Burl reviews The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes! (1969)

 

Beep-boop, it’s Burl, here to make remarkable progress on reviewing one of those very special Disney pictures you might recall from some Sunday night of your youth! It’s the first in a small series of films featuring Kurt Russell, whom we know from The Thing and Breakdown and so many more, in the role of Dexter Riley, an averagepants student at good old Medfield College! Yes, as you’ve no doubt figured out, the movie is The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes!

Dexter is none too smart a fellow – ha ha, he’s meant to be average, as I say, but in fact he comes off as a bit dim, which gives the story more of a Flowers For Algernon feel than the makers maybe intended! He’s an amiable sort though, and he hangs out with a group of pals whose favourite gang activity is, for some reason, listening in on Medfield College administrative meetings! They overhear pennypinching Dean Higgins, played by Joe Flynn from The Rescuers, telling their beloved science professor Professor Quigley, essayed by William Schallert from Matinee and The Man from Planet X, that the college can under no circumstances afford a computer!

But the students have an idea: hit up local gangster and occasional philanthropist A.J. Arno, played by Cesar Romero from Springtime in the Rockies, for the donation of his own slightly used concubator! Well, he goes for it and the next thing you know, Dexter gets electrocuted by the room-sized device and, by a well-known scientific process, himself becomes as smart as a computer! He instantly becomes a world celebrity who does well on quiz shows and will, Dean Higgins hopes, help Medfield cruise to victory in an intermural trivia contest sponsored by Encyclopedia Britannica! But he’s not counting on the predations of a rival dean, nor Dexter’s own equivocal feelings about his downmarket alma mater! 

On the downside, so far as Arno and his bumbling lieutenant Dick Bakalyan, whose mug we know from The Errand Boy and Von Ryan’s Express, are concerned, is that Dexter’s vast new knowledge includes leftover codewords, facts, and figures from the numbers racket in which they trade! So pretty soon the gangsters are after Dexter, and, rather strangely for a Disney picture of this era, make plain that they intend to violently murder him, stuff his corpse in a trunk, dump it into a lake, and then take the opportunity to go fishing on that lake while they’re there! Ha ha, yikes!

But of course there are plenty of monkeyshines involving Dexter’s friends posing as house painters to rescue him from his predicament – though they can't do this without causing our collegiate Charly a head bonk that dwindles his brain wizardry! Then there's a big car chase with flying bullets and rolling paint cans, and the pals take all these risks despite the fact that, thanks to his incredible world fame, Dex gets a bit full of himself and forgets his old friends! Ha ha, there’s the moral lesson for you, kids - friends who are friends are real friends!

But we don't watch these pictures for moral lessons, but rather the cozy, homely feeling they radiate and the shenanigans they promise! Both of these qualities are present in the picture, but not in any great quantity I’m afraid! The storytelling is slapdash, and there’s a feeling of opportunities missed – why have a character become the smartest guy in the world and then waste his talents on a quiz contest? The picture would have benefitted from a lot more pep and energy and a tighter, funnier script! Ha ha, this was the first of the Dexter Riley trilogy, so maybe they get better as they go along – I’ll have to watch Now You See Him, Now You Don’t and The Strongest Man in the World to find out, I suppose, though I’m not especially anxious to, ha ha! I guess this one is not without its pleasures, but I still can’t get too enthusiastic about it! I give The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes one and a half applejacks!

Burl reviews The Rescuers! (1977)

Good day, it’s Burl here with another Disney picture to tell you about! Ha ha, this one, The Rescuers, isn’t quite in the Disney Classic category alongside Dumbo – no, it came along during a period in which the company was maybe floundering creatively a little bit! Old Walt was ten years in the cryonic chamber at this point, and the House of Mouse was putting out things like Pete’s Dragon and Candleshoe and Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo! It’s not that those are bad pictures, but they’re no Superdad, ha ha!

