Chapter Two: You Know, For the Kids and Stuff
Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again & Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation
By Brett Beach
January 28, 2010
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Klosterman is too smart a writer to rant and rave or to drown in gloom. The aura of melancholy I sense may simply be my unease at how much of what he says hits home for me. I commented in one of my earliest columns that finding an artist in any medium that strikes a chord with you is a wonderful thing. For that relationship to continue and deepen as you both individually age and mature is as striking and rare and wonderful a thing as finding a man or woman to want to share your life with or raise a child with, and growing old with him or her. With the six books (including his wonderful fiction debut Downtown Owl in 2008) he has released, and how they have impacted me, it may be that Klosterman and I are on the road to growing old together. I highly recommend picking up one of his books and deciding for yourself.
And now, the rest of the story: Two weeks ago, I became a dad for the first time and in between the well wishes from friends and family and the posting of numerous pictures on Facebook, the question began to form in my mind: how much privacy do I accord my son (who as I type this with one hand lays nestled in the crook of my other arm, waging a valiant effort on his part to avoid falling asleep)? I take this query rather seriously. One of my favorite new authors, Chelsea Cain (who I also mention with pride is a fellow Portlander) had a long-running column in The Oregonian which in the years after Cain became a mother frequently talked about her young daughter Eliza and mined the vein of "kids say/do the darndest things" to great effect. When her daughter turned four last year, Cain felt the time had come to let those childhood experiences remain uncaptured by the written word and so ended the column. It is a lovely gesture - although certainly more than just that - and I have been considering it in light of both being a parent and of having my own public forum.
I will come back to those thoughts later, but this week's Chapter Two picks, in honor of Finn's birth, are a pair of films for the kids. One was Disney's last sequel of the 1970s and the other is a relatively forgotten animated part two from the mid-1980s. Neither is on my short or long list of great sequels or children's entertainment or family fare, but The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again is soothing in its own fashion and more enjoyable than the first and Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation is.. well, it's aggressively weird to be sure and just odd enough to merit more than a passing "meh."
Before I dive into those, I think a few words are warranted on what I do consider to be the epitome of quality family entertainment. From 1983-1985, the series Five Mile Creek aired on Australian television. Thirty-nine episodes were produced and The Disney Channel eventually acquired the rights and broadcast it in heavy rotation for a time. A complete 20-volume VHS compilation (now long out of print) was released in 1985 and the first season came out on DVD five years ago. Loosely based on a Louis L'Amour novel, Five Mile Creek takes place in the Australian Outback and follows the romances, adventures, and antics of those who live and work at a stagecoach station in the mid-19th century. Episodes alternated between light-hearted and more serious fare and one of the main characters even died before the show ended.
What appealed to me as a kid and later as an adult rewatching them was that these were characters that you easily came to care about. As one-dimensional as some of the roles may have been conceived, the performers chosen were so archetypally suited for the part that they brought on added depth and nuance themselves. The majority of the actors never parlayed their roles here into success on the international stage, with the exception of a teenaged Nicole Kidman, who played a recurring character in the third and final season. The show is worth seeking out (buying the VHS set on eBay perhaps?) and falling in love with.
As an indication of where Walt Disney Studios' fortunes were in the 1960s vs. the 1970s, consider this little nugget of info. In the former decade, the highest grossing film for the company was Mary Poppins (over $100 million in lifetime grosses counting various reissues over the years.) In the latter decade it was...The Apple Dumpling Gang ($36 million gross in 1975.) A sequel was all but assured and four years later, the same year that Disney came out with its first PG-rated film, The Black Hole, the gang did indeed ride again and performed as sequels often did once upon a time, pulling in just over half the gross of the first film, about $20 million.
Between 1960 and the early 1980s, the Walt Disney Studios released around 90 live-action or live-action/animation mixed films. Of this total, Norman Tokar or Vincent McEveety, the two men respectively responsible for the first Apple Dumpling and its sequel, directed almost 33%. Throw in the other films by Mary Poppins director Robert Stevenson and those three men accounted for nearly half of Disney's feature film output in this 20-year period. Tokar passed away in 1979, but McEveety went on to direct episodic television (where he had gotten his start in the 1950s and 1960s) for 20 more years, with a fair number of Murder She Wrote-s in the 1980s and Diagnosis Murder-s in the 1990s comprising the largest portion of his efforts. Scanning the list of McEveety's feature films (all of which were from the 1970-1981 period and all for Disney), it seems apparent that he was the go to guy for the lesser tier films and sequels.
To wit, Stevenson directed The Shaggy Dog and its sequel, The Shaggy D.A. Tokar directed the first two Herbie, the Love Bug films while McEveety handled the last two theatrical Herbie films of that era: the Monte Carlo adventure and the truly dreadful Rio de Janeiro junket (aka Herbie Goes Bananas.) The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again may be the most distinguished of his output by default and its good enough that it's a shame Disney has only released it in a bare-bones full screen DVD nearly a decade ago. The first film was ostensibly the tale of a gambler redeemed by the love of a strong woman and a trio of pinch-their-cheeks-cute moppets, but Tim Conway and Don Knotts as Theodore and Amos, a pair of would-be lawbreakers who mostly ended up victims of their own stupidity and bad luck, provided the best moments.
