A while back I discovered that my wife somehow managed to grow up without seeing any of the Kurt Russell Disney mad-science-at-college movies from the late Sixties and early Seventies.
So, I added the movies to my Zip queue, and while I was in Australia the first one, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, arrived.
So we watched it earlier this week. I haven’t seen it since I was quite young, probably late in the single-digit years, and it’s quite a different movie when viewed as an adult in the early 21st century.
There’s some “my how technology has changed” laughs, as when the computer is delivered–in a series of floor-to-ceiling cabinets that essentially fill a room. There’s some “you couldn’t get away with that now” comedy, as when the doctors look into Dexter‘s eyes and can see a cabinet with flashing lights inside there–obviously visual shorthand for the “there’s a computer in his head” thing, but there’s something charmingly naive about the way it’s presented. There’s the “look, it’s clean cut, eighteen year old Snake Plissken” comedy, the “gangsters in a hippy dunebuggy racing comedy”, and so much more.
There’s also an object lesson in the way stories are told. The total screen time consumed between the computer-brain accident and the time that everyone knows what’s going on is about 180 seconds. The time between then and our hero being a world famous celebrity is less than that. Those old Disney flicks didn’t fool around with pacing.
However, FAR AND AWAY the best thing about the movie–which was a complete and total surprise to me, since it apparently made no impression the first time (or more likely wasn’t even there the first time, since I probably saw the cut-down version that they would have shown on the weekly Disney TV show) is the theme song. It’s so gloriously, hilariously, BadGood that I had to rip it off the movie’s soundtrack and make myself an MP3 to preserve it. Actually the visuals that accompany it are similarly amazing, but I wasn’t going to Youtube it, because I’m basically lazy. It appears to be the work of obviously underappreciated Disney genius Robert F. Brunner.
And now I will share it with you.
At some future point we’ll watch the other two movies in the sequence: Now You See Him Now You Don’t and The Strongest Man in the World, but I suspect that there won’t be anything in them to compare with the awesomeness of that track.
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