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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.

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