Let's Get Together for a Perfect "Summer" Movie

Ah, what is the perfect summer movie? Jurassic World? Incredibles?

Solid arguments could be made for these and countless others as well. Since Jaws and Star Wars were released in the mid-1970s, summer has become the season for high energy, popcorn-filled, franchise-driven trips to the local multiplexes. But my candidate for a perfect summer movie predates those two films by nearly a decade and a half, and while it was certainly a special effects powerhouse in its day, it is best remembered for its undeniable charm and the engaging performances of its cast.

The Parent Trap makes me wish I had been a kid back in the summer of 1961. Released ever so appropriately in June of that year, the film remains timeless on many levels despite being so firmly grounded in the post-war, early baby boom popular culture. From the very funny shenanigans and heartwarming discoveries at Camp Inch to the fateful camping trip where gold digger Vickie gets “submarined,” The Parent Trap just oozes summer in nearly every frame of film.

There are so many points of merit to this wonderful movie, it’s hard to know just where to start.

Well, how about the opening credits? This captivating sequence of stop-motion animation was created by T. Hee, Bill Justice and X. Atencio and echoed their earlier efforts on Noah’s Ark and foreshadowed 1962’s Symposium of Popular Songs. Accompanied by Annette Funicello’s and Tommy Sands’ bubblegum rendition of the title song, the clever vignette immediately sets a tone of fun and romance that the entire movie ultimately embodies.

The screenplay and direction of David Swift mix equal parts melodrama, romance and comedy for very satisfying results. Some reviewers, including Disney scholar Leonard Maltin, felt the film uneven in its comedy and ultimately average, a criticism I personally have to disagree with. However, nearly all critics of the time were universal in their praise of the film’s cast. Accolades were deservedly given to romantic leads Brian Keith and the always beautiful Maureen O’Hara, but the film is also notable for its equaling engaging supporting players; among them Nancy Kulp, Frank DeVol, Una Merkel, Joanna Barnes, Charlie Ruggles, Ruth McDevitt and Leo G. Carroll.

But let’s face it; from beginning to end, The Parent Trap belongs to Hayley Mills. Her remarkable performances as both Sharon and Susan are every bit as convincing as the special effects that allow her two characters to share the screen. Studio veteran Ub Iwerks supervised the processes that brought together the two distinctly different twins; it proved an amazing marriage of technical achievement with the exceptional acting of the very talented Mills.

My favorite detail from the film? When Sharon and Susan are placed in isolation at Camp Inch, their discovery of sisterhood appropriately happens within the walls of a cabin named Serendipity. But you’ve got to squint to see the sign by the cabin’s front door.

As I said near the beginning, The Parent Trap is pure summer, in atmosphere as well as setting. Filled with summer camp antics, poolside pratfalls and treks through the wilderness, it is a shining example of family entertainment made the old fashioned way. While I’ll likely be visiting places such as Isla Nubar and Metroville in the coming weeks, I will also be doing some R&R at Camp Inch and Mitch Ever’s southern California ranch. 

One minor postscript: While the 1998 Lindsay Lohan remake was not a bad movie, it was certainly unnecessary. It was one of the less than remarkable results of Walt Disney Pictures “recycling” phase of the late 1990s that begat the likes of Flubber, and the live action 101 Dalmatians among others.

On the Open Road!

"Every day another new adventure, every mile another new zip code!"

Today, we hit the open road!

It's Californy er Bust--day one of our twelve day cross-country road trip, traveling from North Carolina to California and back again.  My son Jake and I will be navigating both backroads and interstates and blogging as we go.  So, to get things started here at 2719 Hyperion, we decided to celebrate one of Disney's most underrated gems, and a film that reflects our own current highway adventure.

