Those obsessed with the meta nature of Disney films will be happy to know that Herbie Rides Again connects this series of films with the Medfield films, as Keenan Wynn brings his villainous Alonzo Hawk against our beloved VW bug (Hawk also appears in The Absent-Minded Professor and Son of Flubber, which take place at Medfield College, as do all of the Dexter Reilly films (The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes; Now You See Him, Now You Don’t and The Strongest Man in the World) and The Shaggy D.A.

Hawk is both a real estate magnate and demolition baron, which is a pretty amazing career path, and he wants to build a mall but “Grandma” Steinmetz (Helen Hayes**!) is standing in his way, as she owns a historical firehouse. She’s also the aunt of Buddy Hackett’s Tennessee Steinmetz*, who doesn’t appear in this movie, so the heroes become Willoughby Whitfield (Ken Berry) and Nicole Harris (Stefanie Powers).

Willoughby is really Hawk’s nephew, but once he learns how horrible the man is — and the chance to get with Stefanie Powers*** as the result will sour anyone on any relative — he helps her save the firehouse, which also has a sentient train car living there.

There’s a lot of comedy made at the bad guy’s expense for being irrationally afraid of Herbie. Look, no one laughs at everyone Christine menaces. I’d like to think that we’re all the heroes of our own stories, so I imagine that Hawk has no idea why this possessed German automobile wants to get him so badly. You can imagine how terrifying a little car constantly honking at you can be. Then again, Hawk did build a parking garage on the field where Joe DiMaggio and his brothers learned how to play ball.

The real evil here may be the Disney publicity department. They worked with Volkswagen to promote the sequel, as every dealer was given posters and a Herbie Bug to display. Even weirder, if a customer wanted to turn their new Beetle into a Herbie, they could buy a custom graphics kit from the VW parts department. Who were these maniacs?

*Tennessee is in Tibet helping his sick philosophy teacher, while Herbie’s former owner Jim Douglas has proved what we knew all along. He didn’t care about the Love Bug at all and has gone to Europe to race other cars.

**She’s also in Disney’s Candleshoe and One of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing.

**I would murder most of my extended family up until third cousins for the opportunity to sip sweet tea with 1974 Stefanie Powers.

If you’re from Pittsburgh, you know that Dr. Claw’s intimidating glass castle is just PPG Place.

Otherwise, this is a movie with perfect cartoon to real-life casting. You have Matthew Broderick as the Gadget, Rupert Everett as Dr. Claw, Michelle Trachtenberg as Penny and Dabney Coleman — the most perfect of these casting decisions — as Chief Quimby.

It then ruins all that good will by showing us Dr. Claw’s face, a fact that never ever happened across every season of the cartoon.

Perhaps the best part of this movie is the minions anonymous scene, in which a variety of henchmen appear, including henchmen include Mr. T and “Famous Bad Guy with Silver Teeth” (Richard Kiel as Jaws), “Famous Villain with Deadly Hat” (Richard Lee-Sung as Oddjob), “Famous Identifier of Sea Planes” (Bobby Bell as Tattoo from Fantasy Island), “Famous Native American Sidekick” (Hank Barrera as Tonto), “Bane of the Bumbling, Idiotic Yet Curiously Successful French Detective’s Existence” (Jesse Yoshimura as Cato Fong from The Pink Panther), “Son Before Second Son” (John Kim as Lee Chan, number one son of Charlie Chan) and “Famous Assistant to Dr. Frankensomething” (Keith Morrison as Igor).

After disastrous test screenings, the film was cut down from 110 minutes to 78 minutes. I have no idea just what was so upsetting in those 32 minutes, nor do I understand why this movie had to be any longer than 75 minutes.

Disney still made money from this movie, despite scorched earth reviews, as there weren’t a lot of kid-friendly films out in the summer of 1999. Throw in a bunch of cheaper direct to DVD sequels and a McDonald’s promotion to make your own Inspector Gadget that had parents traveling hundreds of miles to complete and even the worst of films can be a success.

