (played by the beautiful Midori). Once she retrieves the basket, she drops the can’t-understand-English act and helps herself to a portion of the loot.

The bad guys are now free to hightail it down to Mexico and they charter a seaplane (piloted by Vito Scotti in the first of his all-purpose ethnic roles for Disney) to pick them up. But by now, Garland and Kate are convinced that these are the jewel thieves everyone’s been looking for. Their attempt to confront them in front of Commander Taylor goes badly when their opened picnic basket appears to spill out nothing more than a well-stocked (and surprisingly well-preserved, considering it spent several days underwater) lunch.

Taylor is ready to relieve Garland of his command when a pelican grabs a stray pickle and Kate discovers some of the jewels hidden inside. Garland pursues them across the crowded harbor. After a series of mishaps, the thieves end up inside a yellow submarine. The chase continues out to the seaplane. The thieves make it to the plane but it’s too heavy to take off, so they start frantically dumping whatever excess weight they can find. This ends up including the picnic basket. The thieves escape empty-handed, Garland is declared a hero and Kate gets a stolen engagement ring when she can’t pry it off her finger.

Alternate theatrical poster for The Boatniks

The plot of The Boatniks is inconsequential even by the standards of a live-action Disney comedy and that’s really saying something. It’s really just a framework upon which to hang gags about giant fish, sharks, pickles, poor seamanship and, most surprisingly, sex and booze. In Walt’s day, Annette Funicello wasn’t even allowed to wear a two-piece bathing suit. Here, Wally Cox plays an eccentric millionaire named Jason whose yacht hosts a neverending party attended by dozens of bikini-clad babes. The times, they were a’changin’.

As for the drinking, Disney movies have never been havens of teetotaling. The pleasures of a good stiff drink have played a part in everything from The Love Bug to Rascal. Even Dumbo famously gets liquored up. But there’s a lot more of it on display in The Boatniks. One of the very first gags has Lt. Jordan responding to a distress call by asking if they have any beer on board. The lost ship replies, “Oh yeah, we’re loaded!” Turns out the boat got lost because they set a beer can next to their magnetic compass and everybody was too drunk to figure that out.

The Boatniks is most enjoyable when it diverts from Garland’s investigation to focus on these random side characters. In addition to Cox and Joe E. Ross, whose Nutty Sailor keeps crashing into things, there’s Gil Lamb (who has appeared in small parts in everything from The Ugly Dachshund to The Love Bug) as Mr. Mitchell. He’s attempting to sail solo around the world, evidently to get away from his wife and gaggle of kids. He doesn’t get far before the Nutty Sailor wrecks his boat. Pretty nutty!

Unfortunately, The Boatniks never quite finds its sea legs. For one thing, it could use more of the live-action-cartoon energy that Robert Stevenson brought to The Love Bug. Whether it’s due to budget constraints or inexperience, Tokar shies away from showing much action. We repeatedly see boats disappearing out of frame or behind an obstacle, followed by the sounds of a crash. Sometimes we don’t even get to see the aftermath of these mishaps. Maybe it’s just me but I’ve always found visual gags are a lot funnier when you actually get to see something.

The other big problem is Robert Morse, who can be terrifically entertaining but never cuts loose here. Morse was a good dancer, so you’d think physical comedy should be right in his wheelhouse. But he seems reluctant to appear too foolish, which is a huge handicap if you’re playing a clumsy sailor. Jerry Lewis would have made a nine-course meal out of this role but if you didn’t want to go quite that big, Dick Van Dyke or even Dean Jones would have been more fun.

The Boatniks was Disney’s big summer release for 1970, coming out on July 1. It did pretty well, earning about $5 million that year, although critics weren’t terribly impressed. A few years later, the studio re-released it on a double bill with Song Of The South. Considering all the sexist gags and Japanese and Mexican stereotypes in this picture, that would be a wildly uncomfortable and inappropriate afternoon at the movies these days.

It would be almost a decade before another Ron Miller production would receive Disney’s first PG rating. Until then, the studio kept on making movies like this one. Too wholesome for most adults and older kids but not exactly wholesome enough for the younger crowd. It’s most likely these “problematic” elements that have kept The Boatniks off Disney+, at least for the time being. And while the movie could be a lot worse, it’s far from being a buried treasure in the Disney catalog.

VERDICT: I got a few laughs but overall it’s a Disney Meh.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: King Of The Grizzlies

~ electrictheatre

Hey there, Mouseketeers! Before we get to this week’s movie, I’d like to get some feedback from you. For a while now, I’ve been toying with the idea of adding a paid tier to the regular Disney Plus-Or-Minus columns (sort of a Disney Plus-Or-Minus+ if you will). This would cover things that fall outside the Disney Plus-Or-Minus umbrella: TV productions, shorts, even Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures eventually.

My first question, obviously, is would this be interesting enough for you to spend a couple bucks a month on it? Secondly, how much sounds like a reasonable amount to charge? Finally, what platform would be best for everyone? Substack? Patreon? Something else I haven’t thought of yet?