A Goofy Movie celebrated its 20th anniversary this year.  It remains an unassuming little film that continues to be quickly dismissed by most Disney aficionados, and sadly rejected by animation scholars and movie critics (currently at 53% on Rotten Tomatoes).   But if you cast aside mainstream opinions and talk to individuals who were parents and kids back in 1995, you'll discover many who speak of the movie in glowing, and often reverential terms.  There was even a group of folks who just a few years ago, produced an elaborate live action recreation of the film's opening musical number.  Why?  Because, as was noted on their website, "we love Goofy and A Goofy Movie.  It is such a big factor in our childhood."

It certainly was an unusual concept at the time.  It came on the heels of the Disney animation renaissance, sandwiched in between The Lion King and Pocahontas, and preceded the first Toy Story and the subsequent Pixar revolution by six months.  It was a modest production, largely outsourced to satellite Disney animation studios in Paris and Australia.  The premise and many of the characters were lifted from the syndicated television show Goof Troop. That pedigree, and its Disney MovieToons brand, clearly relegated it to a status more closely associated with the company's much maligned direct-to-video product, commonly referred to as the "cheap-quels." This, despite the fact that it was jointly produced by Walt Disney Feature Animation and Walt Disney Animation France.

It is a film of many virtues.  Essentially a down-to-earth family comedy (albeit one featuring anthropomorphic dog-like characters), it showcased a parent-child generation gap that its audience seemed to immediately recognize and relate to.  Sprinkled in were well-crafted musical numbers, including two near-showstoppers: the opening "After Today" and the visually dense and high energy extravaganza "On the Open Road."

The Possum Posse--Lester, Buford, Beulah and Mortici

It also contains one of the funniest vignettes in a Disney movie.  When Goofy and Max visit Lester's Possum Park, it results in a hilarious send-up of both decaying roadside attractions and Disney's own Country Bear Jamboree.  My two sons made the high-pitched exclamation, "Who's your favorite possum?" a mantra in our household for years after the film's release.  It was a rather bold satire from a studio not typically receptive to that degree of self parody.

A Goofy Movie will never be considered top tier Disney entertainment, but it remains a fun and endearing film, largely forgotten by most, but passionately remembered and loved by many.

Road Trip Addendum

"Howdy boys, is this the way to Nashville?"

Leaving Winston-Salem, North Carolina, we pass directly through Nashville as we cross Tennessee and Arkansas.  For more details, check out our road trip diary and other road trip features on Boom-Pop!

Retro Review: Flying High with The Rocketeer

Two decades ago, one of Disney's better live-action films met with a severe case of audience apathy. It has since languished in unfortunate obscurity despite being an exceptionally well crafted period adventure and a loving homage to vintage movie serials and 1930s era pulp heroes.

The Rocketeer deserves to fly much, much higher.

I personally found the film to be very much in the tradition of early Disney live-action movies, though in setting, eras removed from the studio's 19th century adventure stories and swashbucklers.  I am always loathe to in any way channel the ghost of Walt Disney, but I think he would have approved of  The Rocketeer, if not necessarily the slightly edgier Dave Stevens' comic books upon which the movie was based.  Much in the way that Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson provided the boyhood nostalgia for Walt that he then successfully translated into motion pictures, the filmmakers behind The Rocketeer similarly tapped into the nostalgia of classic Hollywood B-movies and serials, and combined that inspiration with the new-found romance with aviation that was prevalent during the 1930s .  The result was an exciting and entertaining romp that was largely ignored by film-goers who, during that summer of 1991, were more enticed by the groundbreaking special effects of Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the comedy antics of Billy Crystal in City Slickers.

The Rocketeer was Joe Johnston's sophomore directing effort.  Johnston, a special effects veteran who had cut his teeth with George Lucas on the original Star Wars films, was fresh with success from directing Disney's own Honey I Shrunk the Kids when he was enlisted to helm The Rocketeer.  His special effects background served him well on the assignment and the film's pre-digital-era craftsmanship remains impressive to this day.  Johnston recently directed the excellent The Wolfman remake and is currently wrapping up work on the World Wat II-based Captain America: The First Avenger, set to arrive in theaters this summer.

