Welcome back to the 80s, D-Sciples, the most turbulent decade of Disney. They're up, they're (mostly) down, they're trying out weird things to varying degrees of success. And TRENCHCOAT is definitely one of their oddest, and to be frank least successful experiments. It's not for lack of trying, at least on the part of Margot Kidder, but it's hard to pull off a movie that's trying to spoof the spy genre and film noir while not being even a little bit funny. It would be like, oh just for example, filming a movie on jewel of the Mediterranean Malta while making it look as drab and uninteresting as possible. You can almost admire the effort, but mostly you wonder how they could have gotten things so wrong.
We know what you're thinking, D-Lovers - "What the heck is a MOON PILOT?" That's an easy one to explain, it's another word for an astronaut. Explaining what the heck the Disney movie MOON PILOT is, however, is a more challenging question. In some ways it's a contemporary farce about the space race and red scare, in others it's a romance between an all-American chimp-minder and a French alien. Mostly, though, it's just a lot of yelling.
Weigh and anchor and hoist the main sail, we're heading back to the high seas with MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND! Disney's second kick at the can at a Muppet movie where they adapt a work of classic literature, will this movie measure up to the precedent set by their version of the Dickens classic, or will good ol' Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure tale come up short? For our hosts, it mostly depends who you ask, so be prepared for rough seas ahead on the Summer of Muppets!
It's a landmark episode of We Want The D as our finish out our first proper decade of Disney movies. And it's somewhat appropriate that we end the 1940s with SO DEAR TO MY HEART, a movie ostensibly adapted from a book about a boy and his sheep, but as all the best early Disney movies do also provides some insight into Daddy Walt's psyche and how he viewed (or at least liked to view) his childhood.