Enter the Kurt Locker with us as we continue digging up the coolest oddities streaming on Disney+
Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
Kurt Russell is a badass.
This isn’t anything like new information, but it’s always noteworthy when someone’s badassery is so undeniable that it extends across multiple generations.
For some, when they think ‘Kurt Russell is a badass’, they think of his genre classic collaborations with John Carpenter, including The Thing and Big Trouble in Little China. Others might think of him screaming “AND HELL’S COMING WITH ME!” in Tombstone, or the overblown ’80s mania of Tango & Cash. And nowadays, modern film fans can still indulge in uncut Russell greatness in everything from his work with Quentin Tarantino, to his ongoing appearances in the Fast & Furious franchise, to one-off curiosities like Bone Tomahawk.
Russell’s career is so long and so varied that it’s easy to forget that Disney played a major role in his formation. As a child actor, Russell was quickly brought into the fold by ol’ Walt and put to work starring in TV and films for the company. Russell made enough of an impression on Walt Disney that the man’s dying words supposedly consisted of writing “Kurt Russell” on a piece of paper before passing away.
The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes is a good example of the kind of fare Disney used Russell’s early megawatt charisma to sell. Shoes stars Russell as Dexter Riley, an affable but frequently out-of-sorts college student who gets accidentally zapped trying to fix up a fancy new doohickey: A ‘computer’. The shock turns Dexter into a human computer, now with superhuman intelligence and impossible capabilities. Dexter’s money-tight college wants to use his newfound smarts to win competitions, some local gangsters want to use him to make bank on gambling, and Dexter’s friends just want their lovable pal back.
It’s not hard to guess just who is going to end up victorious, but with Russell’s sunny disposition and crack comedic timing at its center, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes proved popular enough to spawn a pair of sequels involving more science-fantasy augmentations.
Russell remained in the Disney fold for a while after Shoes, before making an almost complete clean break in 1980 with the one-two bunch of the filthy hilarity of Used Cars and the sneering violence of Escape from New York — though he later returned to the Mouse to star in Miracle and Sky High.
But let’s go back, shall we, to a time when Kurt Russell didn’t have decades of action and comedy and action-comedy films under his belt, when he was just a hunky goofball trying to make-do with a computer in his brain. — Brendan
Next Week’s Pick:
Before Disney+, The Plausible Impossible was rather hard to find, available only on some rare (and expensive) volumes of the limited edition Disney Treasures DVD series. In this special, which originally aired as an episode of the classic Disneyland anthology TV show, Walt Disney conducts a miniature film school on the fundamental principles of animation, pairing up the lessons with beloved Disney cartoons and clips (including a rarely seen extended scene from Snow White) to demonstrate the magic that takes the impossible and makes it plausible. — Austin
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Our Guests
On its own, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes is a fine movie. It’s light, it’s sort of charming and it’s whimsical enough to be interesting. With modern eyes, it’s far more interesting.
It’s fascinating watching a baby Kurt Russell in action. He’s clearly a budding movie star, with a charm that’s not too far off from the Kurt Russell we later come to know and love. It’s also strange seeing this as the relative beginning of a long career with Disney.
The other thing is how interesting the stories of Medfield College are in a parallel with Disney Channel Original Movies. These Dexter Riley pictures are clearly the precursor to all those Disney Channel movies. They have the same DNA, the same whimsical set ups and it’s amusing to look at that lineage here.
There isn’t too much to say about The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes otherwise. It’s fine. It’s silly. It’s not a bad way to spend an hour and a half. (@hsumra)
The Team
There’s really no meat on the bones of this one, but it proves to be an amiable enough watch. I can fully imagine a kid watching this on TV back in the day and being delighted by the slapstick, pratfalls, Russell’s cartoonish reactions, and the big colorful finale. Cesar Romero as the film’s villain is right in the same sweet spot as he was doing Joker on the Adam West Batman show, toeing the line of suggesting real villainy while never tipping over into being overtly threatening and dangerous.
Mostly, I think I have a soft spot for this movie because I love this era of science fiction, when people knew that things like ‘computers’ were becoming a thing, and were excited by the prospect and promise of what they could do, but had no idea how they actually worked. The result is that technology ends up playing like straight-up magic. The scenes where the teachers and doctors peer into Russell’s ear and see that his mind has been replaced with circuitry garnered the biggest laughs from me, and contributed heavily to that weightless, amiable feeling.
It helps that Russell is such an innately watchable screen presence, even if the movie ends up repeatedly sidelining Dexter in a movie in which he’s ostensibly the star. And I liked that instead of a core friend group, he just had an amorphous band of college buddies who rotated in and out, which weirdly feels accurate to the college experience. So, yes, this movie is a documentary, is what I’m saying. (@TheTrueBrendanF)
48 years before stepping into the planet-sized shoes of Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Kurt Russell began his first foray into a Disney “Cinematic Universe” as Dexter Riley, a below-average student at Medfield College. The town of Medfield also serves as the location of the “Flubber” and “Shaggy Dog” series as well as a pair of Dexter Riley sequels.
The obvious datedness of The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes has potential for derailment, but it actually lends a lot of charm instead. The absurd concept of a boy turning into a computer is far more fiction than science, and I really enjoyed the depictions of old-school computing equipment, and the actually-pretty-accurate lesson about how programs and logic are structured.
Obviously the big draw here is a young Kurt Russell, and his boyish performance in a quirky fantasy romp is a fun diversion from those of us accustomed to his more grizzled adult performances. It’s nothing particularly great or groundbreaking, but definitely enjoyable. (@Austin Vashaw)
Next week’s pick:
https://www.disneyplus.com/movies/the-plausible-impossible-disneyland-1954-58/6lp73COVK1Tx