Disney Plus-Or-Minus: The Mighty Ducks
Among his many other talents, Walt Disney was a master of marketing. From the very beginning, Disney movies spawned toys, games, books, comics, records, clothing, sequels, spin-offs and TV shows. But only one, to the best of my knowledge, produced a major league sports franchise. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you The Mighty Ducks.
The Mighty Ducks was the brainchild of Steven Brill, an aspiring writer/director who fell into acting after striking up a friendship with Steven Soderbergh, who cast him in a small role in sex, lies and videotape. Brill kept paying the bills with bit parts in such films as Edward Scissorhands while continuing his efforts to break through as a writer.
At the time, his roommate was another up-and-coming actor, Peter Berg (he’ll be in this column himself soon). Brill and Berg rekindled a shared childhood love of hockey, playing once in a while and going to see the Los Angeles Kings. Before long, Brill got the idea to write a hockey script inspired by the classic underdog baseball movie The Bad News Bears.
Brill’s original script was reportedly a bit darker than what ended up on screen. If you’re a gin drinker, you can probably surmise how lawyer-turned-reluctant-coach Gordon Bombay got his name. Once Disney got involved, adult themes like alcoholism were given a kid-friendly polish, leaving just enough of a hint to keep the narrative on track.
After the studio was happy with the script, Brill may have wanted to continue his involvement as either the director or star of the film. But Disney wasn’t quite ready to put that much trust in an unknown, although he did end up with a small part and would make his directorial debut at Disney a few years later. To direct, the studio hired Stephen Herek, who’d already made Critters, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Don’t Tell Mom The Babysitter’s Dead. Over the next decade, Herek would sort of become the Norman Tokar of the ‘90s, directing several films for Disney and Touchstone.
Herek and the studio considered a lot of actors for the role of Gordon Bombay. I’m not sure how many of these names got to the offer stage but some of those on the list included such former Touchstone stars as Tom Hanks and Bill Murray, as well as future Disney voice actor Michael J. Fox. Of those, Fox, a Canadian with a well-documented love of hockey, would have made the most sense. An offer did go out to Charlie Sheen, who turned it down, although he will be appearing in this column very soon.
Instead, the project went forward with Sheen’s brother, Emilio Estevez. By now, Estevez was no stranger to Disney. One of his earliest roles had been in Tim Hunter’s adaptation of S.E. Hinton’s Tex and he’d costarred with Richard Dreyfuss in Touchstone’s Stakeout. Since the success of Stakeout, he’d led the ensembles of the two Young Guns movies, both of which had been hits, but films like Men At Work, which he’d written, directed and starred in with Charlie, and Freejack had failed to catch fire at the box office.
The Ducks’ tale will hold few surprises for anyone who’s seen The Bad News Bears or, indeed, most other feature films. Gordon Bombay is a hot-shot Minneapolis lawyer who used to be a star player on his pee-wee hockey team back in the ‘70s. He left his hockey dreams behind after failing to make a tie-breaking penalty shot that could have won his team the championship, a moment that haunts him to this day.
Gordon finds himself unexpectedly thrust back onto the ice after a DUI arrest costs him 500 hours of community service. He’s assigned coach of the bottom-of-the-barrel District 5 Pee-Wee team, a barely there squad with no real equipment, precious little talent, not even a name. Of course, things go badly to start. Gordon doesn’t want to be there and the kids don’t want him, either. Their first game is against the Hawks and Gordon’s old martinet of a coach, Jack Reilly (Lane Smith). It’s an embarrassing defeat that triggers a lot of bad memories for Gordon and causes him to succumb to his worst instincts.
A visit with his old mentor, Hans (Joss Ackland, first seen in this column all the way back in the films In Search Of The Castaways and One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing), helps Gordon recognize that his love of hockey was tainted by the recent death of his father and Reilly’s strident anti-coaching had done nothing to help. Reinvigorated, Gordon sets about turning District 5 into a real team. He recruits some new players, including the Hawks’ star Adam Banks (Vincent LaRusso) after he discovers that redistricting has placed him squarely in District 5. Most importantly, he gets his boss at the law firm, Gerald Ducksworth (Josef Sommer), to sponsor the team, allowing them to purchase new equipment and uniforms and dub themselves the Mighty Ducks.
That’s probably way more story information than is necessary for The Mighty Ducks, a movie you’ve likely either seen already or, if you haven’t, can guess what happens with a high degree of accuracy. Until I watched it for this column, I belonged to the latter camp. I love The Bad News Bears and I like hockey but didn’t see a lot of value in devoting 104 minutes to combining the two. I stand by that decision. Out of the 180 (!) Disney movies I’ve watched for this column so far, The Mighty Ducks may well be the least surprising. It was exactly what I expected.
Which is not to say The Mighty Ducks is intolerable, although perhaps it would have been with a different cast. Estevez turned out to be the right choice to play Gordon Bombay. His brother would have brought a much different energy to the role. If it had been Charlie Sheen, Gordon’s DUI would have felt like the first time he’d been caught doing something like this. With Estevez in the role, it feels more like a one-time slip-up that would never be repeated. Estevez can be sardonic and witty but he’s never mean-spirited or cruel. He makes Gordon Bombay easier to forgive and root for.
As for the Ducks themselves, the kids aren’t quite as well-drawn or distinct as the characters in The Bad News Bears. But they’re all charming and fun without tipping over into cloyingly cute antics. Joshua Jackson gets one of his first big roles as Charlie, the boy who forms the tightest bond with Gordon, but he’s not the only future star on the team. Elden Henson and his brother, Garette Ratliff Henson, Brandon Quintin Adams from Wes Craven’s The People Under The Stairs, Marguerite Moreau and Aaron Schwartz all make good early impressions, as does Jussie Smollett, who would later gain notoriety as the supposed victim of a hate crime that turned out to be a hoax.
Critics were not particularly kind to The Mighty Ducks upon its release on October 2, 1992. It was routinely dismissed as a by-the-numbers underdog sports movie, although some of the kinder reviews admitted that the movie was not necessarily made for them. But bad reviews didn’t prevent the movie from opening in second place, right behind The Last Of The Mohicans, with over $6 million. It continued to hover around the top of the chart for several weeks, eventually pulling in over $50 million. Considering its relatively low budget of around $14 million, Disney was more than pleased with the results.
The Mighty Ducks would eventually return to theatres but before that happened, Disney decided to bring the team to life. In 1993, the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim appeared as an expansion team in the National Hockey League. Disney was required to pay an entrance fee of $50 million, half of that going to the Los Angeles Kings to share the SoCal market. The Ducks did surprisingly well in their first season. Disney eventually sold the team in 2005 but the Anaheim Ducks are still around and even won the Stanley Cup shortly after they were sold.
The Mighty Ducks franchise has expanded a great deal since its modest debut in 1992. We’ll get into some of those other off-shoots later on, since this won’t be the last this column will hear from the Ducks. It’s a surprisingly deep legacy for a modestly budgeted family film. Perhaps the original movie had greater resonance for kids who saw it when they were 10. Or maybe it’s simply the undeniable power of Disney’s marketing juggernaut. Either way, The Mighty Ducks will return.
VERDICT: It seems harsh to give such a harmless movie a Disney Minus, but if the skate fits…