Let me know your thoughts either in the comments down below, on the Jahnke’s Electric Theatre Facebook page, on Twitter (@DrAdamJahnke) or however else you might think a message could reach me. Thanks in advance for your thoughts and your continued support of this increasingly ambitious project! And now, we return to our regularly scheduled program.

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's King Of The Grizzlies

By 1970, it had been a decade since Disney pulled the plug on the long-running True-Life Adventures series. In the years since, writer/narrator Winston Hibler had become a producer and most of the movies he’d worked on involved animals. Movies like Nikki, Wild Dog Of The North and Charlie, The Lonesome Cougar used True-Life Adventures techniques in a fictional setting. King Of The Grizzlies pushed that style even farther. It’s the most documentary-like of Disney’s fictional animal features since Perri.

The movie was based on the book The Biography Of A Grizzly by Boy Scouts co-founder Ernest Thompson Seton. Eight years earlier, James Algar, another True-Life Adventures vet, adapted another Seton book as The Legend Of Lobo. The screenplay was by Jack Speirs (writer of Charlie, The Lonesome Cougar), TV writer Rod Peterson, and Norman Wright, who’d been working for Disney since the Fantasia days.

This would be Canadian filmmaker Ron Kelly’s one and only Disney film as a director. He’d continue to focus on local interest stories in his home country into the 1980s. Once again, Hibler utilized Lloyd Beebe and Cangary Limited to produce the nature footage. Director of photography Reginald Morris had a long history of shooting documentary shorts. He’d later become Bob Clark’s go-to cinematographer, shooting films like Black Christmas, Porky’s and A Christmas Story.

The star of the film is Big Ted, a 1,300-pound grizzly bear who worked for marshmallows, but the movie does include a handful of human actors who were presumably paid actual money. John Yesno plays Moki, a Cree who feels a spiritual connection to the bear he names Wahb. Yesno didn’t appear in a lot of movies but he did have a distinguished career as a broadcaster and activist in Canada.

Chris Wiggins costars as The Colonel, Moki’s former commanding officer and owner of the ranch Moki works at as foreman. Wiggins did a lot of voice work over the years, although none of it was for Disney. He voiced a number of different characters on Marvel’s animated shows of the 1960s, including Thor, Hawkeye and, appropriately enough in this context, Kraven the Hunter. Horror fans may recognize him as occult expert Jack Marshak from Friday The 13th: The Series. Wiggins and Yesno would also both appear in the 1980 Canadian TV-movie The Courage Of Kavik The Wolf Dog (John Candy, who will eventually appear in this column, also turned up in that one).

But Yesno, Wiggins and the other two-legged performers are definitely supporting players in this drama. We first meet the cub who would be king when he’s just a few months old, scampering around the mountains with his sister and Mama Bear. After more than 10 minutes of cute-baby-bears-being-cute footage, we encounter Moki. Moki was raised to respect the bear and even has a bear paw tattooed on his hand. So he’s not exactly a great first line of defense when the bear family meets up with the Colonel’s cattle.

Young Wahb starts the trouble when he finds a wayward calf (Hibler’s folksy narration assures us that Wahb’s intentions are strictly friendly). The resulting commotion attracts the attention of the Colonel, who shoots and kills Wahb’s mother and sister. Wahb himself manages to get away after tumbling off a cliff into the river below. In a switch from Disney’s usual anthropomorphic manipulation, the death of Wahb’s family isn’t played for pathos. Hibler lets us know that animals have blessedly short memories for such trauma and Wahb is back on his feet in no time.

A little later, Moki happens across the little bear cub, scared out of his wits up a tree. He rescues Wahb, straps him on to his horse, and rides off. But unlike humans in other Disney nature dramas, he doesn’t bring him home to raise him like a pet. Instead, he takes Wahb up the mountain to the site of his own coming-of-age ritual, far from the ranch. He lets the cub go, wishes him luck and heads for home, figuring they’ll probably never see each other again.

Wahb spends the rest of the year looking for food and meeting his new neighbors. An encounter with a black bear at a honey tree goes from bad to worse when an adult male grizzly decides to show everyone who’s boss. Poor little Wahb barely hangs on while the grizzly tries knocking over the tree he’s climbed. It’s a hard-knock life for Wahb. Winter arrives and Wahb returns to his birth den for hibernation, fighting off a couple of wolverines for squatter’s rights.

The story picks up four years later with Wahb finding a wolfpack circling a slab of meat hanging above a bunch of traps. Wahb springs the traps and heads back into the woods, seemingly none the worse for wear. But those traps were laid by Moki, who recognizes Wahb’s distinctive four-toed track. He finally tells the Colonel about rescuing the cub years earlier. Needless to say, this news doesn’t go over well.

