Don Carter | Through the Shattered Lens

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.

(Nearly every Saturday night, the Late Night Movie Gang and I watch a movie. On January 20th, we watched the 1975 science fiction satire, A Boy and His Dog.)

A Boy and His Dog begins, quite literally, with a bang. A bang followed by a mushroom cloud. And then a second mushroom cloud. And then another. And another. When the explosions finally stop, we are informed that World War IV only lasted five days. Of course, it destroyed most of society. The year is now 2024 and … well, things aren’t great.

(For those of you keeping track, that means we’ve got another six years left. Enjoy them!)

The world is now a barren wasteland, an endless stretch of desert. There are a handful of survivors but they’re not exactly the types who you would want to survive an apocalypse. Take Vic, for instance. Vic (played by Don Johnson) is an absolute moron. He can’t read. He’s not very good at thinking. He has no conscience. He’s someone who kills and rapes without giving it a second thought. When Vic isn’t scavenging for food and supplies, he’s obsessing on sex. When we first meet him, the only thing redeeming about Vic is that almost everyone else in the world is even worse than he is.

That Vic has managed to survive for as long as he has is something of a minor miracle. Vic has been lucky enough to team up with a dog named Blood. Blood is not only surprisingly intelligent but he’s also telepathic. Unfortunately, the same experiment that granted him telepathy also caused him to lose his instinct as a hunter. So, Blood and Vic have an arrangement. Vic keeps Blood supplied with food and Blood helps Vic track down women.

Blood’s voice is provided by actor Tim McIntire and, from the minute we first hear him, it becomes obvious that Blood may be cute on the outside but, on the inside, it’s a totally different story. Blood rarely has a good word for anyone or anything. He delights in annoying Vic, calling him “Albert” while still demanding that Vic get him food. He’s a surprisingly well-read dog but you wouldn’t necessarily want to get stuck in a kennel with him. Much as with Vic, Blood’s only redeeming trait is that everyone else is marginally worse than he is.

(Sadly, if there was an apocalypse like the one that starts this movie, most of the survivors probably would be like Vic. The only people who would survive something like that would be the people who were solely looking out for themselves.)

A Boy and His Dog is a highly episodic film, following Vic and Blood as they wander across the wasteland and bicker. They fight other scavengers. They spend a rather depressing night at a makeshift movie theater. Eventually, they come across a young woman named Quilla June (Suanne Benton). Blood dislikes her but Vic says he’s in love. (Mostly, he’s just excited that he’s now having sex regularly.) Eventually, through a whole series of events, Vic discovers an underground city named Topeka, where everyone wears clown makeup. The head of the town (Jason Robards) informs Vic that his sperm will be used to impregnate 35 women. Vic is excited until he finds out that reproduction in Topeka is a matter of artificial insemination.

(Both the wasteland and Topeka are nightmarish in their own different ways. The wasteland is world without morality or compassion. Topeka is a world where everyone looks like a mime, there’s always a marching band, and order is maintained by a robot wearing overalls.)

Of course, while Vic is dealing with life underground, Blood waits above ground. By the end of the film, Vic is forced to make a choice between settling down or remaining loyal to his dog. It all leads to a final comment from Blood that will either make you laugh or throw a shoe at your TV. I did both.

A Boy and His Dog is a strange movie. It definitely isn’t for everyone. It’s a comedy but the humor is pitch black. Still, that strangeness — along with the talent of the dog playing Blood and Tim McIntire’s savagely sarcastic voice work — is what makes the film watchable. There’s literally no other film like A Boy and His Dog. By the time Vic ends up in Topeka, the film has become almost a fever dream of apocalyptic paranoia and satire. The ultimate message of the film appears to be that the apocalypse would really suck so let’s try to not blow each other up.

Who can’t get behind that?