One of the few things that never rang true to me about Tron was that Flynn ends up as a CEO. Luckily, Tron: Legacy fixed that by telling us what happened next, all while keeping up the Tron legacy of being a hyped big deal and then not being seen by anyone except those that it was intended for before becoming a cult film that few talk about — if a $170 million movie can be a cult movie, that is.

Screenwriter Adam Horowitz, who wrote the story along with Edward Kitsistold, told Collider, “For us, it was if we’re going to revisit this movie and try to take it forward, we’re the children of Tron. We grew up on it. It informed us. It really helped shape us and get us excited about the possibilities of technology and film and all that stuff. It’s one of the reasons we’re doing what we’re doing – so in that way its like how can we approach this movie in a way that as writers we have an emotional entry point ourselves.”

The writers and director Joseph Kosinski — who made the Gears of War “Mad World” commercial and who will also direct the sequel to Top Gun — had to answer this question: ” In a post-Matrix world, how do you go back to the world of Tron?”

Where the first film glorified the world inside a computer, this film went in a different direction. To wit: finding the humanity that lives within a digital world.

I love that the first hints of this film appeared when tokens to Flynn’s Arcade were sent out and a site claimed that Kevin Flynn is alive, even though he has been missing since 1989. At San Diego Comic Con, a real Flynn’s was open and a rebooted light cycle was on display. I couldn’t wait until this film debuted with all this hype.

Twenty years after Flynn disappeared, his son Sam is ENCOM’s primary shareholder and he uses whatever power he has by releasing the company’s signature operating system online for free. Even though ENCOM executive Alan Bradley — who is Tron in the other world — approves of this, Sam is arrested.

A pager sends Sam a message to visit the dusty old Flynn’s Arcade, where he’s blasted into the video game grid just like his father. This brings him into conflict with the new MCP named Clu, as well as meeting his father’s apprentice Quorra.

I’m easy to please when it comes to Tron. All I needed was to see Daft Punk — who composed the score — show up as the DJs at the End of Line Club, the same place where original Tron creator and director Steven Lisberger appears as a bartender named Shaddix. And I adore that this movie ends with the digital world coming into our own, while lamenting that this is where the story — for now — ends.

I was ten when this movie came out and it was — without a doubt — the biggest thing in my life. Talk about brand synergy — to walk into the GameTrek arcade and see an actual Tron arcade machine with all the same sound effects! I wanted to disappear into the video game grid and escape the bullies of my childhood. I’d much rather hang out with Sark and the Master Control Program — I had an affection for evil even then.

Writer and director Steven Lisberger (Bonnie MacBird* wrote the original story with him) had been inspired by the video games hed played in the 70s and dreamed of a movie based on them. He finally landed at Disney, where computer animation would join with traditional filming techniques and backlit animation to make this groundbreaking film.

Disney executives were uncertain about giving $12 million to a first-time producer and director using techniques that had never been done before. They did finance a test of the flying discs and it won them over, as long as the studio could rewrite and restoryboard the movie. At this time, Disney rarely hired outsiders to make films for them. They were given a cold reception and none of the animators would join the film.

Now for some geeky stuff.

Disney decided in 1981 to film Tron completely in 65-mm Super Panavision**, which makes the movie look way bigger and stranger in the best of ways. And as a result of this being a non-Disney Disney movie, the outside influences make it seem even odder. French comic book artist Jean “Moebius” Giraud, who had worked on Jodorowskys canceled Dune, designed the characters and costumes, while the machines were designed by Syd Mead (Blade Runner, Aliens) and Peter Lloyd worked on the environments, yet all three would switch jobs and pitch in to create the overlook look of the film and even its logo.

However, none of the four studios hired to design the computer animation — Information International, Inc.; MAGI; Robert Abel and Associates and Digital Effects — collaborated on their art, which gives a variety of looks to the film.

Tron sees a world where we all have a computer version of ourselves inside the master grid, a place ruled by the Master Control Program and policed by David Warner’s Sark. It’s a world that Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) helped created when he made a series of video games for ENCOM before growing disillusioned with the big business that those games became. Shades of Atari and Warner Communications, huh?