Anyway, along with the Herbie picture, The Rescuers was their big summer release of 1977, and I can only imagine that both were swallowed whole by Star Wars, ha ha! But if The Rescuers did poorly at the box office, it was probably just as much because, speaking frankly for a moment, it’s not all that great! The narrative is pretty baggy, the characters thin, the songs unmemorable and the action repetitive! It occasionally looks nice though, and I’ll try to list some of its other attributes as well!

We open with a sad little girl, Penny, tossing a message-in-a-bottle off an old riverboat! This note is found by an international society of mice dedicated to helping people in trouble! A novel enough concept, certainly, but it seems like almost any of this society’s other adventures would surely be more exciting than the one we are to be given!

This is kind of a running theme! The mouse agents chosen to rescue Penny from her dilemma are Bernard, a stammering janitor-mouse voiced by Bob “Catch 22” Newhart, and Miss Bianca, the Hungarian delegate, played by Eva Gabor! Both do a fine enough job, but one feels that any other two agents might have been picked instead, and they would be at least as good or better!

And what is Penny’s dilemma? Ha ha, well, she has quite a few! She’s a poor orphan girl, and except for an elderly cat is apparently friendless, and on top of that she gets kidnapped by nasty fortune hunters who need a person of small stature to go down a slime pit to search for a legendary diamond! Geraldine Fitzgerald voices the principal antagonist, Madame Medusa, who, despite Miss Fitzgerald’s admirable hamming, is nothing but an inferior copy of Cruela De Vil! Her secret lair is not an old family mansion but a decrepit riverboat, and she keeps a pair of alligators as pets! (The gators don’t talk, which is odd considering almost every other kind of animal can in this picture!) Altogether, it’s another case where the backstory of how Medusa and her droopy-dog henchman Mr. Snoops began their odd partnership, and how they became aware of the huge pirate diamond they’re searching for, might well have been more compelling than the far end of the tale we're being shown!

Bernard and Miss Bianca’s love story works about as well as you’d expect it to between those two actors, and between those two characters! Familiar voices are present and accounted for in, and helpful to, most of the other characters, like John “Herbie Rides Again” McIntire as Rufus, and perennial hayseed Pat Buttram as the corn likker-drinkin’ swamp rat Luke! While it has moments of charm and humour, and best of all a queer swamp-Gothic weirdness, it’s unquestionably a minor work, and some extra labouring over the story would have been much appreciated! I give The Rescuers one and a half proto sea-doos!

Burl reviews Toy Story! (1995)

A good day to you! Ha ha, it’s Burl here to review an animated picture from… what? Almost twenty years back? Why, how time does fly! Ha ha, I still think of Toy Story as a new picture, I guess, because it fits in so well with all the many computer animated movies that have been made steadily ever since!

Now, I’ll tell you right off the bat that I’ve never seen any of these pictures! Ha ha, the most recently-made animated feature film I’ve seen is Beauty and the Beast, which I saw in the theater with a ladyfri*nd way back in 1991! I guess all these years I figured they were mainly films for kids, and that I would one day have a kid of my own with whom I could watch them! And now that’s the case, ha ha!

So until yesterday, I’d never seen Toy Story, and now I have! “Ha ha, what did you think of it, Burl?” you’re probably saying to your computer screen right now! Well, I thought it was pretty amusing! It was fast-paced and funny, just as I was expecting it to be!

Tom Hanks, famed from his appearance in The Money Pit, stars as Woody, a talking-cowboy doll which bears no resemblance to any actual toy I’ve ever heard of! He’s the de facto leader of the playthings in Andy’s room, but his benevolent rule, and his status as Andy’s Favourite, are threatened when the lad receives a Buzz Lightyear for his birthday present! There’s acrimony in toyland, and the two rivals must undertake a harrowing journey through a space-themed pizza restaurant and the home of a sadistic child, and not miss the moving van that will soon take everybody to a new home! Each must deal with his own troubles along the way: Buzz has to realizeand then deal with the realization that he’s not a real space ranger but only a child’s amuse-bon; while Woody must address his tendency toward mild unctuousness!

