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• Saturday, July 12, 2008 08:17 AM

  Mom and Dad Save The World?

  If such a dubious selection can make the list, I would have to put The Stupids starring Tom Arnold and Jessica Lundy on the list. It is overlooked and underrated.

  As a bonus, it contains a song called "I am my own Grandpa." Any movie with such a song deserves at least one viewing.

  And what is up with bashing The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas? Those are two of Disney's best modern movies. I said in '89 and I'll say it again. Mermaid and Do the Right Thing were the two best movies of that year. Yes, it changed the ending and thus the moral, but it still works as a classic fairy tale. It is hard to take a critic seriously who would bash a movie with the lyrics of the late, great Howard Ashman, whose death was the first step on the rather swift decline of the modern Disney animated film.

  And, yes, Disney did transform the chubby 13 year old Native American into a marriage aged sexpot, but they also created a surprisingly well made film. It has a more adult tone than many modern Disney films, including an on-screen killing. And despite the subsequent marketing of Pocahontas as one of the Disney Princesses, the movie was not a fairy tale romance. It dealt with the issue of love in a way that was quite serious for animated fare. Love doesn't conquer all in Pocahontas. Pocahontas is faced with an adult choice and forgoes her happily ever after. Lastly, I would argue that Pocahontas is one of the better films to emerge from that time frame about Native Americans. It deftly avoids the overly PC traps that comprised the backbone of highly overrated films like Dances With Wolves. The Native Americans are not presented as this perfect civilization that was destroyed by the evil white man. The warlike, brutal side of Native American society is given more attention in this Disney cartoon than in most modern movies involving Native Americans. It has a balance that more adult films on the subject sorely lack.

  So, while I agree with the need for a list of kids flicks that go beyond the standard Disney flicks, I strongly disagree with the choice of the two aforementioned films as examples of bad kid flicks. They seem to have been chosen randomly. With Brother Bear, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, Cars, the grossly overrated (non-Disney) Shrek movies, and anything Disney has released direct-to-DVD out there, why pick two that arguably earn the header Disney Masterpiece™?

  Speaking of direct -to-video titles, Muppet Classic Theater is an hour of pure fun and I urge all parents to write Disney and get them to finally release this little gem on DVD, and not just because my daughter has just about worn out our VHS copy.

  —Dmagnificent Read Dmagnificent's other letters
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