The sequel has them breaking out on their own to become gentlemen of leisure and respectability. Of course, it all goes horribly, ridiculously wrong. While it is often a mistake to elevate enjoyable supporting players to lead roles, ADGRA solves this by surrounding the pair with a bench-deep roster of great character actors and giving them all worthwhile bits of business. Kenneth Mars is a shambling hulking delight as a seemingly unstoppable federal marshal who is reduced to a blubbering psychotic mess when he crosses paths with Conway and Knotts. Tim Matheson, fresh from a breakthrough role in National Lampoon's Animal House the year before, uses his frat-boy-bland good looks as a private who may be up to no good. Harry Morgan stepped away from M*A*S*H to play the put-upon and increasingly flummoxed commander of a fort under siege (no Colonel Potter fortitude here, though it is interesting to note he is the only other returning actor from the first film, albeit in a different role.) The irreplaceable Jack Elam shows up late in the film and gains laughs from just the way he carries himself.
The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again is episodic by nature with its 90 minute running time divided into three distinct sections: Theodore and Amos arrive in town and are mistaken for bank robbers; they flee but with their luck, it is into the arms of the military and they are conscripted; and after destroying a military fort they are sentenced to prison but uncover a plan to rob a train and manage to redeem themselves. The ending feels particularly rushed (although in a nice deus ex machina, Native Americans fortuitously come to the rescue and are not the bad guys) and the best segment is the glorious slapstick in the middle part by which Conway and Knotts unintentionally torch Fort Concho to the ground. Reflecting on its impression on me as a young'un, it appeals to that childhood fear that no matter how hard you try to be an adult, you are in over your head and every step you make is inevitably going to be bungled. Conway and Knotts may never have been Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello, but their shtick still works 30 years later.
There apparently was a five or six month stretch in 1985 where I was obsessed with The Care Bears. Since I was not aware of the greeting cards or the toys and the show had not started airing (at least not in my neck of the woods), my only rationale is that the ubiquitous full page ads for that spring's The Care Bears Movie in the back of the comic books I purchased made a distinct impression on me. I was most definitely in the Mountain View Mall fourplex opening weekend and on the way back home, I made my mother stop so I could rent the one VHS release that was available at the video store. By the time Care Bears Movie II: A New Generation came out one year later in 1986 and earned a scant $8 million, I was definitely not interested any more. (Whether or not it opened in Bend, I honestly do not recall. It opened on far fewer screens so it may not have and my lack of interest may have been partially a sour grapes result of inaccessibility.)
I didn't see the sequel until I was an adult and so my thoughts on it are colored with that perspective. The first film calms me much as the second Apple Dumpling does, and this is thanks to Mickey Rooney's soothing tones as the narrator and the occasional Canadian accent detectable when someone says "about" or in Grumpy Bear's wonderful harrumphing of the epithet, "Baby bear mischief!" Much as many movies or television shows are filmed on the cheap in Canada, the Care Bears output gives us chaos running amok in what must be Canadian locales and I am always amused by the notion of grumpy Canadians who have stopped caring because of some evil spirit. CBMII has much the same sort of plot as the first one but suffers from a regrettable decision to be a prequel for the first half hour of a slim 76- minute running time.
This origin story is confusing in and of itself but from what I can gather, the Care Bears were much like our Pilgrims of the 1600s, fleeing persecution in a distant land and eventually making their way by boat to a heavenly bestowment of sorts (seriously, their boat is carried up in a beam of light towards the clouds where Care A Lot is ultimately established). They are endowed with personalities and powers and charged with watching over the world to see that people don't give up caring for one another.
What befuddles me the most is that in the Care Bears Movie, the Care Bear Cousins are introduced for the first time anywhere, in their own magical land known as the Forest of Feelings. In CBMII, they are already part of the group of young animals being maneuvered towards safe haven and they are placed in the Forest of Feelings so that not all the Care creatures are in one place at the same time (which I guess is equivalent to not having every member of the President's cabinet at the State of the Union address lest the line of Presidential succession be irrevocably severed). Have their memories been wiped? Why do Brave Heart Lion and Playful Heart Monkey not remember their brethren? How is this a New Generation?
The songs aren't as memorable as Carole King's theme for the first film (and I do have to wonder how much it would take to get her and James Taylor to perform it as a duet on their current US tour) although one song hilariously and unintentionally evokes Faith No More's "We Care a Lot," which came out around that time. The summer camp setting and a young girl's obsession with becoming Camp Champ are bizarre but not as much as the sight of an outcast brother and sister finding their calling as de facto babysitters for the wee Care ones.
The commercial failure of this project ended the big-screen saga of the bears who care but, in following years, The Care Bears would wind up in adaptations of Alice in Wonderland and The Nutcracker, significantly trippier than A New Generation and, the last time I checked, available for viewing over on YouTube.
To come back to my dilemma from the start of the column, as Finn has returned once again to be rested on my right arm: I know I am looking forward to the adventure of fatherhood and occasionally doing another "silly column" such as this in the future. It is my hope that I won't have to rely on Finn too too much to pick up my slack in the anecdote department. With that said, it appears he has wet his diaper, his jammies, and by extension me, so I have other business with which to attend.
Next time: This filmmaker's first three films - a thematic trilogy - came out in the 1990s. We are still awaiting his fourth film.