Beyond its well-executed and fast paced storyline and capable cast, The Rocketeer is a visual cornucopia of 1930s popular culture and Hollywood archetypes.  Aviation pioneer and eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes plays a central role, while Errol Flynn is not so subtly channeled into the villainy of movie star Neville Sinclair, an undercover Nazi agent in pursuit of the jetpack that is the centerpiece of the film.  Also included in the mix is California Crazy architecture in the form of the  Bulldog Cafe; the over-the-top but rather accurate-for-the-era set design of the South Seas Club; the giant German dirigible Luxembourg; the film's climatic showdown at the Griffith Observatory; the true fate of the original and iconic Hollywoodland sign; and a brilliantly realized piece of animated Nazi propaganda showing squadrons of rocket-propelled German soldiers symbolically conquering Europe and North America.

One of the film's most notable components is the perfectly matched score by composer James Horner.  It was an Oscar-worthy effort that went almost entirely unrecognized at the time.  

Disney had intended The Rocketeer to be a trilogy of films, but the lackluster (but not entirely disastrous) box office returns quickly quashed further productions.  The film's troubled production history (screenwriters Danny Bilson and Paul DeMeo were fired and rehired several times during the movie's five years of development) and aforementioned box office did not endear it to studio execs, and it has subsequently faded from view.  A bare-bones DVD edition was released in 1999; a restored high definition Blu-Ray would certainly be welcome, but it doesn't appear to be on the company's radar at the moment. 

We will continue to celebrate the 20th Anniversary of The Rocketeer this week at 2719 Hyperion.  Check back tomorrow as we Consider the Source of the movie--the comic book stories of Dave Stevens.

Retro Review: You're Going to Rattle the Stars, You Are

I just recently revisited Treasure Planet for the first time since its home video release in spring of 2003.  Even though I enjoyed the film very much when it was released in 2002, it faded rather quickly from my memory, no doubt in part due to its lukewarm critical reception and rather disastrous box office returns.  People for the most part, including even the most passionate of Disney fans, simply stopped talking about it.  It even seems that the Walt Disney Company itself has subtlety disowned it.

It deserves better.

Treasure Planet does have its passionate supporters of which I now include myself.  Voyages Extraordinaires author Cory Gross called the film an "unsung Disney classic" and noted, "It proposes a swashbuckling, romantic aesthetic for the Hubble Age that prefigured the popularity of Disney's pirate band and silhouettes them against beautiful novae and nebulae."  You can find Cory's intelligent and very articulate review of Treasure Planet here; he pretty much states all of the things about it that I wish I could have included here in this Retro Review.  Needless to say, I wholly agree with his conjecture that it is perhaps the company's most underrated film since Fantasia.  Similar to Fantasia, Treasure Planet, in concept, design and execution, was most certainly years ahead if its time.

I was drawn back to Treasure Planet, primarily due to my recent fascination with Victorian-Edwardian Scientific Romance and Retro-Futurism.  (Again, a nod to Cory and his Voyages Extraordinaires site, where I have been extensively educated in these matters, and in the nuances and ambiguities of what many people now refer to as "steampunk.")  My Hawkins Strongbox project reflects this passion, and my interest in matters of this regard can be easily traced back to the formative Disney years of my youth.  This was when I had only a passing interest in animation and had yet to experience a theme park, but was drawn like moth to flame to Disney live-action adventure films.  In Search of the Castaways and The Island at the Top of the World are among the Saturday matinee memories that I still cherish to this day, and I have no doubt that those experiences laid the subconscious groundwork for my most recent explorations into these aforementioned genres that encompass almost every known category of entertainment.  (Yes, there is even a steampunk category of music; check out Abney Park for starters.)

Treasure Planet is in my opinion, a creative amalgamation of themes attributed to three of the 19th century's most recognized authors of fantastic fiction: Robert Louis Stevenson, Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.  The connection to Stevenson is of course direct, being based on that author's classic adventure tale, Treasure Island.  From Verne and Burroughs come notions of space travel and otherworldly settings.  Treasure Planet filmmakers John Muskers and Ron Clements (writers-producers-directors) married these notions to some retro-modern technologies and crafted a stunning and often visually complex masterpiece, for which they have never been given enough credit.