Later on, one of the Colonel’s laziest ranch hands, Shorty (Hugh Webster, who appears in another movie this column will get to eventually), decides to catch forty winks while laying some fence posts. Out for some fun, Wahb knocks over the posts and wakes up Shorty. He manages to escape but the Colonel is now convinced that his ranch is on the verge of turning into a freakin’ country bear jamberoo. He demands Moki set bear traps around the property and to hell with his people’s sacred traditions.

Years later (this movie is big on time jumps), Moki comes face-to-face with Wahb, now a massive seven feet tall. Rather than firing his gun, Moki speaks to him in the language of the Cree. The words soothe Wahb and he leaves Moki alone, satisfied that the two of them are kindred spirits.

Unfortunately, he heads straight to the Colonel’s camp where he once again wakes up Shorty (so lazy), destroys the chuckwagon and chases Slim the cook (Jack Van Evera) up a tree. The Colonel decides that eight years of intermittent bear sightings is enough and heads out to take care of Wahb once and for all.

The Colonel stumbles around the woods for a while, finally catching up with Wahb just as he’s winning a rematch with his old rival grizzly from the honey tree. The newly crowned king of the grizzlies attacks, sending the Colonel tumbling into a ravine. Moki turns up and again speaks to Wahb in Cree, calming him down and sending him on his way. Moki helps the Colonel and they watch the bear marking his territory from a safe distance. The Colonel still isn’t convinced that Wahb won’t be back and raises his rifle to shoot but Moki has already removed the bullets. Finally persuaded that this bear really, truly means a lot to his friend, the Colonel agrees to let Wahb go and live his life in peace.

Theatrical release poster for King Of The Grizzlies

King Of The Grizzlies isn’t the best Disney nature adventure but it’s far from the worst, either. On the plus side, the movie is beautifully shot. Practically every frame showcases a stunning Canadian landscape suitable for framing in your finest ranger stations and fire lookout towers. The animals are pretty great, too. Some of these movies can get a little sleepy and pastoral but this one at least keeps things moving.

The movie is on shakier ground whenever it goes back to its human costars. The relationship between Moki and the Colonel is probably pretty interesting but nobody seems all that interested in exploring it. Rather than trusting the actors to do their jobs, Hibler’s pushy narrator tells us whatever details he decides are relevant. It’s like no one had the heart to tell him that his services would be required less in a movie about people.

The film also appears to have been shot MOS (that’s without synchronized sound, for those of you who didn’t go to film school). What little dialogue there is was added in post-production, which gives those scenes the feel of a late-period Godzilla sequel. You never really feel any connection between Moki and Wahb. You just have to take Hibler’s word for it that it exists. It feels like there’s an interesting movie to be made from this material. But Hibler and his team of writers never quite find it.

King Of The Grizzlies was Disney’s first release of the 1970s, hitting theatres on February 11, 1970. It did…well, I don’t really know how it did at the box office, to be honest with you. I can’t find any receipts listed on the usual box office tabulating sites. But considering that it isn’t currently available on Disney+ or Blu-ray and I’ve never met any ravenous King Of The Grizzlies superfans, I doubt it packed ‘em in.

By now, the True-Life Fantasy format had already run its course but Disney wasn’t quite ready to give up on the hybrid subgenre. The 1970s were very much the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” decade at the studio, returning time and again to previously successful formulas that Walt liked with increasingly diminishing returns. Both Winston Hibler and screenwriter Jack Speirs will be back in this column and they’ll be bringing some more animals along with them. Prepare accordingly.

VERDICT: Despite some redeeming features, this teeters into Disney Minus territory.

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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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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit

By 1968, Dean Jones was firmly established as Walt Disney’s go-to leading man. At the same time, Kurt Russell was climbing his way up to become the studio’s favorite juvenile lead. It was inevitable that their paths would cross eventually. It’s perhaps a little surprising that it only happened once, in the now mostly forgotten comedy The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit.

Producer Winston Hibler and director Norman Tokar took the reins on this one (pun very much intended, thank you very much), reuniting the team from Russell’s Disney debut, Follow Me, Boys! Screenwriter Louis Pelletier, another Follow Me, Boys! alum, based his script on the 1965 novel The Year Of The Horse by Eric Hatch. Hatch himself had some early Hollywood success. He was nominated for an Oscar for the classic My Man Godfrey, also based on one of his books.

Jones stars as Fred Bolton, an overworked creative director at a big Madison Avenue advertising agency. Bolton’s team has prepared a huge presentation for the firm’s biggest client, a pain reliever called Aspercel. But Aspercel’s president, Mr. Dugan (Fred Clark), is unimpressed by the work, even the mechanical pill-swallowing man whipped up by Charlie Blake (Dick Van Dyke Show costar Morey Amsterdam in what is surprisingly his only Disney appearance). Dugan wants a fresh, innovative, sophisticated campaign that appeals to the jet set and he gives Fred just 24 hours to come up with one.

