The Bad News Bears, No. 4 - Bad News Bears (2005)

[This entry was written in an airport on a failing battery.]

Remakes have been a major feature of the ‘00s. It is easy to question the creativity of filmmakers, when it’s perhaps more appropriate to lament the gutlessness of financers. Artistically, one may cite many reasons to do a remake: original was a good idea told shoddily, technology has improved, the story needs updating for a new generation…laziness. Then there’s always the nostalgia factor, the sense (amongst the moneymen) that an audience is more likely to buy into a movie with a recognizable title and a familiar plot. It provides the comfort of the familiar found in a sequel, but with the “promise” of greater importance.

Most recent remakes fall under the horror genre, and somewhat less often action and thriller. These are seen as easily repeatable forms. One sees a lot less comedy being remade, probably because it is much harder to repeat jokes. Hence also fewer comedy sequels, and comedy franchises generally – there are of course exceptions to this.

Still, a remake of The Bad News Bears was put out in the middle of the remake decade, though it dropped that stuffy “The” like Fast & Furious to become simply Bad News Bears. This is a remake of the least essential type, one masterminded by studio accountant geniuses who noted much love for the 1976 original, and anticipated (perhaps incorrectly) audience nostalgia. Even then, it is an odd proposition to remake The Bad News Bears, as basically every underdog sports comedy in the interim 30 years has been an unofficial remake of The Bad News Bears. That raises the issue of distinguishing a remake from the rest of the sports comedy market, so that it’s more than just a generic baseball formula entry with a familiar title and names.

Bearing the onus of championing this effort, and it pains me to say this, is director Richard Linklater, a generally much more interesting filmmaker than such a bland, mainstream remake would suggest. He’s the guy who defined his generation with Slacker and Dazed and Confused, who mastered the tricky romantic genre with Before Sunrise and Before Sunset. He was even fresh off a similar mainstream comedy about a lovable loser adult connecting with lovable loser children, School of Rock. And that’s not to mention the surrealistic portentousness of something like Waking Life.

So what is Richard Linklater even doing on Bad News Bears? Most likely he’s doing damage control, realizing such a remake will get made one way or another, and it’s his duty as a right-aged fan who grew up with the original to make the result as inoffensive as possible. The same can go for screenwriters Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, fresh off of the gleefully cynical Xmas-terpiece Bad Santa. With a potentially idiosyncratic team like this, they can at least preserve something of the first film’s casual vulgarity and iconoclasm, something the official sequels never managed.


Joining Ficarra and Requa from Bad Santa is Billy Bob Thornton, taking over the role of Morris Buttermaker from the original’s Walter Matthau. Casting Thornton is the most intelligent move in all of Bad News Bears; he is distinct from Matthau’s on-screen persona, yet Thornton brings the same sense of laconic, breezy slobbishness and meanness. And drunkenness. Add to that now an air of womanizing, a Billy Bob special (the man did date Angelina Jolie for a very long time). Thornton has an astounding skill at being more likable than the characters he plays ought to be. Chalk that up partly to audiences’ desires to side with the bad boy, the person we wouldn’t cheer on in real life. Thornton also has the ability to underplay the central emotional beats, giving his characters definite humanity without ever beating it into the ground.

If Thornton is the best part of Bad News Bears, and an example of mostly smart updating of something that never needed to be updated, the rest of the movie does not follow suit. Rather than get lost in a sea of similar narratives, the remake resolves that issue by being as much like The Bad News Bears as it possibly can. Not only is the central story the same (washed-up baseballer coaches a team of Little League misfits, gets them to the championship), but every story beat, hell, every specific baseball play, follows the 1976 outline slavishly. This means there is no point to recount the plot or message or anything, when I’ve already done that.



The exactitude of the Bad News Bears recreation often boils down to specific shots, reaching nearly 1998 Psycho levels of pointlessness. And not only are the titular Bears mostly the same characters, with the same personas, but they even look the same. Without prompting, I could instantly peg Timmy Deters as the new Tanner Boyle, long before he opens his maw to say rude things. The same goes for the rest of the players: Toby Whitewood (Ridge Canipe), Mike Engleberg (Brandon Craggs), Timmy Lupus (Tyler Patrick Hones), Ahmad Abdul Rahim (Kenneth Harris), the Agilar brothers (Carlos y Emmanuel Estrada). That’s not to say their performances are anywhere near as sincere as in the first; they just look right.

