We Want The D

If you've listened to our last few episodes, or even just take a cursory glance at the movie titles, you'll know we've been spending more than our fair share of time talking about Disney animal movies. Unfortunately, NAPOLEON AND SAMANTHA doesn't break that trend. Fortunately, however, things are a little more...exotic in this movie, and not just because the animal in question is an old, milk-loving lion. There is so, so much more than that going on in this movie that our hosts could never have predicted, and no, we aren't just talking about a teeny-tiny Jodie Foster or a strikingly youthful Michael Douglas.

Wayne Gretzky. Don Bradman. Usain Bolt. There are some athletes who are so far ahead of their peers they will likely forever hold the title of GOAT in their respective fields. But the biggest GOAT of all may be a horse - a horse named SECRETARIAT. Secretariat ran three races very fast, and as a result, a lot of rich white people got a whole lot richer, and so of course Disney made a movie about it. But while straight-forward on paper, this movie is anything but thanks to some truly bizarre directorial choices that we get to relish in together.

It's our 300th episode! And we couldn't be more happy to be talking about perennial underdog Disney movie TANGLED. Not only did it lose in several straight polls for past anniversary episodes, it somehow feels like this movie never quite gets its due, despite how good it is, always in the shadow of its younger, colder cousin. But no longer, as our hosts sing its praises from the top of a tower in all respects. Well...except maybe one.

At first blush, it doesn't seem like there's anything in Disney's FOLLOW ME, BOYS! that we haven't seen before. It's not the first time we've seen Kurt Russell, Fred MacMurray or Vera Miles. It's not the first time we've seen Disney create a whole small town on their studio backlot. It's not the first time we've had wacky punctuation in the title. But just because it's all been done, doesn't mean it's ever been done this well - because this movie is unexpectedly charming and affecting across the board...well, maybe not the extended war games scene, but pretty much everything else.

Not all live action remakes are created equal, and in the case of LADY AND THE TRAMP that means being a movie that has the look and feel of a direct-to-Disney+ release. That is to say, it's not all that bad as far as these remakes go, it just feels more inessential than usual. Sure, there's some dynamite voice casting, some nicely expanded roles for the non-dog characters, and it's way less racist. But while the original movie is so charming that it's an undeniable timeless classic, this one just kinda...exists in the ether of other remakes.

On the surface, Disney's RASCAL may appear to be yet another entry in the long list of Disney's "boy and his dog" movies - only this time the dog is a bandit-masked, human-handed, cute lil' raccoon. But in fact, Disney's RASCAL is actually about another one of our favourite recurring Disney themes - children who have not properly grieved the loss of a parent. In this one, all the animal hijinks, of which there are plenty, play second fiddle to the infuriatingly negligent actions of a rambling-man father, the dogged perseverance and self-sacrifice of an older sister, and the tacit understanding of a town that it might just take the whole village to properly look out for this boy and his racoon.

Stop us if you've heard this one before: James Garner, fleeing from a dangerous scenario he wants no part of, gets mixed up with a little boy he only sort of barely tolerates, meets a widowed woman living all on her own in a lonely, isolated location, and through gruffness and the power of 1970s masculinity endears himself to all and escapes danger. No, we didn't rewatch that Castaway Cowboy movie, we watched Disney's ONE LITTLE INDIAN and experienced a whole lot of deja vu.

You may recall from episodes past that our hosts have no small amount of fondness for the bite-sized stories featuring the critters who inhabit the Hundred Acre Wood. Stretch a story to feature-length and throw the most chaotic and thoughtless of those characters into the center of it, however, and it's a whole different story. THE TIGGER MOVIE is no doubt a favourite of a certain, pre-school aged portion of Disney's audience, but for our hosts it may be inarguably bouncy and trouncy, but how much fun there is to be had is questionable.

There's a lot of deception going on at the core of Disney's TONKA. The cover/poster doesn't really give any indication of who the title character really is, so it's not until the opening theme song starts to refer to Tonka's powerful hooves and glossy coat that you might start to clue in. Then there's the fact that this movie is based on an actual historical horse, but he was never called Tonka at all. And, of course because this movie was made in the 1950s, there's the fact that none of the Native American characters are played by Native Americans. Still, as a piece of media depicting the events of and lead-up to the battle of Little Bighorn and Custer's Last Stand from the dual perspectives of the Indigenous people and the colonizers, there's more to chew on here than one might expect. Another sneaky bit of deception from Tonka! Tonka the great one!

Historically, Disney's never really been able to knock it out of the park when it comes to Ron Miller-era movies that feature hapless leads going up against bumbling criminal enterprises. NEVER A DULL MOMENT doesn't exactly defy that trend, but it comes close. Likely thanks to having the criminal mastermind be a complex, art-loving Edward G. Robinson, filling his ranks with an eclectic group of henchmen, and putting the always-entertaining Dick Van Dyke in the lead role. Don't know if our hosts would agree that there's NEVER a dull moment, but they're certainly less frequent than expected.