Professor Popinjay's Compendium of Perspicacity

A Non-review by Professor Popinjay

Oftentimes, if I encounter a franchise with several installments, I like to write them all up at once and tick a huge chunk of films off my list in one fell swoop… such a strange expression.

Sometimes I’ve seen all the installments and can quickly start writing. Other times I need to see a couple more films and THEN I can start writing.

Every once in a while I realize a film I’ve seen has a myriad of sequels of which I was previously unaware and I become nauseous. The 1976 Bad News Bears is one such film.

I remember seeing the 1976 BNB in my middle school film class. I learned a lot in that class. It was very enjoyable. In retrospect I’m not sure what great breakthroughs in cinema this film was meant to present to us but I’m sure the teacher had his reasons. Walter Mathau was pretty great in it.

As a middle schooler, I found these kids amusing, what with their snarky attitudes. I later realized the version we saw in school had been heavily edited. Seeing it many years later, I realized these kids weren’t just snarky, they were downright profane and sometimes utterly racist. I know this kind of talk from children was supposed to be shocking and played for laughs but most of the time I feel like racist humor only appeals to other racists.

When I realized how much this film depended on the children’s use of profanity and abominable racial and sexist slurs, I was done. I don’t even care if they learned to work as a team and respect each other. It wasn’t teaching an important lesson with the sensitivity and compassion such as we see in Remember the Titans (2000). It was just a bunch of nasty jokes and slurs followed by “It’s all okay because we won a baseball game”. Boo!

And as with any of these “feel good” kids’ sports movies, naturally it generates a plethora of sequels, each successively degrading exponentially in quality. I can’t officially comment on The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977), The Bad News Bears Go To Japan (1978), and a 1979 TV series. I haven’t seen these and I don’t want to. I can only imagine! They go to Japan!? What, they can’t make racist jokes fast enough in their own country, they have to go somewhere with more readily available foreign culture? I suppose I shouldn’t speculate. Again, I’ve not seen these.

I did however see the 2005 remake with Billy Bob Thornton. It was… slightly more sensitive, but not by much. Yes, they (gnomes) at least had the wherewithal to not have a child (or ANYBODY for that matter) use the N-word! While some of the kids swore a bit, most of the profanity (or profane-ness) came from Billy Bob which made it slightly more palatable and genuinely funny considering he’s doing it in front of children. I know, that wouldn’t be funny in real life but it’s funny in a movie.

That’s the thing. I wouldn’t really call this a kids movie. And yet it’s that trite oft-repeated plot of a bunch of kids settling differences, working though self-imposed obstacles, working together and achieving victory. We’ve seen it a thousand times. It’s a great formula. These are all great things for anyone to see. Does it appeal to most adults to see kids do these things? A fair percentage, I’m sure. But it seems like when kids are involved in this way then the film should definitely be for kids. Instead, BNB 2005 hangs in this weird limbo between “Movie for kids” and “Movie for adults that happens to feature a bunch of kids”. There’s a big difference between this film and, say, Kicking and Screaming with Will Ferrell which incidentally also came out in 2005 and was definitely directed toward kids while still being somewhat enjoyable for adults.