But where Bad News Bears does not copy thoughtlessly, it adds just as thoughtlessly. A significant number of mostly ornamental details have been altered (we’ll get to those), for seemingly no reason except because they could do it, and it slightly justifies the film’s status as a remake. Most apparent are several new members of the Bears. Let’s see, there’s Prem Lahari (Aman Johal) – despite the name and the new ethnicity, he’s essentially Ogilvie, love of stats and all. More distinctly, there’s also an Armenian, Garo Daragabrigadien (Jeffrey Tedmori).


Oh, and there’s Matt Hooper, which is an unacknowledged and pointless Jaws shout out (Troy Gentile). While most of the changes are a chance to increase the team’s ethnic diversity (even as they lose the immortal “Jews, spics, niggers” litany – cinematic blasphemy!), Hooper is a chance to add a whole new realm of diversity – he’s a paraplegic! He’s in a wheelchair! This could be either disgustingly twee, or disgustingly offensive. They err for the latter.

The stated goal of the new Bad News Bears is to play on political correctness and race politics, something the writers saw as the primary purpose of The Bad News Bears. So it’s been constructed with a (largely failed) attempt to highlight the distinctions between the ‘70s and ’00s. This being the entire focus of the new effort, is becomes little more than Bad Santa lite, a PG-13 effort to renew that film’s misanthropic worldview for a slightly younger audience.

And just who is the target audience of this Bad News Bears? Given its PG-13, that’s a bit more adult than most child sports comedies tend to go. In fact, Bad News Bears fully capitalizes upon the PG-13 rule that one must never utter “fuck” more than once, but “shit” can be said indefinitely with no further repercussions. Without exaggerating, I’d wager “shit” gets uttered over 100 times, in a calculated effort to out-crass the first. (Kudos to the filmmakers, for it’s not most who’d retain this part of The Bad News Bears, even if it makes the new movie alienating to almost everyone.)


So the swear quotient is way up, as otherwise the new movie features far more off-color comments and discussions. It’s all somewhat calculated, skewed comic notions tossed in with intent to offend. One can see why families rejected the movie, limiting its appeal mostly to older audiences familiar with the first. And with this new emphasis upon filth over all else, the tonal function of Bad News Bears modifies. Despite the surface narrative, this is in fact not a sports movie. It’s a comedy, in a sports milieu. Most of the new details – I swear, I’m getting to those – serve to fashion new jokes, or do reversals on old jokes. The degree of Bad News Bears’ success or failure is thus mostly whether or not you find it funny. And as it is laconic, off-kilter, oddly paced (without echoing the particular rhythms of the 1976 version), it’s surely not everyone’s comedy.

That at least leaves the original drama mostly untouched. Buttermaker still has a crisis of friendship and faux-fatherhood with Amanda Whurlitzer (Sammi Kane Kraft, a decent real life pitcher, but not a whit of Tatum O’Neil’s anything else). Buttermaker still questions the idea of competitiveness versus playing baseball. All that’s still there, unadorned, and while it’s not messed with, it isn’t as effective as before. Their heart wasn’t in this angle, no doubt, and without The Bad News Bears as reference, it’s entirely possible one could miss the message of sportsmanship this movie still ostensibly possesses.


If nothing’s been changed on the dramatic front, how does that happen? Despite the semi-indie credentials behind the camera, Bad News Bears IS a studio effort – low budget by Paramount standards ($35 million, the same as it grossed, the little underachiever), but still a studio effort. That means a generic professional sheen to everything, a proliferation of moving cameras and blandly perfect lighting, etc., etc. This is in contrast to the original’s ramshackle nature, which more wholly jibed with the attitude of the Bears themselves. It was lackadaisical, with a faded veneer of springtime Little League, whereas this entry feels like any other competent movie with a wide release.