In addition to his trouble at work, Fred is also a single parent trying to raise his daughter, Helen (Ellen Janov), with help from his Aunt Martha (Lurene Tuttle). Helen has been taking horseback riding lessons from S.J. “Suzie” Clemens (Diane Baker) and shows real promise but worries that she won’t reach her full potential unless she has a horse of her own. Fred can barely afford to pay for her lessons, much less buy a horse. But once he hears about the high-class world of competitive equestrianism, he has a brainstorm. Get the client to buy a horse under his daughter’s name, name it Aspercel and bask in all the free publicity once Helen and her horse start collecting medals.

It takes awhile for Helen and Aspy to start winning and for Fred’s subliminal advertising gimmick to start bearing fruit. A little too long for Dugan’s taste, who soon gets frustrated by the miniscule notices the junior equestrian trials merit in the paper. But Fred guarantees that Helen and Aspy will make it to the nationals in Washington, where the real publicity is. Dugan agrees to be patient a little longer but warns that Fred’s job is on the line if he fails to deliver. Helen overhears the whole conversation from inside Aspy’s trailer and finally understands why her dad was so insistent on her competing.

Later on, Fred returns home after a business trip to find the house deserted and Aspercel out of his stable. The horse runs off and Fred chases after it across country. Aspy allows himself to be caught after Fred collapses in exhaustion. Realizing they’ve run miles, Fred decides to try and ride the horse back home, easier said than done for a novice horseman. Meanwhile, Helen and Aunt Martha have returned home and reported the horse stolen to the police. When the cops roll up with the siren blaring, the spooked horse takes off like a shot, jumping fences and walls and eventually destroying a greenhouse after sending Fred through its front door.

Aspy returns home on his own and Fred ends up behind bars. He calls Charlie to come vouch for his identity to prove he didn’t steal his own horse. But Charlie’s only interested in milking the story for headlines, so he lets Fred cool his heels for a bit. Back at home, Helen is feeling the pressure of having to compete to save her father’s job. She’s also caught the eye of Ronnie Gardner (Kurt Russell), the brother of one of her fellow equestrians. When Ronnie shows up at the house to take her on a date, Helen confides that she doesn’t even like competing in horse shows any more and is only doing it because of her dad.

When Fred gets back, Ronnie confronts him, angry that he’d force Helen to do something against her will. Fred hadn’t realized she felt that way and agrees that her happiness is the most important thing, so he decides to take her off the competition circuit. But when Suzie hears about Fred’s wild ride and Aspy clearing a seven-foot-one wall, she has an idea. Instead of the junior leagues, she’ll ride Aspy herself at the International Horse Show in the open jumping division. The only trouble is that she’ll need to bring in a trainer to get her and Aspy in shape and the most qualified one she knows just happens to be her ex-fiancé, Archer Madison (Lloyd Bochner). And just when Fred was mustering up the nerve to tell Suzie that he’s falling for her.

Suzie qualifies for the show and the whole crew heads down to Washington. I’m assuming most of the footage used in the competition montage is from the actual event itself. Eventually, the playing field is leveled down to Suzie and her closest competition, the debonair Lieutenant Mario Lorendo (Federico Piñero). You’ll get no points for guessing which horse triumphs but Tokar manages to wring a surprising amount of suspense out of the final showdown. When the dust settles, Suzie assures Fred that there’s nothing between her and Archer and Helen immediately starts planning their wedding.

The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit is no classic but it’s more enjoyable than its somewhat strained Mad Men Meets National Velvet premise might suggest. The title, of course, is a play on the 1955 novel (and 1956 Gregory Peck movie) The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit about a discontented public relations man. I’m sure that reference meant a whole lot of nothing to kids in 1968 and it’ll mean even less to kids today.

The movie works best when Tokar and company keep things light. The opening scenes in the ad agency are fast-paced and funny. There’s a recurring bit where Dean Jones keeps accidentally snagging things on the saddle he’s toting through the office and it made me laugh every time. The advertising satire isn’t quite as sharp as the marketing gags in Son Of Flubber but it’s amusing enough. Fred’s horseback ride arrives about midway through the film and it injects some needed energy at a crucial moment. Jones also gets an opportunity to spotlight his talent for physical comedy when he tries to figure out how to mount a horse.

But there’s also an overall sense that the movie just wasn’t thought all the way through before they started to roll cameras. We get zero indication of why Fred’s a single dad. It’s clear that the father-daughter relationship is meant to be the heart of the movie but it isn’t really explored after Fred realizes he’s been pushing her too hard. It’s sweet that it’s resolved happily and quickly but there’s still almost half an hour of movie left. The tentative teenage romance between Helen and Ronnie never really goes anywhere. And Fred’s attraction to Suzie never feels like more than a narrative requirement. The chemistry between them is non-existent. Even something as innocuous as Fred’s horse allergy (a gag already lifted from That Darn Cat!) is forgotten about after a while.

The movie’s biggest flaw is that it’s just too long. You could easily lose about 20 minutes and still have a fun, entertaining picture that tells the exact same story. Whenever the pacing starts to sag, the movie’s shortcomings become more obvious. Still, the movie has just enough going for it to make it worth watching.