One consistent criticism of the film is that it "lacked heart."  I have always found this to be a particularly shallow critical cliche and one all too easy to get away with.  Visually dynamic films frequently fall victim to this conjecture and Treasure Planet proved to be no exception.  The centerpiece of any Treasure Island adaptation is the relationship between the young Jim Hawkins and the always questionable Long John Silver.  Treasure Planet serves well that story element and brings to bear an emotional resonance that culminates with film's final interaction between the two characters.  Silver's journey of redemption rings especially true when he tells Jim with unabashed pride that, "You're going to rattle the stars, you are."

Hopefully in the years to come, Treasure Planet will shed some of the critical and box office baggage it has been forced to burden and move beyond the general apathy that continues to plague it.  It will certainly never receive the top-tier status afforded the likes of Snow White and Beauty and the Beast, but perhaps it will at least be able to rise to a more respectable level within the rankings of Disney animated features.

Desert Living in The Living Desert

Fifty four years ago today, Walt Disney released the first True-Life Adventure feature film The Living Desert. With its cactus-perched bobcat and square-dancing scorpions, the film launched yet another successful chapter in the history of the Disney Studios. Especially notable is the fact that RKO, Disney's distributor up until that point, balked at releasing The Living Desert, asserting that there was no market for longer form nature documentaries. Walt and Roy Disney were quick to show RKO the door and Buena Vista, an in-house distribution division was subsequently born. The Disney brothers were quickly validated in their decision; the film would gross over five million dollars on a budget of approximately $500,000, and would also win that year's Oscar for feature length documentary.

True-Life Adventures veteran writer and director James Algar explained the genesis of The Living Desert in a 1968 interview:

"Living Desert came about in this way. A young man from UCLA came in and showed us about 10 minutes of film that he had made as a thesis. Because it had to do with nature and we were then making nature stories, he brought it here. This was a boy named Paul Kenworthy. And this was one moment when Walt spotted a thing instantaneously; it sounded very exciting. Kenworthy's sequence was the story of the wasp and the tarantula. It was a very-well-covered, very-well-photographed, thorough going account of how this wasp stings the tarantula to a state of paralysis and lays its eggs inside the body of the tarantula. The tarantula is in a state of preservation, and when the wasp's young hatch, they then feed on the tarantula and become new wasps and fly off. This was a little complete short story right out of nature, and the boy had done it well. And Walt said, "Let's get hold of this young man and set him up out there and see if we can't find out more such stories about the desert and build a thing about the desert." And this is what happened."

Kenworthy would become one of two principal photographers on The Living Desert and ultimately go on to contribute his skills to subsequent True-Life films, most notably The Vanishing Prarie in 1955.

The Living Desert has any number of memorable moments, but a few stand out and those have become burned into the collective subconscious of the baby boomer generation. Dramatic confrontations--among them a red tailed hawk versus a rattlesnake, the aforementioned tarantula-wasp showdown, and two male tortoises jousting for the same potential mate. This harsher side of nature is offset throughout the film by lighter moments, most notably the comical, and occasionally criticized, scorpion square dance. Of that particular sequence, Algar noted:

"In Living Desert we had the material of the scorpions in their little mating ritual where they walk back and forth and circle. And the more we looked at that, the more it obviously felt rhythmic and the more we saw the chance of creating something interesting. This is one time where we actually created the music, and we set it to a square-dance routine. Now people tend to marvel, "Gee, how do you get those animals to perform to music?" where in truth you get the musician to perform to the animals. It's not quite as mysterious as it might seem."

One specific scene in the film would become legendary and in many ways iconic. When a peccary, an American cousin of the wild boar, chases a bobcat up a very tall cactus, the resultant image of the perched bobcat subsequently became representative of Disney's once and future nature themed efforts. It was displayed in marketing materials, on merchandise, and included in the opening montage of the Wonderful World of Disney. It was even recreated as part of the Nature's Wonderland attraction that was a Frontierland mainstay for many years at Disneyland.

