sjcobert Reviews

The Funny Company (1963– )

They don't make 'em like this any more...

[10/10 · 19 December 2005]

"The Funny Company" was a series of short (5 or 6 minute) films about a bunch of enterprising kids doing chores and deeds for local businesses. A distinguishing thing about this series is that each film contained a short film-within-a-film, which might be an educational piece, a story, a song, a how-to segment, or other item of interest to kids. In a sense, this show could take a place next to "Captain Kangaroo" in showing that a show could be entertaining and educational at the same time.

In a sense, it's a shame this little gem didn't continue longer than it did. The educational segments (most of which were introduced by a gizmo called the Weisenheimer) taught without hitting the viewer over the head, and anyway, why does the value of a cartoon have to depend on how empty-headed it is? It is on record that a six-year-old child saved the life of a 2-year-old by giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, which he learned from this show. Know of any other cartoon that can make that claim?

Trivia bit: This show's "educational" segment - later used on shows like "The Big World of Little Adam" and "Tennessee Tuxedo" - was spoofed in the early years of "Saturday Night Live" in a segment called "The Mr Bill Show". Every episode had poor Mr. Bill getting the what-for beaten out of him by Mr. Sluggo and Mr. Hand... and every episode had some "lesson" that usually lasted one line. Example (from the first "Show"):

MR HAND: Look, Mr. Bill, here comes Mr. Sluggo! (Mr. Sluggo, in his car, runs over Mr. Bill) MR BILL: Ooooohh!! MR HAND: You should always look both ways before you cross the street, Mr. Bill.

Trust me, it loses something in the spoofing.

Money to Burn (1973 TV Movie)

Clever, but a bit (necessarily) disappointing...

[8/10 · 17 September 2005]

This movie had a clever plot to it: A counterfeiter has the sharp idea to exchange a million dollars of his bogus bills with worn-out money that is earmarked for destruction. The problem is, the real money is kept in a vault, and the floor in front of it is super-sensitive to contact: even the weight of a feather will set the alarm blazing. The con (and his safe-cracking partner) ask a retired master crook how to do it. The guy half-jokingly answers, "Why don't you walk on the ceiling?"... and the partners get a wild idea.

This movie sets up the counterfeiter and the safe-cracker as the protagonists (I suppose "heroes" is too nice a term, since they are after all criminals), and that is the big weakness of the movie. We root for these two guys to pull off their harebrained scheme and to finally get away with it, but we can't forget this basic rule: this is a TV movie, and according to the Television Code a lawbreaker must be punished for his or her misdeeds. The movie tries to present us with a kind of "have your cake and eat it too" ending (I can't say more without turning it into a spoiler), but I suspect most viewers will find the ending just a bit of a disappointment.

The Juggler of Notre Dame (1982 TV Movie)

Superb retelling of the classic story

[10/10 · 28 July 2005]

This retelling of the classic story of the simple juggler varies from the original in certain ways, but it is still very well told and the message shines through. The Juggler (played by Carl Carlsson, a professional juggler whose stage name actually is Barnaby) is presented as a tragic figure, trying to get past a terrible loss in his life. His juggling is still top-notch, but he is just too sad a figure to make it as a street performer. Along comes "Sparrow" (Patrick Collins in a superb performance), who has little juggling talent but whose outlook on life helps Barnaby rediscover some of the joy he lost. Alas, tragedy is to touch the Juggler's life once again, and this time he finds himself at a Catholic retreat... after renouncing his juggling for good. In this retelling, Providence intervenes and Barnaby takes up his craft once again, juggling (a performance you have to see to believe) for the statue of the Blessed Virgin.

Very highly recommended. You don't have to like juggling to enjoy this movie!

Things We Did Last Summer (1978 TV Movie)

Let's not forget Jane Curtin going on location in Memphis

[7/10 · 28 February 2005]

The comments and summaries entered so far have left out one of the more offbeat entries: Jane Curtin's supposedly "serious" news entry about what was going on in Memphis, Tennessee, during the summer of 1977. The city was under martial law that summer after the police went on strike. And - at the risk of stating the obvious - you can bet it hit that city hard when Elvis went to that big gig in the sky that August.

It made my local (Knoxville, TN) paper that SNL had contacted the mayor of the city to ask for permission to do an impression of him as part of the sketch; as I remember, that plan was scrapped and the mayor appeared as himself. (Sorry, forget the guy's name.) And as I recall, the gag of the episode was, in the midst of all that was going on in Memphis, the only thing Jane had to report can be summed up in four words: "IT WAS VERY HOT".

Detective Conan (1996– )

Like a breath of fresh air

[20 June 2004]

I had read about "Detective Conan" about a year prior to the show being released in the United States, and so when "Case Closed" began airing in May of 2004 I jumped at the opportunity to see this show. I was not disappointed.

