In 1973’s Superdad, Disney takes on the generation gap.
Charlie McCready (Bob Crane) just can’t understand what’s going on with his daughter, Wendy (Kathleen Cody). She’s smart, pretty, and has the potential for a great future ahead of her but all she wants to do is hang out with her friends on the beach. Eccentric Stanley Schlimmer (Bruno Kirby) drives everyone around in a souped-ambulance. Ed Begley, Jr. (who plays a character who doesn’t even get a name) joins in whenever the group sings a folk song. Wendy’s boyfriend, Bart (young and likable Kurt Russell), is a surfer and water skier. Charlie is truly convinced that this extremely clean-cut group of teenagers is going to lead his daughter astray. In fact, Wendy wants to marry Bart! Charlie attempts to hang out with Wendy, Bart, and his friends on the beach and he can’t keep up. He can’t water ski, he can’t play football, he can’t play volleyball. All he can do is scream in this weird high-pitched voice. The entire time is Bart is extremely nice to him and doesn’t even make fun of him for not being able to hit a volleyball over a net. I mean, even I can do that! But because Charlie’s not dealing well with becoming middle-aged, he decides that Bart is a threat.
(I’m going to assume that Charlie also teams up with a creepy friend and starts filming himself having threesomes with groupies, though we don’t actually see that happen in the film. The subtext is there, though!)
Charlie decides that he has to get Wendy away from this group and the best way to do that would be to trick her into thinking she’s received a scholarship to …. Yes, this is just that stupid …. a scholarship to a prestigious university. While Bart and his healthy, non-smoking, non-drinking friends are all going to City College and living at home with their parents, Wendy will be miles away at a college where she can do anything that she wants. Charlie thinks this is a great plan. One gets the feeling that Charlie, for all of his overprotectiveness, hasn’t read a newspaper in 20 years. Seriously, has he not been keeping up with what was happening on most college campuses in the late 60s and early 70s?
The main problem with this film is that Charlie is an incredible jerk. It’s one thing to be overprotective. Fathers are supposed to be overprotective of their daughters. It’s one thing to worry about his daughter not having a good deal of ambition. I can even understand him getting annoyed with Stanley because Stanley is kind of annoying. (Watching this film, it’s hard to believe that Bruno Kirby was just one year away from playing the young Clemenza in The Godfather, Part II.) But seriously, Charlie is freaking out over his daughter dating KURT RUSSELL! In this film, Kurt Russell plays a character who is always polite, mild-mannered, sensible, and remarkably understanding of Charlie’s attempts to keep him from marrying Wendy. There is one scene where Bart gets upset and he barely even raises his voice. He’s incredibly likeable and, for all of this film’s flaws, it’s still easy to see why Kurt Russell became a star.
Of course, what really makes this film a cringe-fest is that it stars Bob Crane as a family man with a secretly manipulative side and, the whole time I was watching, I kept having flashbacks to Greg Kinnear in Auto-Focus. Wendy, to make her dad really angry, gets engaged to an actual hippie named Klutch (Joby Baker) and there’s a scene in which Klutch and Charlie get into a fight in Klutch’s artist studio. Every time Klutch swung anything near Charlie’s head, I definitely cringed a bit. Red paints get spilled everywhere, though luckily it ends up on Klutch and not Charlie. Still, watching the film, I couldn’t help but think that there are worse things that could happen to someone than having their daughter marry Kurt Russell.
Through the Shattered Lens 