Hey guys! How was everyone's week? Mine was pretty good. So I had this review all written and posted but something weird happened with Google Chrome and the post got deleted. So I'm going to attempt to do it again. Let's get right into it.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks is probably one of Disney's most underrated movies. It's done pretty well on home media over the years, it being the second movie Disney ever put out on VHS in the early 80s, and getting pretty frequent re-releases on VHS in the 80s and 90s. But people still don't really talk about it all that much. It did okay critically and financially, but for whatever reason, even though, if they saw it at all, people of my generation probably saw it on the Walt Disney Masterpiece Collection VHS release in 1994 and any reissues it had after that. Yet it's one that I quite enjoyed watching this time.
One of the things I like about it is that it's a fun movie to watch. While it's not as strong a film as Mary Poppins, it's still enjoyable to watch. The tone is a bit all over the place, but that's pretty much the case with any Disney movie that came out in the 70s. This movie was made in an era when Animation wasn't doing quite as well at the Disney Studio and the studio was relying on the live action films they were producing to keep themselves going though The Aristocats, Robin Hood, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and The Rescuers all did okay when they came out.
The cast of this movie is spectacular. I mean you have Angela Lansbury and David Tomlinson as the leads, and the actors playing the children were pretty good, though none of them did very much else before or after this movie. The oldest of the kids, Charlie, is a bit of a jerk at the start of the movie, but his attitude changes once Miss Price (Angela Lansbury) proves that she can perform magic spells. The other two kids, Carrie and Paul, are quite fun to watch on screen.
The visual effects are actually quite a bit better than they were in Freaky Friday. Probably because animation was used in this movie and that made things stand the test of time. Also the process they used to combine the live action characters with the animation is actually much improved compared to how the process was different than the more traditional blue screen process movies were using at the time.
I originally saw the movie on VHS sometime in the early 90s. As I mentioned in my overview of the Neon Mickey VHS releases, I'm about 95% sure that it was the 1986 release (seen above) that my parents rented for me rather than the original 1980 release that came out the same day as the first VHS release of Pete's Dragon. I remember enjoying it and not being afraid of the King, who is a Lion (he's on the front cover of just about every home video release), chasing them at the end of the animation sequence, the way the Wizard's duel between Merlin and Madam Mim did in The Sword in the Stone.
The songs in the movie are pretty solid, since they were written by the Sherman Brothers, who had done numerous projects for Disney in the 60s and 70s. However, the one thing I don't like about this movie is the dance sequence in the middle of the "Portobello Road" scene. It really slows the movie down since it's just random people dancing in the middle of Portobello Road (the location in the movie, not the song) and it feels like it drags on and on for five minutes.
Overall this is a great movie. Before last night I hadn't seen it in about 30 years, since whenever the last time was that we rented it from Rogers Video. I've never owned it on VHS, DVD or on Blu-ray, so it was nice to be able to sit down and watch it on Disney+ last night.
That's gonna be it for me for this week. However, I will be back on either Sunday or Monday with my review of To Sleep in a Sea of Stars as I am on page 607, and I only have 271 pages left until I finish it, so if I continue going at the rate I've been going when it comes to reading, I should be done by tomorrow afternoon. If not, I'll definitely be finished by Sunday night before I go to bed. So keep an eye out for that review at some point. Until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you all later. Take care.
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