Programmer Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) and his girlfriend (and Flynn’s ex-girlfriend) engineer Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan) have learned that MCP is taking over their projects and is shut down by senior executive vice president Ed Dillinger (also Warner). It turns out that the businessman got so far by stealing Flynn’s games. In retaliation, Flynn has quit and runs an arcade when he isn’t hacking into ENCOM.

Of course, that allows the Master Control to blast Flynn into his reality, a place where Alan is Tron and Lora is Lori and all the video games that the creator loves have become life and death. I kind of love everything about this movie except for Flynn becoming the CEO at the end. We all know how business works and we’ll learn even more in the sequel.

Another part of my childhood was in the soundtrack to this movie, which was composed by Wendy Carlos. I never could quite figure out why my dad’s Walter Carlos albums just ended and wondered if his sister took over for him. It wasn’t until years later that I learned the brave truth. Two other songs — “1990’s Theme” and “Only Solutions” — came from Journey.

Unfortunately, Tron was originally going to be released during the Christmas season of 1982. When the chairman of the Disney board Card Walker found out that Disney expatriate Don Bluth’s film The Secret of NIMH was coming out in early July, he rushed Tron in an attempt to crush Bluth. This also meant that Tron would be going up against a summer of films that included Blade Runner, Poltergeist, Star Trek II and E.T. While it would become Disney’s highest-grossing live action film for 5 years, it still lost the studio a ton of money, as they thought it would generate $400 million in profit.

The world has changed — the state-of-the-art computer used for the film’s key special effects had only 2MB of memory and 330MB of storage, for example — but Tron has remained a cult film that deserved a much wider audience.

*MacBird believes that she was the first screenwriter to edit a screenplay on a computer, but chose the industry-standard Courier font when she printed it, all so Disney would still think she used a typewriter.

**The computer-generated layers were shot in VistaVision — both anamorphic 35mm and Super 35 — and the real world scenes were as well, then blown up to 65 mm.

Based on the novel Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter, this story had already been adapted into a movie with Mary Pickford in 1920. By the late 1950s, the book was still selling 35,000 copies per year, so Walt Disney bought the rights and got the biggest cast he’d ever used for one of his movies, with people like Jane Wyman, Richard Egan and Karl Malden, who is absolutely fabulous as the town’s preacher.

The heroine of this story is, of course, 12-year-old Pollyanna, the orphaned daughter of missionaries who has come to Harrington to live with her very rich and very strict aunt, Polly. Pollyanna’s greatest skill is that nothing brings her down; she’s so optimistic that people may get upset with just how cheerful she is about life.

You know who doesn’t love life, despite pretty much owning the town and ruling the people? Her aunt. In fact, her aunt is such a horrible person that it takes Pollyanna falling off a ledge and becoming paralyzed to make her realize just how salty she can be.

Roy O. Disney, the studio business head and Walt’s brother, made thousands of Pollyanna photo locket necklaces to sell in Disney gift shops. They had the quote “When you look for the bad in mankind expecting to find it, you surely will.” inside, which was attributed to Abraham Lincoln. Finding one of these necklaces on vacation with his family, writer and director David Swift asked the studio to recall this product. Lincoln never said that quote and Swift had made it up.

This was Hayley Mills’ first Disney film and she’d pair up with Swift again for The Parent Trap.

Based on the 1961 book Car, Boy, Girl by Gordon Buford, this was the first of many movies that woud feature Herbie the Love Bug, who is driven by Jim Douglas (Dean Jones) and worked on by Tennessee Steinmetz (Buddy Hackett), a mechanic who transforms used car parts into art.

Jones claimed that this film was so good with the fact that it was made when Walt Disney was still invovled with his films. It was released just two years after Walt’s death. I would also say that having Robert Stevenson as director — he also made Mary Poppins, That Darn Cat! and Old Yeller — helped.

Douglas has big dreams of racing, but all he getsto do is compete in demoltion derbies. After racing and crashing another car — an Edsel, no less — our protagonist comes across a car dealer named Peter Thorndyke (David Tomlinson, Mary Poppins) abusing a Volkswagen Beetle. The next morning, the car just so happens to show up at Douglas’ house and he’s nearly arrested until Thorndyke’s sales assistant and mechanic Carole Bennett (Michele Lee) convinces her boss to sell the car.

