Even if you love the original Escape to Witch Mountain, you have to welcome a remake. The 1975 sci-fi Disney film has some very dated special effects — though the visible wires used to “levitate” a handgun and a harmonica give it a campy charm — and it’s not exactly the well-respected classic that The Black Hole or Old Yeller is, anyway. So, better a remake (or “modern re-imagining”) of a slightly beloved movie, which has already been redone once, to give The Rock another fulfillment of his Disney contract and utilize all the “perfect” digital effects now available.
While it seems that eventually all Disney live-action classics will be remade, potentially rendering obsolete the careers of Dean Jones, Kevin Corcoran and those ugly kids from Mary Poppins, there are some that may, like Witch Mountain, deserve to be recycled. Disney has previously erred in reworking films like The Absent-Minded Professor (Robin Williams is no Fred MacMurray) and The Shaggy Dog (Tim Allen is no MacMurray, either, nor even is he Tommy Kirk), and it’s mistakenly producing new versions of Swiss Family Robinson and 20,000 Leauges Under the Sea. But there are so many other films, most forgotten, that would better lend themselves to remakes.
Here we’ve selected 10 such classics, all but one live-action features, and we welcome you to suggest any others you may wish to see updated and/or re-imagined. …Read more
Poor Disney. The studio tries to do good by finally producing an animated movie featuring a black princess (The Princess and the Frog, out Christmas 2009) and it’s still called out for being racist. Since this past weekend’s debut of the teaser trailer for the film, a return to traditional 2-D animation (can the new computer-assisted techniques still qualify these films as “hand-drawn” or “cel” animation?) after a five-year drought, blogs such as Vulture and Defamer have noted possibly offensive stereotypes in the movie.
Well, what do you want? A return to traditional Disney films or racism-free films? As displayed in the montage featured as today’s clip of the day, most of our beloved Disney classics unfortunately have their share of racist portrayals. And let’s not forget some of the more contemporary Disney films, like Aladdin, which can be seen in this other YouTube clip as also being racist. So, perhaps Disney’s return to tradition is about more than just 2-D animation style. I’m not saying it’s a good thing. I’m just not all that shocked by it.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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