Revis­it­ing Disney’s bizarre live-action run from the 1960s to the ​’80s

This morning’s big movie-world news con­cerns the soon-to-debut stream­ing ser­vice Dis­ney+, which has now unveiled all of the titles in its con­tent library one by one with an unend­ing Twit­ter thread. But the posts have been cause for baf­fle­ment among those under the age of thir­ty, many of them con­front­ed for the first time with Disney’s deeply strange run of live-action vehi­cles from the ​’70s and ​’80s.

In between the mid­cen­tu­ry reign that yield­ed every­thing from Alice in Won­der­land to The Jun­gle Book and the ​’90s Renais­sance that brought The Lion King as well as Beau­ty and the Beast, Dis­ney made their nut with fam­i­ly-friend­ly projects often play­ing up the adora­bil­i­ty of an ani­mal costar. These releas­es main­tained the studio’s squeaky-clean image and gave the par­ents of Gen-Xers some­thing to put on in order to keep the kids occupied.

Before he linked up with John Car­pen­ter, Kurt Rus­sell rose to fame on the backs of jour­ney­man pro­duc­tions such as these, hav­ing signed a ten-year con­tract with the Mouse House in 1966 that made him the studio’s gold­en boy through the ​’70s. Here he is in The Com­put­er Wore Ten­nis Shoes, look­ing fresh-faced and bliss­ful­ly unaware of how much bet­ter his career’s going to get.

And here’s Rus­sell two years lat­er, mon­key­ing around with his simi­an scene part­ner in The Bare­foot Executive.

For those unfa­mil­iar with the movies at hand, the com­bi­na­tion of pure non­sense titles and hacked-togeth­er pro­mo art cre­ate an alter­nate dimen­sion in which Dis­ney went B‑studio instead of tak­ing over the indus­try. Imag­ine the Walt Dis­ney Com­pa­ny of today agree­ing to put their name on the following:

It bears men­tion­ing that how­ev­er fake these movies may seem to a present-day observ­er, many of them are quite good, and were rec­og­nized as such at the time of their release. Con­sid­er the exam­ple of The Apple Dumpling Gang, which paired Don Knotts and Tim Con­way as a com­ic duo to such pop­u­lar suc­cess that it spawned a series of sequels.

This chap­ter of Disney’s his­to­ry has been large­ly scut­tled under the rug, as the corporation’s brand man­agers pre­fer to recall the gold­en days of their ground­break­ing ani­ma­tion. But Dis­ney+ could spark a wider re-acknowl­edge­ment of these live-action curios, and with it, a reck­on­ing of the studio’s spot­ty past. They’ve con­spic­u­ous­ly decid­ed not to make the rosi­ly racist Song of the South avail­able for stream­ing, but they’ve still allowed such eye­brow-rais­ing picks as Dar­by O’Gill and the Lit­tle Peo­ple. It’s only a mat­ter of time until the rest of the skele­tons get exhumed from the closet.

Dis­ney+ will be avail­able to the pub­lic on 12 November.