Director: Vincent McEveety
Cast: Bob Crane, Kurt Russell, Barbara Rush

Although I extremely dislike the Disney company of this day and age, there are a lot of things I admit that I admire about Walt Disney's leadership over the Disney corporation until his death, things that I wish the leadership of Disney today - or any other major Hollywood studio - would take notice of and try to emulate. For starters, right from the beginning days of the Disney studio, Walt Disney was always looking to do something new and different in the world of motion pictures. In animation, he was the force that got his studio to not only be the first to add sound to animated films (much to Max Fleischer's chagrin) and not only the first to add color to animated films (much to Max Fleischer's chagrin), but the first to make a feature-length hand-drawn color animated movie (much to Max Fleischer's chagrin.) Risks such as those that Walt Disney took usually paid off in spades. The second thing that I admire about Walt Disney's leadership that even when he had a great success with something motion picture-related, he generally eschewed making true sequels to the successful works in question. Yes, he did make some (Son Of Flubber, Savage Sam, The Monkey's Uncle, for example), but Walt had more of a taste for original stories, and he seemed to know that generally too much familiarity would breed contempt. Which brings me to a third reason I admire Walt Disney's general direction. When he did strike box office gold with some kind of general idea, he was not one who liked to milk the idea to utter death. For example, take the feature-length entries in the Disney Tru-Life Adventures Series, documentaries such as The Vanishing Prairie and The Living Desert. When the Disney company started to release this series in 1953, it was fresh and new, and nobody else was making anything like them. By the time the last entry (Jungle Cat) hit theaters in 1960, other filmmakers from elsewhere were starting to actively emulate them for the theatrical and television markets, and Walt Disney knew that while he probably could extend his series for a few more years, demand was starting to dip. So, he brought the series to an end while it still had some strength and respect in the public eye.

While there were occasional critical and/or financial flops (such as Ten Who Dared and Miracle Of The White Stallions) during the leadership of the Disney corporation by Walt Disney, Disney still had a great batting average right up to when Walt Disney passed away in 1966. After the initial shock of Disney's long-time leader now gone, many people wondered where the studio would go from there. Actually, for the first few years after Walt Disney's passing, the studio seemed to be doing well, putting out box office hits such as The Love Bug, Bedknobs And Broomsticks, and The Aristocats. However, upon closer inspection of the hit movies that came out of Disney the first few years after Walt Disney's passing, one will see that the majority of these hits had been in the extensive pre-production stage while Walt Disney was still alive. Eventually, the Disney company started to run out of movie projects that had earlier been under Walt Disney's eye, and that's when things started to go south. Instead of the Disney company trying then to imitate the kind of business thinking Walt Disney had in his lifetime, the Disney company started to think along the lines of, "What worked once before should work again." Namely, that meant repeating movie plot formulas. In the 1970s, the Disney company started to endlessly milk out an endless number of heavy-handed slapstick comedies, and movies concerning mischievous animals usually accompanied by precocious children. While in this period Disney did make some respectable movies, such movies were definitely in the minority. Making the situation worse was that in this time period, the mindset of audiences both child and adult was rapidly changing. You could say that the mindset of the entire audience was more grown-up, and finding the simple-minded nature of 1970s Disney movies no longer to their taste.

I sometimes wonder what direction the Disney studio would have moved along had Walt Disney not died in 1966. Had Walt Disney lived for another ten years - heck, even just for five more years - he no doubt would have seen popular culture (not just with movies) suddenly changing rapidly in front of his eyes. What would he have thought of adults and kids suddenly lining up to see movies with bad language, violence, and sexual material? Would he have caved in and started making more mature-themed movies, at least ones that had new ideas that other studios had not started exploiting? Or would he have tried to stay as wholesome as possible? How would he have reacted if he had still been alive when Superdad was first proposed to the Disney company? Would he have rejected it? Would he have gone for it? Or would he have gone for it, but requested a lot of changes? I have a feeling the decision concerning the proposal of Superdad would have been either choice one or three, judging from how the project ended up after being made. Before getting more into Superdad's quality, a look at its plot: The title figure is a man named Charlie McReady (Bob Crane, Hogan's Heroes), a lawyer by trade who is married to a woman named Sue (Barbara Rush, Peyton Place), and the two of them are parents to a teenage daughter named Wendy (Kathleen Cody, Illegally Yours). Although their daughter is old enough to about to leave high school behind and attend college, Charlie is worried about her future. He doesn't like her boyfriend Bart (Kurt Russell, Interstate 60), nor her close circle of friends, believing that these people will drag Wendy down to have a troubled life. At first, Charlie tries to infiltrate Wendy's friends and boyfriend by joining them in their recreational activities, but needless to say, he gets humiliated trying every one of those activities. Things get worse for Charlie when he finds out that Wendy plans to attend the local college instead of a more prestigious post-secondary institution, which will keep her in close contact with Bart and her friends. So, with the help of his law partner Ira (Dick Van Patten, Eight Is Enough), Charlie arranges with another college further away to give a scholarship to Wendy to attend there, with Charlie arranging to pay the entire expense of the scholarship from his savings. Wendy is informed she got a scholarship, and a bit reluctantly uproots from Bart and her friends to attend the further away college. Of course, Charlie is initially happy that his plans worked. But of course, complications soon come up...

