By Scott Buckner
TV is an incestuous playground, particularly when it comes to one (or often several) TV series being spun off from another. The list of television programs doing a lot of begettin’ and begottin’ is pretty considerable, particularly once the 1970s. (Yes, Mork and Mindy was indeed a Happy Days spinoff.) While Norman Lear and Aaron Spelling were perhaps the most successful purveyors of incestuous small-screen lineage, the undisputed king of the big screen tree-without-branches during the 1960s had to be Walter Elias Disney.
This thought dawned on me during this past Saturday afternoon’s Hallmark Channel doubleheader presentation of the still-incredibly popular Disney films Old Yeller and Swiss Family Robinson. Go ahead – try and play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with any 1960s Disney movie and see how far off the ground you’re able to climb.
Released in 1957, Old Yeller is set on the Texas homestead of the Coates family. Dad Jim (played by Fess Parker, looking like a poor man’s Gregory Peck in a mustache. Or Tennessee Ernie Ford. I haven’t figured out which) is off driving a herd of cattle to Kansas, so the ‘stead is being tended to by mom Katie (Dorothy McGuire) and young sons Travis and Arliss. The family hasn’t seen any money since the Civil War, but curiously, they enjoy a standard of living that extends beyond the more-believable Little House on the Prairie standards of that era, where people dressed in rags and ate dirt. The Coates home is a multi-room McMansion of a log cabin (with wood-plank floors, even!) with multiple corn cribs out back, and they’re somehow able to harvest a massive wagonload of corn from the most miserable patch of spindly stalks growing far enough apart to drive a car between. How these people manage to escape an IRS audit is a mystery to me.
While Jim’s off cattle driving, Katie spends her days as the frontier’s uber-June Cleaver. She accomplishes all sorts of hard labor like chopping fenceposts and hoeing the even-more-miserable patch of green crops, yet her clothes stay impeccably clean even when she’s worn them several days in a row, and the updo’s always in place. And dammit, she knows how to handle a rifle, too. If that girl just had a good set of pearls and a crock pot, there’s no telling how far she could’ve gone as the Frontier Martha Stewart. Meanwhile, teenaged son Travis (Tommy Kirk, as the inspiration to Johnny Crawford’s Mark McCain in The Rifleman – referenced by the cameo appearance in this movie by Chuck Connors) does the outdoor chores and hunts wild game for food and keeps tabs on little brother Arliss (Kevin Corcoran, as the inspiration to every Chucky movie), who spends most of his time chucking rocks at everyone and annoying whatever small furry mammals wander his way.
Anyway, a yellow mutt that’s made a name for himself across the entire state of Texas for stealing and sucking dry bags upon bags of eggs from local chicken coops wanders in from the somewhat-nearby Texas town of Salt Licks to take up residence at the Coates ‘stead because, well, any dog that’s been able to master more than sit, stay and fetch on his own deserves that sort of reputation. Even in Texas. Since everything’s perfect in Eisenhower-era Disney World, Yeller also happens to be a remarkably clean and well-fed example of a stray dog that, in today’s world, would be mauling joggers alongside the rest of the feral dogs living in the south suburban Cook County Forest Preserve District. Neither Travis nor dad Jim has cottoned much to well-diggin’ yet, so Arliss adopts the dog and names him Old Yeller while the two frolic in the muddy stagnant pool that serves as the family’s only source of drinking water. Travis chucks rocks at Yeller, Arliss chucks rocks back at Travis (“Don’t you go rockin’ my dog!”) and Travis plans to shoot Yeller in the morning if he eats any of the venison hanging on the porch overnight.
Yeller’s an eggs-and-bacon sorta dog, so of course he doesn’t touch the venison. So Travis spends the entire rest of the movie developing a brotherly bond with Yeller because Yeller’s “a heap more dog than I had him figger’d for.” But really, it’s more because Yeller doesn’t have Arliss’ penchant for sassing back and chucking rocks. Yeller further ingratiates himself to Travis and Katie because he’s really good at fending off scary wildlife like black bears, boars with razor-sharp tusks, spindly-corn swipin’ raccoons, the rabid family cow Rose, and a rabid wolf not afraid of a big pyre built to cremate the rabid family cow before it rises from the ashes and inspires a then-unknown director named George Romero to come up with Night of the Living Dead.
Which brings us to the rabies (a.k.a. hydrophobia, a.k.a. rabies) epidemic that bodes the end for Yeller – an epidemic known more commonly around those down-home Texas parts as “hydrophobee.” Or known – even more commonly than that — as “the slobberin’ fits.” Which, interestingly enough in the Disney world, also brings us to the traveling menfolk who come sniffing around the Coates homestead since Katie’s husband happens to be out of town for Lord knows how long. That’s because, if on thing these guys know how to do better than sniff out manless womenfolk, it’s how to identify a critter with rabies.
The first arrival is lazy ne’er-do-well Bud Searcy, a fat, slobberin’ sort of guy who could easily have been the inspiration for Terrill – the fat, slobberin’ leader of the Red Legs in Clint Eastwood’s 1976 non-Disney film, The Outlaw Josie Wales. Bud’s favorite pursuits are sponging free meals from the local housemarms and – when he’s not subjecting his daughter Lisbeth (Beverly Washburn, easily the twin to Hayley Mills in Disney’s Pollyana) to a wide variety of child labor law infractions like fetchin’ water and harvestin’ spindly corn – he’s abandoning her at the Coates homestead for weeks at a time. Bud was sent by Jim Coates to look in on his family in his absence, so given Bud’s disposition, you have to wonder about Jim’s ability to judge the basic character of his neighbors.