Herbie — so named by Tennessee — seems to have a mind of his own, but he’s able to help Douglas win several big races, to the continual chagrin of his former owner. Much like nearly every Dean Jones character, Douglas is a jerk and just wants a Lamborghini 400GT instead of the heroic little VW Bug. Herbie responds by running away, damaging big stretches of Chinatown and nearly driving himself off the Golden Gate Bridge in his depression. Yes, back in the day, live action Disney got dark.

Of course, not so dark that a small Volkswagen can’t win a race against cars with much more horsepower, like Thorndike’s Apollo GT (the avergae VW bug had 40 hp while the Apollo GT had 225 hp).

Sure, everyone knows Tarzan, but how many people were clamouring for a movie all about Edgar Rice Burroughs’ other hero, the Earthman gone to Mars John Carter? Well, me. But I’m also the same guy who went nuts when Valerian came out.

The first book in the adventures of this character — A Princess of Mars — came out in 1917 and was followed by a total of eleven novels. As early as 1931, Looney Tunes director Bob Clampett got Burroughs’ approval to make a John Carter movie and worked with teh writer’s son John Coleman Burroughs to create rotoscoped animation that was quite realistic. After showing the test footage to film exhibitors in 1936, the movie was cancelled as they believed that the idea of men on Mars was too outlandish for small town audiences. Keep in mind that the very next year saw Flash Gordon play theaters and become a huge success. If Clampett had succeeded, he would have beat Snow White and become the first full-length animated film.

Ray Harryhausen wanted to make this film in the 50s and John McTiernan and Tom Cruise tried in the 80s, but technology was never at the right level to make a movie that could capture the look and feel that the novels promised. There was an attempt to make the movie with Robert Rodriguez and John Favreau as well; when the latter fell apart, Favreau moved on to start the MCU with Iron Man. He did voice a Tharg bookie in this film, as he was excited that it was getting made.

Andrew Stanton, who directed the Pixar films Finding Nemo and WALL-E was able to convince Disney to get the right back from Paramount and that he could make John Carter into a franchise. Stanton then went on to pretty much shoot the movie twice, consulted animation experts instead of those who made live action movies and ignored marketing advice. There was no way he could have won, however. The movie needed to make $600 million worldwide to just break even, an amazing number that only sixty-three movies have been able to achieve.

The movie lost Disney more than $200 million and cost the studio’s head Rich Ross his job. He’d already cancelled a 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea remake and cut the budget on The Lone Ranger, yet gave this movie all the money it wanted and a $100 million budget on top of that.

How could a movie like this fail? Was it because using Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” in the trailers made it seem old fashioned? Did the original Star Wars like ads not reach moviegoers? Did fans of Burroughs even know this was in theaters? Or are properties like The Shadow, Green Hornet and The Phantom — and John Carter — no longer well-known?

The actual movie is, charitably, a mess. It’s a gorgeous looking one, though, with fully realized Tharks and the world of Barsoom. It also strangely has Burroughs himself in the film as a character and starts with the bad guy getting a superweapon instead of introducing us to its hero.

We’ll never get to see Gods of Mars and Warlord of Mars, sadly. This film bombed on such a nuclear level that probably no studio will ever make another John Carter film. Don’t tell the Burroughs estate, who got the rights back and want to make another go of it. Hey — it took 79 years of development to make the first one.

Norman Tokar only directed one non-Disney film — Where the Red Fern Grows — and also made plenty of episodes of Leave It to Beaver. But he’s best known for his run of films at Walt’s place, including The Apple Dumpling Gang and Candleshoe.

A UFO has made an emergency landing, which leads to the U.S. government taking it to what we can only assume is Area 51. It’s pilor, Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7, escapes because he looks like an ordinary Earth cat. The major difference between this cat and mine is that the majority of my feline friends like to throw up hairballs at all hours while Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7 has a special collar that gives him telekinetic and telepathic abilities.