This show is a welcome relief from the Scooby-Doo inspired cartoons (not to mention Scooby-Doo itself) that presented a "mystery" that a tree slug could solve in two minutes. The stories are well thought out, the solutions are NOT obvious but can be put together by an observant (and thinking) viewer, just as Conan does, and best of all the series does not insult the intelligence of its viewers: the show is entertaining without padding 3/4 or the episode with slapstick routines and mindless running from a person in a Halloween costume.

The show's premise is that little six-year-old Conan Edogawa is actually a 16-year-old detective prodigy. He was reduced to a grade school child when a mysterious would-be assassin gave him an experimental poison that (unknown to the poisoner) regressed the detective rather than killing him. In a bit of angst reminiscent of the early adventures of "Spider-Man", Conan makes a hard discovery: You can have the most brilliant detective mind in the world, but if you're six years old, all the police are going to tell you is, "BEAT IT, KID!" In spite of this hardship, little Conan finds ways of bringing the guilty parties to justice -- although all too often, someone else takes the credit for his deductions.

HIGHLY recommended.

Against All Odds (1984)

This film does not work. Why not? Now there's a question...

[30 April 2004]

This is the sort of film that you leave, recognizing that the film as a whole never "came together", but trying to figure out just WHERE it went wrong. The script was (or at least should have been) intelligent, the actors were competent... so what went wrong?

The best answer I could come up with (and heaven knows I'm no big shot Hollywood critic) was the way James Woods portrayed the character of Jake. This guy should have come off as a bigger-than-life, high-level Mafioso type; I got the impression of a cheap hood who tried to make himself look big as the front man for the real boss. When Jake orders the ex-football player to do a routine murder and the jock goes along with it, it doesn't underscore what a big man Jake is; it cheapens the lead character to think that he'd take orders to commit murder from the weaselly underling.

It didn't help this movie in the long run - okay, maybe its box office - that the continuous play of Phil Collins' "Against All Odds" on radio and MTV effectively made this movie a must-see... and regardless of how good the tune was and what it was nominated for, the lyrics had NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with what happened in the course of the movie.

The Aurora Encounter (1986)

What might have happened if "E.T." had taken place a century earlier

[21 April 2004]

This movie appears to try and cash in on the success of "E. T." by telling the story of a (supposedly true) occurrence in Texas almost a century earlier. A little alien lands near a Texas town and befriends many of the locals. Unfortunately his arrival attracts the attention of a few of the wrong people, and things go downhill from there.

The story of "E. T.", retold in a time when there was no 20th century technology to work with - not to mention no Reese's Pieces with which to lure anyone out of the woods - could have made for a most interesting movie. Unfortunately, this feature is woefully slow-paced, and the ending is very much a downer. If the story is in fact true, the writers might have been forgiven for taking a little artistic license to pick up the pace a little and keep the audience's attention. The scenes of the alien's interaction with the townspeople (most notably Jack Elam's character) have some magic to them, but the film as a whole just never quite comes together.

Beauty and the Beast (1934)

Mary Jane???

[7/10 · 9 April 2004]

There is some controversy in the world of Looney Tune & Merrie Melody fandom if the main character of this short, the little girl who enters The Land of Slumber, is indeed the long-running comic book character Mary Jane.

Sniffles the mouse was once described as "Chuck Jones' first star", but he only appeared in about a dozen Merrie Melodies and one Looney Tune in the 1930s and 1940s. He did have a cameo appearance in 1994's "Space Jam", but the fans who remember him at all generally remember his backup feature in the comic book "Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies" (later simply "Looney Tunes") that ran continuously from 1941 thru 1961, a run matched only by Bugs and Porky. The feature had him teamed up with a little girl named Mary Jane, and in fact after the first issue was re-titled "Sniffles and Mary Jane". (In the 1950s this was renamed "Mary Jane and Sniffles".)

So is the "Beauty" of "Beauty and the Beast" in fact Mary Jane? The evidence in its favor includes: 1) The little girl looks like Mary Jane as she was drawn in the very first comic books; 2) She enters Dreamland the same way in the short and the comics, by having magic sand sprinkled on her; 3) In her adventures, she shrinks to toy (or mouse) size; and 4) In her adventures, toys and dolls come to life. Furthermore, although she is not called (or credited as) "Mary Jane" in the short, she is not called any other name either, so the short does not rule out that she MIGHT be the Mary Jane of comic fame.

In fairness, the creator of Mary Jane for the comics, editor Chase Craig (who named the character after his wife) never claimed to have seen "Beauty and the Beast". (In fact, when he developed the series, only three "Sniffles" cartoons existed and he had only seen one of them!)