The movie is a trifle, but an enjoyable one! The voice casting is marvelous: Tim Allen, who is probably best known for his headlining appearance in What Do You Say To A Naked Lady?, sounds remarkably like Mel Gibson in his role as Buzz! Wallace Shawn from My Dinner With André plays a meek dinosaur; John Ratzenberger, known principally for his role in Protocol, is an officious pig; Annie Potts of Ghostbusters is a sexy Bo Peep; R. Lee Ermey of Full Metal Jacket is, of course, the leader of a platoon of army men; and Laurie Metcalf of Uncle Buck is Andy’s mom!

Little details delight the semi-alert viewer throughout, like the Alien-themed bop-em at the pizza place, or the fact that Andy’s house is being sold by Virtual Realty, or the mix-n-matched mutant toys led by a crab-legged confabulation that could only have been inspired by The Thing! I suppose the computer animation must look pretty crude to purveyors of todays cartoonshows, but it looked okay to me! I think I was right to start my journey into feature-length computer animation with the first one of them made!

There wasn’t much work done on the details of how life as a toy really works, though a set of capital-R Rules is alluded to at one point! Nor were they much concerned with providing any internal logic to the fancy! But ha ha, none of this bothered ol’ Burl! I guess I should watch the sequels, and maybe that has more of that business, if I ever do get curious about it! At any rate, it’s an inoffensive and fast-paced amusement, and I give it two and a half tributes to Gary Larson!

Burl reviews Dumbo! (1941)

Rootin-tootin-scootin, it’s Burl! Ha ha, I’m here to review a classic in animation for you, the fine Disney picture Dumbo! Ha ha, you’ve all seen it, I’m sure, but I hadn’t! Not until recently anyway! I’d certainly seen bits of it, like the parts General Robert Stack weeps over during his screening in 1941, but that’s about it!

The biggest surprise I found in the picture was that Dumbo doesn’t really fly until the end! I thought his flying would be a big part of the movie, and that he would have many flying adventures! Maybe they were saving those for the (ha ha, non-existent) sequels, and this was meant as more of an origin story!

And indeed it does begin with his origin: in point of fact, delivery by stork! The particular stork delivering Dumbo is an elderly slowbones, a little muddle-headed, and his slack performance causes needless grief for dowdy Mrs. Jumbo! Dumbo – whose real name, Jumbo Jr., is quickly forgotten – finds himself in a world of nasty lady elephants, unfeeling clowns, a self-obsessed ringmaster and, thankfully, a good-hearted mouse! When Mrs. Jumbo goes ape trying to protect her offspring’s good name, she is locked up as mad, and the mouse becomes Dumbo’s only friend!

The movie doesn’t overdo Dumbo’s tribulations, I’m glad to say! Neither does it condemn his episode of accidental drunkenness! In fact, had Dumbo and the mouse not accidentally imbibed clown champagne, they never would have discovered his magical flying powers in the first place!

The movie is full to bursting with beautiful circus imagery and great character voices! Ha ha, that mouse is marvelous! Even the songs are pretty good, and not too numerous! I would echo Sigfried Kracauer’s critique of the picture though: the famed theorist complained that, while Dumbo might well have used his power of flight to soar off “toward some unknown paradise,” he instead chose to remain “the highly-paid star of the same circus director who once flogged his mother Jumbo.” Though the obvious answer is that Dumbo is choosing to remain with his mother and only incidentally with the circus itself, it still does seem as though one of the movie’s takeaway messages is that forgiveness can be bought with perks and comforts! And the rest of the animals still must dwell in their cramped quarters, after all!

The movie is a little thin, maybe – Dumbo never speaks a word in the picture, so as a character he’s a little lacking! Ha ha, but the garrulous mouse, the bumptious crows (whose Negro coding, while sympathetic, is the movie’s most outdated element), the bi*chy elepantresses and the deluded ringmaster all help to make up for that doughnut hole!

It’s a terrific picture overall, brisk and breezy at 64 minutes, beautiful to look at, frequently clever and often charming! Casey Jr. is a marvelous little train, too! I’m going to give Dumbo three faceless roustabouts!