I wanted to watch this movie because I had read that Walt Disney had said it reminded him of his childhood. One of my favorite parts of the the Disney World Resort is Main Street U.S.A., and I also read that this movie had some connection to what they tried to create in the park. The story is about a widower who moves from Boston to a small rural town with her three children. They fix up a big yellow house and adapt to country life. My family enjoys Little House on the Prarie and Pollyana, and we thought this would be along those lines. As we watched Summer Magic, we became increasingly mystified. Rather than progressing through a linear narrative, this movie piles on things that make no sense into a larger and larger pile, like a misshapen heap of gunney sacks. Most of the songs were terrible and poorly placed. None of them added to the story. There were moments when it felt like the movie might work, and some sequences were enjoyable as separate vignettes, but we ended up turning it off before it was finished. I watched the rest of it myself later and didn't care about any of it. I would have liked a better story and characters I could care about.
Review of Summer Magic
