We've watched a lot of sub-par Disney movies over the years, but there's something different about CHICKEN LITTLE. It's a movie with so many problems that there's no way they couldn't have been apparent to the people making it, and yet nobody seems to have cared to pump the brakes and try to correct them. The result is a montage heavy, dialogue light, weird looking, strangely cast, inexplicable mess of a story that puts our hosts through the ringer.
It's a classic tale of a family vacation gone awry in Disney's BON VOYAGE! A straight-laced father just wants to give his wife and children a holiday to remember, but all manner of entitled little rich boys, beach con-artists, and would-be cuckholders conspire against him to throw a wrench in their plans. And no, we didn't slip into an alternate universe where the Griswolds are somehow Disney characters, it is good ol' Fred MacMurray at the centre of all these hijinks as usual.
For the first and most likely only time, we're breaking protocol on the podcast for the grand finale of the Summer of Muppets. Because Disney hasn't made enough feature-length Muppet projects (yet), we're allowing ourselves to examine the small screen sitcom THE MUPPETS.. (the period is part of the title), which aired on ABC for one season back in 2015-2016. Was this a wonderful new forum for these beloved creations that never got a fair shake, or a misstep that unfortunately put the gang back on the shelf until their latest revival on streaming? Opinions vary, including our own, but it continues to hold true that there's no such thing as too much Muppets.
Based on the novel by S.E. Hinton, TEX is a thoughtful coming-of-age story about a wayward and wild teenage boy learning to think of people other than himself, and learning to be ok with saying goodbye to friends and family as they inevitably leave their small, rural Oklahoma town - even if he has to stay. If that seems a little too mature and grounded for Disney, just remember that the 1980s were a strange time for the company. One that we look back fondly at as we finish up the decade with this week's episode.
There's no shortage of movies we've watched over the course of this podcast that involve Disney putting animals in harm's way. We are still pretty sure they killed at least one horse. But THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN portends a more benign future where Disney can make movies that star animals but without the need to for there to be actual animal performers. The downside is, they've finally hit that balance of making CGI animals look realistic while still being expressive, so stories about wild animals being kept in a strip mall and never seeing the sun are still super duper depressing.