Anyone who for some reason wants to take a look at Superdad would be best advised to know of lead actor Bob Crane's standing at the time of the production. After Hogan's Heroes ended in 1971, Crane suddenly found that demand for him in the Hollywood industry had all but dried up, and he had to lower himself working in dinner theater for the most part. I have a feeling that eventually getting a lead role in a Disney comedy wasn't much of a boost for him, which may explain how he comes across for the most part in the movie. There seems to be a dark cloud over his head, with his frequent sour expressions suggesting maybe someone a minute earlier interrupted Crane in the middle of the making of one of his notorious "home movies". Added to that is that physically, he doesn't look in the best shape, with his greying hair and his often-labored body movements. He clearly isn't happy about his surroundings, so it's a little surprising then that his phoning-in style is at times better than what a more enthusiastic actor might bring. His character's viewpoint of his daughter never becomes creepy or obsessed (such as how Tony Danza was in the later movie She's Out Of Control), but more towards a parent who has a healthy amount of concern for his (adult) child and wants the best for her. However, Crane does a lot more for his character than the other parts of the production do. There is some technical sloppiness, like an ample part of Crane's dialogue clearly (and badly) looped in post-production. But that's small potatoes compared to how the screenplay makes this character out to be. The character of Charlie isn't set up very properly in the beginning. Apart from Charlie not being really hostile towards his daughter's friends - just concerned - that's about the only insight we get into him. Subsequently, when he makes an action, big or small, we clearly see that he never first takes the time to stop and think carefully as to what he afterwards executes. As a result, he becomes a real dimwitted character, and not dimwitted in a way we can identify with and laugh at. Even children in the audience will think this guy is a real dope and not be laughing at him.

It should then be no surprise when I reveal that every other character in Superdad doesn't contain much (if anything) relatable to an audience, and the cast is pretty hard-pressed to be inspired by the weak script by Joseph L. McEveety, who wrote six other Disney movies of this period. Disney oft-used goofy actor Joe Flynn (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes) is fun to see as always, and Joby Baker (Blackbeard's Ghost) does put some effort to portray a somewhat demented artist that gets tangled with Charlie's daughter Wendy. But as for the other players in the movie, all that can be said of them is that they are "nice", and nothing more. Charlie's wife Sue is pleasant, but we learn really nothing about her opinion of things. Kurt Russell as Wendy's boyfriend Bart has no bad traits, but the script hardly gives him a bone that will give him some real personality. For that matter, we hardly learn a thing about Wendy's other friends, other than the fact that they, Wendy, and Bart act in a freely innocent manner that was dated by at least ten years when this movie was filmed. They just drift along being blandly cheerful for the course of the movie. This actually may be because of another big flaw in Superdad's screenplay, being that the story structure is a mess. You may have got a hint about this in my plot synopsis two paragraphs above, how it goes in one direction at first (Charlie interacting with his daughter's friends), then suddenly it changes its course to Charlie manipulating his daughter's post-secondary education plans. One of the consequences of this wild plotting is that because the story doesn't seem to evolve in a natural manner, the characters are not allowed to evolve as the movie goes along. They either seem stuck in neutral, or make sudden jumps (often not explained thoroughly) in their behavior that just ring false.

Another big mistake the story structure of Superdad makes is that although the movie changes direction several times, the pacing of the movie really feels extremely slow. It's odd then that some plot elements (like Joe Flynn's character's troubles) are never resolved despite the movie taking its sweet time, but a bigger problem of the slow pace is that the movie in fact becomes often really boring. It's so boring, that often my mind drifted away from the story and characters to focus on some curious details, like the fact that you only see two visible minorities in the entire 96-minute running time of the movie, or that Bart and the rest of Wendy's friends somehow manage to find the time to drive 400 miles (and back) in an entire weekend to visit Wendy at her college. Curious details such as those did occasionally give me some amusement, which is more than I can say about Superdad's direct stabs at comedy. The (intentional) comedy is not the least bit funny at all. To give some idea of the movie's inability to provide laughs, let me illustrate the part of the movie where Charlie tags along with Wendy and her friends to bond with them. They play volleyball, football, surfing, and water skiing all in the course of a day (making them somehow more attention-deprived than today's young adults), and when Charlie tries his hands at these activities, the unbelievably unimaginative (and unimaginatively executed) gags are exactly what any audience member will be able to predict, even those who are of pre-pubescent age. It's not just that kids won't be laughing at anything in Superdad, they'll be even more stiffly bored than their parents. Whoever thought at the Disney company that kids might be interested in a plot concerning a father worrying about his now-adult daughter, as well as a look at elements of the then-fading counterculture movement? If Walt Disney was still alive, while I am not sure if his guidance could have made Superdad work for the most part, I still think his influence would have improved the movie to a significant degree. Or your influence, dear reader, for that matter.

(Posted December 15, 2023)