Apart from Dean Jones and Kurt Russell, most of the main roles were filled with actors with limited Disney experience. (A few vets turn up in smaller roles, including Alan Hewitt, last seen in The Monkey’s Uncle, and Norm Grabowski, who pops up as a truck driver.) Diane Baker made her screen debut as Anne Frank’s sister, Margot, in George Stevens’ The Diary Of Anne Frank. Since then, she’d appeared in such films as Marnie and Mirage. She’s really more of a dramatic actress and never seems fully comfortable with the featherweight Disney style. The movie might have worked better with Suzanne Pleshette in the role. Baker hasn’t made another Disney movie since and she seems to have slowed down in recent years but she kept extremely busy. In 1991, she appeared in The Silence Of The Lambs as the senator whose daughter is kidnapped by Buffalo Bill. Hannibal Lecter loved her suit.

Fred Clark is one of those actors who seem like they appeared in a ton of Disney movies but really didn’t. He appeared in supporting roles, often comedic, throughout the 1950s, including The Caddy and How To Marry A Millionaire. His cigar-chomping, slow-burn comedic style is ideally suited to Disney work but The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit would be his first and last Disney movie. He died a few weeks before the movie was even released at the age of 54.

This was also the first and last film for young Ellen Janov who played Helen. She was the daughter of Arthur Janov, a psychologist whose book The Primal Scream became a 1970s fad thanks to celebrity followers like John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Ellen, who was also a singer and cut a respectable cover of Cat Stevens’ “Portobello Road”, soon decided to leave show business and follow in her father’s footsteps as a practitioner of primal therapy. But her practice didn’t last long. On January 7, 1976, she died in a house fire at the tragically young age of 22.

Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Winnie The Pooh And The Blustery Day

When The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit was released on December 3, 1968, it brought an old friend along with it. Winnie The Pooh And The Blustery Day, Disney’s second Winnie The Pooh short, appeared as the co-feature. The short earned Walt Disney a posthumous Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, the last of his astonishing 22 Oscar wins. They say records are made to be broken but I don’t think anybody’s even close to knocking Walt off that particular perch.

Even with an assist from Pooh Bear, The Horse In The Gray Flannel Suit failed to impress critics or audiences. Today, the studio hasn’t exactly buried the movie but they aren’t going out of their way to make it accessible. It’s on DVD but it isn’t currently on Disney+ or even available to buy or rent digitally. Frankly, it deserves a little better. Sure, it’s low-key to a fault but it’s not without its charms. There are certainly a lot worse movies with the Disney name on them out there.

VERDICT: A minor Disney Plus but, just like a horse is a horse, a plus is a plus.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: Charlie, The Lonesome Cougar

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's Charlie, The Lonesome Cougar

As long as Walt Disney was alive, nature films had a place at his studio. The genre had evolved over the years, from short films to feature-length True-Life Adventures to fictional narratives with animal protagonists. They weren’t always blockbusters but Walt liked them and they were usually inexpensive enough to turn a reliable profit.

But by late 1967, Walt had been gone for almost a year and the nature pictures were on their way out. Winston Hibler, Disney’s long-time writer and narrator of the True-Life Adventures, kept the tradition alive. But most of the nature shows had migrated to television. These days, animals were more likely to costar with established stars like Brian Keith (in A Tiger Walks) or Dean Jones (in The Ugly Dachshund or Monkeys, Go Home!…or most of the movies Jones had appeared in so far, come to think of it). Animals hadn’t been the whole show since The Incredible Journey back in 1963.

This might help explain the somewhat unusual release of Charlie, The Lonesome Cougar. Honestly, I struggled with whether or not to even include Charlie in this column. The movie was released concurrently with The Jungle Book, playing in most markets as a double bill. Clocking in at 75 minutes, it’s too long to be considered a short but it’s certainly not a very long feature (The Jungle Book itself is only 78 minutes). It feels like a TV production. As a matter of fact, it somehow managed to get an Emmy nomination when it aired on The Wonderful World Of Disney a couple years later. But Disney itself includes it on their list of Disney Films and that makes it official enough for me.

Theatrical release poster for the double bill release of The Jungle Book and Charlie, The Lonesome Cougar

Most sources, including IMDb, Letterboxd and Wikipedia, credit Winston Hibler as the director of Charlie, The Lonesome Cougar. I’m not entirely sure how they came to that conclusion as the movie itself does not have a directing credit. Regardless, he definitely produced the film and cowrote it with Jack Speirs, a longtime staff writer who had been writing Walt’s Disneyland TV introductions since the ‘50s.

If anyone other than Hibler could make a claim to directing the picture, it’s field producer, cinematographer, and animal supervisor Lloyd Beebe. Beebe had been working with Disney since the ‘50s, training and housing animal actors from his ranch in Sequim, Washington. In 1972, Beebe received permission from the studio to open his facility, Disney’s Wild Animal Ranch, to the public. It’s still open to this day, now operating as the Olympic Game Farm. You might even be able to meet a descendent of Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar up there.

