Superdad (1973)

'Superdad' is known in my families lore as the movie that my father took my mother to on their first date, so I'd long been curious about it. However before the age of streaming this movie was hard to come by, a box office disappointment it achieved VHS and Betamax releases in the 1980's and then nothing until 2008, when a DVD was made available exclusively to member of something called "The Disney Movie Club".

'Superdad' stars Bob Crane, trying unsuccessfully to re-launch his career after the cancelation of 'Hogan's Heroes'. Disney, especially then, tended to cast the same actors over and over, but they declined to have Crane back presumably both do to the finical failure of the film, and his extremely shady personal life (google if you dare). The juvenile leads are Kathleen Cody as Crane's daughter, (Cody had been a star on the gothic soap opera 'Dark Shadows', 'Superdad' was the 3rd in a three picture deal with Disney, the best remembered of which is probably 'The Snowball Express') and Kurt Russell as her sweetheart (Russell of course was a perennial Disney regular).

Also in the cast are Barbara Rush as Cranes more down to Earth wife, Dick Van Patten as his law partner, and octogenarian Judith Lowry as Mother Barlow, a comic relief character of the 'isn't it funny that this old lady beats on horses and rides a motorcycle' school. The film also has nine friends and a Saint Bernard (named Rolly Polly) who the kids hang out with, including Bruno Kirby (City Slickers) in his film debut and Ed Beagly Jr., who has maybe one line. The film is directed by Vincent McEveety, a Disney journeyman who directed a couple of 'Herbie' films among others.

While 'Superdad' was a safe bet for my dad on the Mormon dating scene of the early 70's, and is charmingly a Disney movie of its period, the film is rather mediocre, it feels kind of lazily assembled with no strong foundation or gimmick to hold it together. Starting the summer after his daughters senior year the film is principally about Crane's efforts to connect to his daughter and break up her relationship with Russell, who he feels is beneath her. He invites himself to hang out with them at the beach, and interferes with a birthday party, physically hurting himself in both efforts. He feels he might finally be making progress when through his law partner Crane arranges a fake scholarship (which he has to pay fore) to fictitious Hunting College 400 miles north near San Francisco. He hopes this will cause her to fall in with a nice law student as a romantic interest, instead she gets engaged to a hippy trippy artist who is the best thing in the movie, he is played by Joby Baker another Disney regular. So now dad's got to break those two up and get her back with Kurt, the film ends in a wedding.

'Superdad' is deservedly not a Disney classic, there is a good reason you probably have near heard of it, it's undercooked. However it's occasionally amusing though most of the laughs are near the end, and to me its interesting as an artifact. I rented it and watched it twice as I'll probably never see it again, though I actually enjoyed it more on the second viewing having a greater sense of what it was, or was trying to be. Bob Crane is an awful fake screamer. **

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