Officially, the similarity of "Beauty" to Mary Jane is considered a bit of a coincidence, nothing more. But fans will always wonder if perhaps, in the back of the creator's mind, the little girl with the late night snack became Sniffles' longstanding friend.

(For the record, both the little girl and her tin soldier friend from this short make a return appearance in "Those Beautiful Dames" later that same year.)

Bedtime for Sniffles (1940)

A rare Warners Christmas-themed cartoon

[21 March 2004]

It's Christmas Eve, and Sniffles the mouse is going to wait up to see Santa Claus making his rounds. Only problem is, the little guy didn't realize just how tired he'd get - or how appealing his bed would look - waiting up that late. For all the hundreds of animated shorts WB put out over the years, this is one of the very few that is Christmas-themed, and I've never figured out just why that is. ("The Shanty Where Santy Claus Lives", being black-and-white, doesn't get much air time nowadays.) Sniffles only appeared in about a dozen shorts in the late 1930's and 1940's, and the fact that this little classic is played every year at Christmas time is probably the only reason he didn't fade into obscurity.

The Powerpuff Girls: 'Twas the Fight Before Christmas (2003 Video)

Delightful (and not-so-violent!) Christmas video

[9/10 · 13 March 2004]

It's the Christmas season, and everyone in Townsville is looking forward to what Santa Claus has for them. But when Princess Morebucks gets the notion that she might just be on Santa's "Naughty" list, she makes a visit to the North Pole and almost ruins Christmas for everyone. This lighthearted holiday fare will entertain kids and adults alike. The animation is the simple TV-style, not the computer-enhanced style the theatrical movie used. Perhaps best of all, the violence that the series is so often criticized for is kept to a minimum. Some kids may not like the depiction of Santa as a grouchy old sourpuss, but who could blame his state of mind after having to deliver a lump of coal to almost every girl and boy on the planet?

Those Beautiful Dames (1934)

Kind of dismal at first, but with a happy ending

[6/10 · 11 March 2004]

A little girl living (alone?) in utter poverty is rescued from her dismal existence by a group of toys come to life. The flick starts out with the bleak view of the girl's life: even the mice in her shanty can't find enough crumbs to live on. Then the toys - led by a little girl and a toy soldier, last seen in "Beauty and the Beast" (1934) - slip in while the girl is asleep and totally renovate her home. The girl awakens at midnight to a party of cake and ice cream. The cartoon is amusing in its silly, Merrie Melody way. Purists might object to the title song being sung as "Those Beautiful Dolls", buy, hey, this is a kids' cartoon. Favorite bit: A line of teddy bears dances to the title song played on a record player. When the record skips back, the bears all gamely repeat the same step over and over until the little girl fixes the player.

George Shrinks (2000–2003)

Cute, enjoyable little cartoon

[19 February 2004]

The children's book "George Shrinks" is about a boy (perhaps eight years old) who awakens one morning to discover he has shrunk to the size of a mouse. This program modifies the premise in this way: the main character is named "George Shrinks" (yes, "Shrinks" is his last name) and, to the best of anyone's knowledge, he has always been about two inches tall. George's family takes their oldest son's diminutive size in stride, as does George himself. Mr. Shrinks is an inventor and has made several devices to assist tiny George in getting around and doing what he needs to do. And George himself is one plucky kid, who (in the tradition of other shrunken kids such as Alice) isn't going to let being mouse-sized stop him from enjoying life.

Some of the adventures of George come about by his being so tiny; other times, George uses his miniature size to solve a problem (such as when his mother's wedding ring is washed down the drain.) The stories are imaginative and non-violent, and should be a delight for young and old alike.

Sarah T. - Portrait of a Teenage Alcoholic (1975 TV Movie)

Linda Blair vehicle with all the stops pulled out

[18 December 2003]

This movie was a vehicle for Linda Blair - but don't let that deter you from checking it out.

Linda plays Sarah Travis, who as the movie begins already has a problem with alcohol. Her parents' recent divorce (and her mother's remarriage) and her move to a new school are not helping things. Slowly everything in her life slides right down the hill and into her river of alcohol. Some of the movie is custom-made for Linda Blair - she gets to sing at a party, her boyfriend has his own horses and lets her groom them (Linda LOVED horses, the teen magazines dutifully reported) - but the message of the movie rings clear. Remarkably powerful scene: Linda goes to an AA meeting, and little Bobby (Eric Olsen, then starring in "Apple's Way") steps forward and shares that his alcoholism made him "so damn disgusted with myself" that he knew he had to get help.

It's not accurate to say Sarah hits rock bottom. She THINKS she hits rock bottom, and then learns the hardest way possible just how much further she could fall.

A powerful movie, HIGHLY recommended.