Beebe and his team, including collaborators Charles L. Draper, Ford Beebe and William Bacon III, are most responsible for what makes Charlie memorable. He has a knack for staging animal action, whether it’s cute and adorable or fraught with danger. This isn’t necessarily the most thrilling of the Disney nature movies but Charlie does have a very winning personality and that goes a long way.

Rex Allen, who had previously lent his familiar voice to The Incredible Journey, The Legend Of Lobo and several shorts, returns as narrator. Allen would continue to narrate educational films and TV productions for Disney but this will be his last appearance in this column. He kept on doing voice work, narrating the 1973 animated adaptation of Charlotte’s Web and countless commercials, for many years until his death in 1999.

We first meet Charlie at the height of his lonesomeness, a kitten without a mother to look after him. Yes, it’s another orphaned Disney animal but at least this time, we’re spared having to watch the traumatizing event. Charlie is soon discovered by Jess Bradley (Ron Brown), a forester employed by a logging company in the Pacific Northwest. Jess knows Charlie doesn’t stand a chance on his own, so he takes the young cat home with him.

Charlie grows up fast and most everyone at the logging camp seems to love having a pet cougar wandering around. His only enemy is Chainsaw, the excellently-named dog of camp cook Potlatch (Brian Russell, who would later write for such TV shows as The Life And Times Of Grizzly Adams and Greatest Heroes Of The Bible). Their feud ends up causing a commotion during the launch of the big river drive. Charlie ends up scaring the cook off the big floating kitchen, so Jess leaps on board to rescue the supplies. With the cook back on shore, the boss enlists Jess to take his place and Charlie becomes the team mascot.

Their time on the river comes to a bad end when Charlie accidentally sends the kitchen floating downstream while Jess is napping. The float is destroyed and Charlie is banned from the camp. Jess builds an enclosure for him but starts spending less time around the house after he meets a new girlfriend. Lonesome once again, Charlie escapes and finds a girl-cougar of his own. Sadly, their relationship is doomed once they get hungry. The semi-domesticated Charlie is unable to fend for himself and, cougars being cougars, his new gal pal is disinclined to share her prey.

Charlie decides to head back to Jess’ place but has become hopelessly lost in the mountains. Over the next few months, Charlie slowly learns to fend for himself, not unlike Nikki, Wild Dog of the North. Eventually, one of his misadventures leads him to a log flume which he rides back to the camp. He heads back to Potlatch’s kitchen by instinct but ends up trapped inside by Chainsaw.

The next morning, Potlatch finds a hungry, scared, full-grown cougar locked in his pantry. The men corner Charlie in a freight elevator and just as the boss is about to shoot him, Jess turns up, sure that Charlie will remember him. Jess wins that bet and soon, he and his new fiancée bring Charlie to a wildlife sanctuary high up in the mountains, free to reconnect with his lady friend (or, if not that, another, virtually identical female cougar). Ain’t love grand?

Charlie, The Lonesome Cougar does not stray far from the established pattern for films of this type. If you’ve enjoyed the adventures of Lobo, Nikki, Perri, or any of Disney’s other critter stars, you’ll probably like this one, too. Hibler, Beebe and the rest of the team use a bit more movie trickery than usual to accomplish sequences like Charlie’s flume ride. But there’s still plenty of legit animal action to enjoy. Charlie’s participation in a log-rolling contest against a lumberjack was real, included after Beebe discovered one of his cougars had a knack for it.

Beebe also captured some exciting footage of historical interest. The log drive was shot on the North Fork of the Clearwater River in Idaho. This had been a vital and spectacular part of the logging industry since 1920. Beebe ended up filming one of the last river drives in America. In 1971, the Clearwater floated its last logs as the Dworshak Dam closed the North Fork. Beebe’s footage is a genuinely thrilling sight, vividly depicting an authentic log drive as it happened.

But if you’re not into logs or cougars or cougars that roll logs, there’s not a lot here you haven’t seen before. Almost all Disney movies are formulaic to some extent but the nature movies are particularly cookie-cutter. That’s not to say this is a bad example of the genre. It’s certainly a whole lot more enjoyable than The Legend Of Lobo, for instance. But by 1967, Disney’s nature formula was beginning to be a bit stale.

VERDICT: There’s just enough here to make it a very minor Disney Plus if you’re a fan of these movies.

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Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Gnome-Mobile

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Original theatrical release poster for Walt Disney's The Gnome-Mobile

Ask anybody to start listing off live-action Disney movies and odds are The Gnome-Mobile is not going to be the first, second or even tenth movie they mention. Hell, even if you try to help them out by having them list off live-action Disney movies about magical little people, The Gnome-Mobile will come in at least second after Darby O’Gill. As of this writing, The Gnome-Mobile has not been released on Blu-ray and it’s not available on Disney+. It doesn’t seem to have much of a cult following. Just over 1,000 people have even marked it as “seen” on Letterboxd, making it slightly less popular than Johnny Tremain. But taken on its own merits, The Gnome-Mobile is a fun little movie that, for my money, is a lot more enjoyable than some of Disney’s other late ‘60s output.