Despite its recent DVD release, The Living Desert remains largely unseen except by the most devout of Disney enthusiasts. It is quick becoming lost in an age of high definition Imax productions and 24 hour nature-themed cable channels. It is regrettable as the film still retains a timeless charm and remains both entertaining and often compelling some five decades after its inital debut.

Retro Review: A Perfect Summer Movie

Ah, what is the perfect summer movie? Spiderman? Pirates of the Caribbean? Cars?

Solid arguments could be made for any of these and countless others as well. Ever since Jaws and Star Wars were released in the mid-1970s, summer has become the season for high energy popcorn-filled trips to the local multiplexes. But my candidate for a perfect summer movie predates those two films by nearly a decade and a half, and while it was certainly a special effects powerhouse in its day, it is best remembered for its undeniable charm and the engaging performances of its cast.

The Parent Trap makes me wish I had been a kid back in the summer of 1961. Released ever so appropriately in June of that year, the film remains timeless on many levels despite being so firmly grounded in the post-war, early baby boom popular culture. From the very funny shenanigans and heartwarming discoveries at Camp Inch to the fateful camping trip where gold digger Vickie gets “submarined,” The Parent Trap just oozes summer in nearly every frame of film.

There are so many points of merit to this wonderful movie; it’s hard to know just where to start.

Well, how about the opening credits? This captivating sequence of stop-motion animation was created by T. Hee, Bill Justice and X. Atencio and echoed their earlier efforts on Noah’s Ark and foreshadowed 1962’s Symposium of Popular Songs. Accompanied by Annette Funicello’s and Tommy Sands’ bubblegum rendition of the title song, the clever vignette immediately sets a tone of fun and romance that the entire movie ultimately embodies.

The screenplay and direction of David Swift mix equal parts melodrama, romance and comedy for very satisfying results. Some reviewers, including Disney scholar Leonard Maltin, felt the film uneven in its comedy and ultimately average, a criticism I personally have to disagree with. However, nearly all critics of the time were universal in their praise of the film’s cast. Accolades were deservedly given to romantic leads Brian Keith and the always beautiful Maureen O’Hara, but the film is also notable for its equaling engaging supporting players; among them Nancy Kulp, Frank DeVol, Una Merkel, Joanna Barnes, Charlie Ruggles, Ruth McDevitt and Leo G. Carroll.

But let’s face it; from beginning to end, The Parent Trap belongs to Hayley Mills. Her remarkable performances as both Sharon and Susan are every bit as convincing as the special effects that allow her two characters to share the screen. Studio veteran Ub Iwerks supervised the processes that brought together the two distinctly different twins; it proved an amazing marriage of technical achievement with the exceptional acting of the very talented Mills.

My favorite detail from the film? When Sharon and Susan are placed in isolation at Camp Inch, their discovery of sisterhood appropriately happens within the walls of a cabin named Serendipity. But you’ve got to squint to see the sign by the cabin’s front door.

As I said near the beginning, The Parent Trap is pure summer, in atmosphere as well as setting. Filled with summer camp antics, poolside pratfalls and treks through the wilderness, it is a shining example of family entertainment made the old fashioned way. While I’ll likely be visiting places such as Far Far Away, World’s End and Spiderman’s Manhattan in the coming weeks, I will also be doing some R&R at Camp Inch and Mitch Ever’s southern California ranch. 

One minor postscript: While the 1998 Lindsay Lohan remake was not a bad movie, it was certainly unnecessary. It was one of the less than remarkable results of Walt Disney Pictures “recycling” phase of the late 1990s that begat the likes of Flubber, and the live action 101 Dalmatians among others.

Postscript #2: The two-disc Vault Disney edition of The Parent Trap is an exceptional DVD set. You can still scare up a copy of this out-of-print edition on Amazon and other various online retailers.