Professor Popper's Problem (1974)

Amusing little movie, a pleasant diversion

[7/10 · 5 October 2002]

I had the pleasure of watching "Professor Popper's Problems" on the Disney channel in 1989. (They put the extra "s" at the end of the title.) It involves a professor at a British school who has developed a shrinking pill. He and a couple of his boy students test the pill, and sure enough, they shrink to a few inches in height. But growing back to normal is a little more complicated, and making things more complicated still are rivals who want to kidnap the shrunken professor and get the formula from him.

This movie was never a shoo-in for the Academy Awards and it isn't exactly a classic, but it is reasonably pleasant (especially for the kids) and is entertaining.

The Powerpuff Girls Movie (2002)

Fun, excitement and laughs for fans and newcomers alike!

[10/10 · 4 July 2002]

"The Powerpuff Girls" movie tells the story (familiar to fans of the show) of how Professor Utonium created Blossom, Bubbles and Buttercup. It then takes the story a step further to show how the Girls made the decision to use their powers to fight crime and help the people of Townsville.

The film is almost non-stop action and excitement. The 2D animation may not be as sharp or "state-of-the-art" as, say, "Shrek", but it is still a visual delight. Kids will love the simple story (which makes a point without hitting the viewer over the head with it), while adults will enjoy the in-jokes and references that abound in the movie.

One final observation: It is obvious that the creators of this little gem love and respect the medium (and the audience as well). The fact that this was in part a "labor of love" shows in the finished product.

A Short Story (1993)

A girl comes to terms with being short

[9/10 · 12 November 2000]

A young girl, Sylvie, realizes early in her life that she is small for her age. Her entire family is quite petite, so she takes her lack of height in stride. However, she is the eldest of three children, and when her "little" sister and brother pass her in height she has a crisis. She tries many things to increase her height, from hanging from a jungle gym to high-heeled shoes, but eventually comes to terms with the fact that she will always be tiny. But she joins a club for small people, a covert society that is slowly "adjusting" the world to make it more accessible to people like herself.

This tongue-in-cheek cartoon is an amusing story about a young girl who comes to terms with her short stature. At the end of the movie, an adult Sylvie and three other petite people sit at a table (with chairs that are right for them) as the screen shows the disclaimer, "Any similarity between persons living or dead is entirely coincidental." Uhh... yeah, right. Is that why the main character has the same name as the creator of the film? ;o)

The Uncanny (1977)

Lucy's guaranteed weight loss plan: Step in the pentagram, please...

[12 November 2000]

This movie tells three stories about how cats are bent on taking over the earth. Peter Cushing plays an author who is trying to expose cats as evil creatures. An odd error in this movie is that each of the humans who suffers at the hands -- uh, paws -- of cats is pretty darn nasty anyway, and the cats seem to be more of agents of revenge than just plain evil. Most interesting story was the second one, in which a teenaged girl named Angela picks on her cousin Lucy, rubbing in how short she is and sending her cat, Wellington, to the pound. Turns out Lucy is a witch and Wellington is her familiar, and by the time they are done with Angela she has a serious height problem of her own...

Whoopass Stew! (1992)

A cute cartoon showing the origin of what would later be The Powerpuff Girls

[8/10 · 11 October 2000]

"The Whoopass Girls" are created by Professor Utonium, duke it out with a quintet of gangrenous punks, and have to come up with a novel escape when they get stuck on a trio of three-foot-long amoeba crooks. Viewers will recognize The Whoopass Girls as the trio now known as The Powerpuff Girls; they are a little leaner in this short than they are on the familiar Hanna Barbera cartoons, and although their names are the same and their outfits (mostly) the same, the personalities of the Girls were not much developed until Cartoon Network picked up the show four years later. Trivia bit: The punks in the first part of the cartoon (later named The Gangreen Gang) were a satire on Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids!

Joë petit boum-boum (1973)

Passable French cartoon... Nice, but hardly a classic

[5/10 · 11 October 2000]

This is a cartoon about a group of boys (Boy Scouts, possibly) who encounter a spooky castle during a camping trip. The boys discover a very large man living there. Although the man is not a giant, he soon looks like one when he traps the boys in a shrinking machine and reduces them to the size of flies. One boy, Johnny, escapes and has an adventure in a beehive. When he gallantly saves the hive, the Queen Bee knights him. Then Johnny organizes the bees and other woodland animals to attack the castle and rescue (and restore) his trapped friends. The story, while familiar,is told with imagination and life. The animation was a notch before state-of-the-art in 1975: passable, but possibly a turn-off to kids who grew up with Disney. Biggest drawback: The dialogue is almost non-existent. Perhaps Jean Image cut all talking to a minimum to make the film more open to international markets, but the decision hurts the film more than it helps.