Even though The Gnome-Mobile seems like a natural and even obvious subject for a Disney picture, it still has a somewhat unusual history. The movie is based on a novel by Upton Sinclair, of all people. Sinclair was a noted left-wing political activist and the author of such books as The Jungle and Oil! (later the basis for P.T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood).

Sinclair had a rocky history with the movie industry. He had approved of and produced the 1914 adaptation of The Jungle (a silent film now lost) and he got a big payday from Victor Fleming’s 1932 version of his book The Wet Parade. But in 1933, he was hired by movie mogul William Fox to write a hagiography of Fox Film Corporation. The resulting book, Upton Sinclair Presents William Fox, was a critical look at Fox’s attempt to create and control a monopoly. Needless to say, this did not endear him to Hollywood executives.

In 1934, Sinclair ran for governor of California as a Democrat with a Socialist-leaning platform. Every studio in town opposed him, churning out anti-Sinclair propaganda to defeat him (you may remember this being touched upon in David Fincher’s Mank). Sinclair practically went broke losing that election, so afterward he went out on a speaking tour to raise some money. The tour took him through Redwood National Park in northern California, which inspired him to write The Gnomobile, one of his only books for children.

After The Gnomobile was published in 1936, Sinclair’s friend, Rob Wagner (whose magazine, Script, had been one of Sinclair’s only defenders during his gubernatorial campaign), introduced Sinclair to Walt Disney, another former contributor to Script. Wagner and Sinclair thought The Gnomobile would make for a good cartoon. Walt thought it was better suited to live-action and promised to keep it in mind if he ever started making live-action pictures.

Upton Sinclair and Walt Disney discuss The Gnome-Mobile

Over the years, Sinclair held him to that promise, periodically checking in with Walt. By the mid-60s, a note of fatalism crept into Sinclair’s correspondence. He was getting up there in years and still hoped to see The Gnomobile turned into a movie before he died. Apparently, this worked. Walt assigned the newly-retitled The Gnome-Mobile to his A-team: director Robert Stevenson, producer James Algar and screenwriter Ellis Kadison.

(I don’t imagine Upton Sinclair and Walt Disney saw eye to eye on much of anything, especially politics, so I was very curious about how they got together. In particular, I need to thank author Ariel S. Winter, whose fascinating blog We Too Were Children, Mr. Barrie provided a great deal of insight into their history.)

“A-team” might be a bit generous in describing Kadison who certainly had an interesting career but only worked with Disney on this one project. Like a lot of Disney writers, Kadison worked extensively in television. He’d also written, produced and directed some odd-looking, lower-budget family films like The Cat, Git!, and You’ve Got To Be Smart, which is probably what brought him to Disney’s attention. The Gnome-Mobile came toward the end of Kadison’s Hollywood career. His last major credit was writing several episodes of Sid and Marty Krofft’s psychedelic nightmare The Banana Splits Adventure Hour.

Triple Oscar winner Walter Brennan (last seen around these parts as a friend of Those Calloways) stars as San Francisco-based lumber tycoon D.J. Mulrooney. He’s on his way to an important business meeting in Seattle but not before he stops at the airport in his vintage Rolls Royce to pick up his grandkids, Elizabeth and Rodney (played by those Mary Poppins kids Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber…the credits actually introduce them as “those Mary Poppins kids” to remind you that you already liked one movie these kids were in).

The Mulrooneys stop for a picnic lunch among some giant redwoods. Elizabeth goes exploring and meets a young gnome named Jasper (Tom Lowell, Canoe from That Darn Cat!). Jasper has a big problem and his closest friends, a bunch of talking, animatronic forest animals, haven’t been much help. It seems that Jasper’s grandfather, Knobby (played by Brennan without his false teeth), is fading away. He’s lost the will to live since he’s become convinced that he and Jasper are the last of the gnomes.

Elizabeth convinces D.J. to give Jasper and Knobby a ride in the jauntin’ car, now dubbed the Gnome-Mobile according to the Sherman Brothers’ song, to search for other gnomes in other forests. Knobby agrees to go along with it despite his mistrust of “doo-deans” (that’s gnomish for big people), especially the loggers he refers to as “Mulrooney’s Marauders”. D.J. tries to keep his identity a secret but once the cat’s out of the bag, Knobby goes ballistic. He wants nothing to do with Mulrooney and D.J. decides he doesn’t want anything to do with the short-tempered, ingrateful gnome, either. He plans to drop them off and be rid of them at first light.