While Bud wasn’t making a pig of himself at the Coates kitchen table, Katie was being visited by passerby Burn Sanderson, played by Chuck Connors in a respectable cameo appearance on his way to North Fork to play Lucas McCain on The Rifleman. Burn, the rightful owner of Yeller, trades Yeller to Arliss for a “Jim Dandy finest-lookin horny toad” and a home-cooked Katie Coates meal. In the real world, it might have dawned on Katie right about then that she could just hop a stage over to Dodge City and snuff Miss Kitty and become the wealthiest cook/saloon owner/hooker nearest the Rio Grande. But she didn’t, so she and Travis are left to flip a coin over who gets to shoot Old Yeller after Yeller saves the family for about the fiftieth time from some wild, ferocious, rabies-infected local beast. A dog can save a family only so many times in the middle of a raging hydrophobee epidemic, so Travis ends up drawing the short straw in the Rabid-Dog Shootin’ Derby.
But that’s okay, because when he wasn’t busy sucking eggs stolen from chicken coops, Yeller’s other talent was siring various illegitimate offspring throughout the Texas countryside. Lisbeth had presented one of Yeller’s bastard offspring to Travis as a gift, but by the time Yeller was dead and buried and Travis had spurned Lisbeth’s gift about an hour earlier in the movie, Jim had returned from the cattle drive with a big sackful of coins, a pony for Travis, and some fatherly advice for Travis: “When you start lookin’ around for somethin’ good to take the place of the bad, as a general rule, you can find it.”
So New Yeller comes to be the new Old Yeller, the nation’s last band of banjo-playing baritone singers land a movie soundtrack gig, Walt Disney somehow misses the opportunity to invent the sequel, and the screenwriters of Stripes are left to provide Bill Murray with background for one of the more memorable lines in modern movie history.
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Immediately thereafter on the Hallmark Channel, the Disney incest-fest continued with Swiss Family Robinson, a 1960 release that ranks among one of the most ambitious – and successful – of Walt Disney’s live-action movies. Which, incidentally, was the inspiration for the 1960s TV series Lost In Space. I’ve never seen Swiss Family Robinson in its entirety, and I was only able to catch half of Hallmark’s presentation last weekend, but I saw enough of it to drag out this column perhaps longer than some people might think it deserves.
I missed the opening 10 minutes or so, so I’m not sure whether Jim Coates got snuffed by a Texas twister or some leftover hydrophobee milk from the rabid family cow or whether Katie just dumped him for bringing her nothing more than a pair of shoes and a “My husband went on a cattle drive to Kansas and all I got was this crummy T-shirt” T-shirt, but there she was (as Mother Robinson, along with Arliss and Travis – imagine that!) with a fellow known only as Father Robinson (John Mills, the real-life father of 1960s Disney Movie regular Hayley Mills) getting shipwrecked on some tropical East Indies island. They were on their way to Australia along with son Fritz Robinson (a boyish James “Dan-O” MacArthur from Hawaii Five-O) when something pretty awful happened to sink their big ol’ pirate-looking ship. Yet they managed – without the benefit of power tools – to build a perfectly-constructed log raft and a stupendous, massive set of multiple treehouses right off the pages of Better Homes and Foliage.
On top of that, these regular folks who couldn’t figure out how to stay dry in a rainstorm somehow manage to invent the refrigerator. And to think all The Professor managed to cobble together during those many years on Gilligan’s Island was a radio from two coconuts.
At this point, I would be remiss in not mentioning that while Dorothy McGuire upgraded her wardrobe to something more button-down Victorian, her updo’s always perfect in this movie, too.
Anyway, Mother and Father Robinson are quite content to live out the rest of their lives on this island inhabited by elephants, tigers, ostriches, and all sorts of other animals that have no natural business being anywhere near the East Indies, but they send Travis off with Dan-O in some little canoe outrigger sailboat to sow their wild teenage oats elsewhere because there are no women besides Mother Robinson on their island, and she’s pretty much spoken for. Arliss, however, is left behind with mom and dad because the only thing he’d do with a live woman is chuck rocks at her.
This leads Dan-O and Travis on a wild adventure involving a Tubbs-and-Crockett wardrobe that predates Miami Vice by a good 25 years and a shipload of pirates borrowed from the set of whatever movie Disney was making about the life of Ghenghis Khan at the time. Further complicating matters is British navy Captain Moreland (Jonathan Pryce, looking suspiciously like British governor/navy man Weatherby Swann in Disney’s current Pirates of the Caribbean franchise) and his very hot daughter Bertie (Janet Munro, who would have been Kelly LeBrock if it had been 1985 instead of 1960), who have been captured by the Mongolian pirates. Captain Moreland has done an amazing job of giving Bertie (actual girl name Roberta) a bitchin’ short-short hairdo to make everyone believe she’s a cabin boy, but neither the Mongolian pirates nor Dan-O or Travis have brains enough to recognize a hot, full-lipped woman beneath the gangsta ski cap when they see one.
I didn’t stick around long enough beyond that to see how Swiss Family Robinson finally ends, but sources tell me it involves a thrilling climax where the Robinsons join forces with the Mongolian pirates to roast Jeff Probst on a spit and emerge victorious on the upcoming season of Survivor: Tobago.
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See what else the Beachwood Nation has been watching, in our What I Watched Last Night collection.
Posted on May 22, 2007