Franklin “Frank” Wilson (Ken Berry) soon takes the cat in and names him Jake. He’s the key to getting the cat back home, even if no one in the Energy Research Laboratory believes in him. He also has a girlfriend named Elizabeth “Liz” Bartlett (Sandy Duncan) who loves her kitten Lucybelle so much that she brings her along on dates.

This is the kind of movie where an alien cat raises the money for gold by betting on sports and playing against pool sharks. I guess that’s what happens when you crash land on our mudball and come up against bad guys like Roddy McDowall.

Ironically, this film pairs McLean Stevenson with the man who replaced him on M*A*S*H*, Harry Morgan. Plus, Dr. Wenger is an actor who knows all about animals who can do magical things. That’s Alan Young, who was Wilbur on Mister Ed.

Man, Frank Marshall picks some wild movies to direct. There’s the cannibal-themed Alive, the apes with lasers Congo, the Disney film Eight Below and The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend A Broken Heart.

If you ever wanted to walk around your house in bare feet again, you should probably skip this movie, which has spiders crawl into people’s ears via a football helmet and even live inside a dead nature photographer as his body is shipped back to America in a coffin.

It’s up to Dr. Ross Jennings (Jeff Daniels), a new doctor in town with the titular phobia, who has to protect his new town of  Canaima, California for an invasion of the spawn of prehistoric spiders mixed with old fashioned American creepy crawlers.

John Goodman shines as Delbert McClintock, an exterminator, and Julian Sands is as mean as ever as the villainous Dr. James Atherton. The small spiders used in the film were Avondale spiders, a harmless species from New Zealand, while the giant spiders were bird-eating tarantulas with eight-inch legspans. They were all handled by entomologist Steven R. Kutcher, who also was in charge of the locusts in Exorcist II: The Heretic, the bugs in Prince of Darkness and the mosquitos of Jurassic Park amongst many other films. As for the monstrous general spider, it was one of the first props made by Jamie Hyneman, who could go on to star on MythBusters.

This was written by Don Jakoby (Lifeforce, Double Team, Invaders from Mars), Al Williams and Wesley Strick (Cape Fear, The Saint, Doom). It was made under the Hollywood Pictures name instead of Disney, as it’s a pretty frightening film in moments.

Ran means chaos or turmoil and that’s what’s at the heart of Akira Kurosawa’s take on King Lear and Mōri Motonari. The director had been planning to make this film for decades and this was the realitization of a decade of painting the storyboards for this film. It would be his last epic and the most expensive film that he would ever make.

Beyond the autobiographical nature of this story, Kurosawa also saw the battle scenes as metaphor for nuclear warfare and the high anxiety after Hiroshima. There’s also the influence of Japanese Noh theater for two of the protagonists, Hidetora and Lady Kaede, whose single-mindedness stand in contrast to the rest of the cast of characters.

Hidetora is a powerful warlord at the close of his life who has decided to divide up his kingdom amongst his sons, with Taro gaining the First Castle and the leadership of their family, while his brothers Jiro and Saburo are to support him and live in the lesser castles.

The wise old man explains unity using three arrows. It is easy to snap one arrow but three together are more durable. Saburo snaps all three arrows and calls his father a fool, which leads to him and a servant named Tango being exiled. Fujimaki, a visiting leader who watches all of this, agrees with the brash young man and offers him his daughter in marriage.

Taro’s wife Lady Kaede also demands that her husband go to war, still angry that her entire family was killed by Hidetora. The constant battles — gunfire has replaced swords and arrows — drives the old man mad as he wanders the wilderness, haunted by visions of those he has destroyed in his journey to power.

As the entire family follows him into some level of insanity, with war, intrigue and double crosses throughout, it seems as if every castle will crumble into nothingness.

How important was Ran to Kurosawa? His wife of 39 years Yôko Yaguchi, died during the production and he only mourned for one day. His eyesight had also completely deteriorated by the time principal photography began, so his assistants used his paintings as guides to frame each scene.

A new 4K scanned release of Ran is now available from Lionsgate. If you are a lover of film, I urder you to add this to your collection.