Unfortunately, Knobby’s tirade caught the attention of Horatio Quaxton (Sean McClory, Kurt Russell’s drunken dad in Follow Me, Boys!). Quaxton runs a traveling two-bit sideshow called Quaxton’s Academy of Freaks (unfortunately, we don’t get to see much of the Academy, otherwise this would likely shoot to the top of my list of favorite weirdo Disney movies). He manages to sneak into the Mulrooneys’ hotel room and kidnap the basketful of gnomes. Once the crime is discovered, D.J. calls his right-hand man, Mr. Yarby (Richard Deacon, last heard as the voice of the survival manual in Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N.), and orders him to get their security team on the case immediately.

As far as Yarby’s concerned, this is just a sure sign that D.J. is cracking up. He arranges to have his boss locked up in a mental institution. Rodney and Elizabeth borrow the Gnome-Mobile, rescue their grandfather and figure out where Quaxton is hiding by interrogating a pair of his disgruntled employees (played by instantly recognizable character actors Frank Cady and Ellen Corby). By the time they get to Quaxton’s cabin, Knobby has already made his escape but they’re still in time to rescue Jasper.

Meanwhile, Yarby is still on their trail accompanied by a pair of male nurses (one of whom is played by Norm Grabowski from the Merlin Jones saga). They spot the Rolls while filling up with gas and immediately take off after them, yanking the hose out of the fuel pump in the process. D.J. leads them on a cross-country chase that ends up with Yarby’s car slowly coming to pieces bit by bit.

Ultimately, they get rid of their pursuers and are reunited with Knobby, who has found a gnome colony led by the thousand-year-old Rufus (who else but Ed Wynn). Rufus assures Jasper that there are plenty of other gnomes and a surplus of unattached gnome women. Jasper is immediately attracted to a shy beauty named Violet (Cami Sebring, ex-wife of celebrity hairstylist and soon-to-be Manson Family victim Jay Sebring). But in gnomish tradition, it’s the girls who chase the eligible boy. Jasper is dunked into a sudsy bath and whoever is able to catch him and hang on to him for seven seconds wins. In the end, Violet prevails over her more aggressive rivals. She and Jasper get married and D.J. donates 50,000 acres of forestland to the gnomes.

Theatrical re-release poster for The Gnome-Mobile

It seems clear to me that The Gnome-Mobile has been overshadowed by the not-dissimilar Darby O’Gill And The Little People. It’s easy to see why. Darby O’Gill has a lot going for it that The Gnome-Mobile has not, including richer characters and young stars like Sean Connery and Janet Munro. That movie makes room for drama, suspense and romance. This one is basically just a knockabout comedy. But it’s a funny, entertaining knockabout comedy and that goes a long way.

Sinclair was inspired to write his book in the first place by the magnificent redwoods and some echoes of his conservationist message still ring through the movie. But even though it looks briefly like the film is going to be Disney’s version of The Lorax, it never quite gets there. Sure, D.J. is an obscenely rich industrialist who made his fortune by deforesting huge swaths of land but he’s not a bad guy. He seems to feel that he’s made enough money and that it’s important to protect some land for future generations. Leave it to Disney to find away to make a movie that’s simultaneously pro-capitalism and pro-environmentalism.

At any rate, it’s not as though The Gnome-Mobile is heavy with messaging of any kind. The movie exists to showcase some fun special effects, engaging comic performances and goofy slapstick. I mean, what can you really say about a movie where a fuel pump starts spewing gas everywhere and the hapless gas station attendant tries to stop it with his hands and face? You can’t take any of this too seriously. As long as you go with the flow, you’ll have a good time.

We do have to say goodbye to a couple of familiar faces with this movie. Ed Wynn, who has been a presence in this column since Alice In Wonderland, died in 1966 at the age of 79. The Gnome-Mobile, his final film, was released posthumously about a year after his death. Wynn could be a lot but Disney usually had a pretty good sense of where and when to deploy his unique energy. Rufus is a good role for him to go out on. I’ll actually miss seeing him pop up in these movies.

The Gnome-Mobile also marks the end of Matthew Garber’s brief film career. He appeared in three Disney films beginning with The Three Lives Of Thomasina, then evidently decided acting wasn’t for him and went back to school. About ten years later, he contracted hepatitis in India. He died of pancreatitis back home in London in 1977 at the age of 21. In 2004, he and his on-screen sister, Karen Dotrice, were named Disney Legends. Dotrice will eventually find her way back into this column but it’ll be awhile.

When The Gnome-Mobile was released on July 12, 1967, critics weren’t exactly blown away but a lot of them found good things to say about it. It did OK at the box office, well enough to warrant a theatrical re-release in 1976. But it’s a movie that’s left a very small cultural footprint. You don’t hear it talked about much at all, either fondly or disdainfully. As usual, that’s kind of on Disney. They’re the ones deciding what to release on Blu-ray and promote on their streaming service. They could easily start introducing The Gnome-Mobile to a new audience if they felt like it. It’s a fun little movie that deserves another chance.

VERDICT: Another Disney Plus that’s not on Disney+.  

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