As befits that shift in tone (akin to a song cover done well, just not right), observe the changes in rival Yankee coach Roy…Bullock. The change of last name away from Turner is one of the most gleefully pointless switches. Greg Kinnear plays Roy as a darker – no, wait, lighter – version of his stressed motivational speaker from Little Miss Sunshine. Roy is an all-American, but with intended insidious flaws deep down. In The Bad News Bears, this manifests itself in the final game as Roy slapped his son on the pitcher’s mound in full public view. To “update” the movie, now Roy’s son merely trips when Roy pushes him. It doesn’t hold nearly the same weight, as do none of Roy’ intended villainies. He’s really just a comic butt of Buttermaker’s shenanigans, a casualty of the film’s slide from narrative to gag-driven comedy.

There are other lamentable changes necessitated by political correctness, ones that no one was apparently pleased with during filming. Take for example Buttermaker’s beloved and iconic Budweiser beer cans, switched here to the fictional Goldweiser. Because beer companies, 30 years later, no longer wants to associate themselves with a drunken antihero. (Compare that to Breaking Training, where Budweiser was promoted from a product to the plot prime mover.)

Then there’s the end of the movie, where Buttermaker shares his beer stash with the Bears upon their championship loss. (That loss remains in this entry same as ever, but not without testing groups complaining that the Bears ought to win this time – which totally misses the point, even now, stupidly myopic parents of America.) Of course, in 2005 you simply can’t encourage a drunken pre-teen beer riot, not in a PG-13 movie. I’ll let Tanner speak for me here, as he sums up everything wrong with the new “solution: “Non-alcoholic? What’s the damn point?” Indeed.


But I promised a listing of the other arbitrary changes made, large and small. With nothing else to say, here goes:

Buttermaker is no longer a has-been from the minor leagues, he’s a has-been from the major leagues (pitched one inning for the Mariners when they were an expansion team). This makes no difference. He’s also no longer a pool cleaner, but an exterminator, which is an opportunity for a new string of jokes wherein he exposes his baseball team to carcinogens on a regular basis, and carries diseased raccoons in the beer cooler. It’s tasteless and all, but when Bad News Bears commits to such grossness, it has its own identity.

Sponsoring the Bears’ inclusion in this Little League they don’t belong in is Toby’s mother now, Liz Whitewood (Marcia Gay Harden). This is done a) because “overambitious working mother” is “more ‘00s” than “neglectful father,” and b) so Billy Bob Thornton has somebody else to schtupp. Marcia hardens his gay, as it were, though like most new diversions, there is not much ultimate point to this scene outside of its own confines. It doesn’t even affect Toby much.

The team’s sponsor is no longer Chico’s Bail Bonds, it’s Bo Peep’s Gentleman’s Club. They even feint at replaying the old Chico’s gag. Sure, the Bo Peep’s reveal is amusing, but it’s also the kind of change which seems irreverent to the first.


What else? Oh, lotsa little things.

The League no longer celebrates in a Mexican restaurant, but a German restaurant.

Amanda no longer sells star maps, she sells clothes in a swap meet. (This shift necessitates the creation of a vast swap meet set, no doubt blowing a lot of the increased budget on unnecessary additions.)

Ahmad’s hero is now not Hank Aaron, but Marc McGuire. They mention this fact, to show they’ve changed something, then never do anything with it again. That’s inefficient.

Kelly Leak (Jeffrey Davies) has an artificially expanded romantic subplot with Amanda, which adds nothing (a repeated refrain). Kelly is so unimpressive here, hence his delayed mention. At least his newfound “punk” identity frees up the music supervisor, allowing an extended montage to a lovely song by a band called “Bloodfarts.” That’s a band created for the movie, and an example of the new humor it brings to the table.

Despite the camera moves telegraphing it in advance, Lupus no longer makes a major outfield play in the final game. That play still happens (it’s been foreshadowed), only now it’s wheelchair-bound Matt Hooper catching the ball, in the only scene where they have the audacity (or whatever) to show this guy on the field.

And Tanner no longer informs the Yankees post-lost that they can insert their trophies into their anuses; this is done by Prem. Then Tanner says something different, simply to point out that a change has been made. What point all this serves, I dunno.


That’s about it for this movie. For people who’ve seen the original, there’s nothing new here except for changes that simply question their own existence, and one-liners about Helen Keller and chupacabras and the Tooth Fairy. Really, it’s a combination of several other movies that work better on their own: The Bad News Bears (obviously), Bad Santa, School of Rock. Depending upon your mood, any of those serve the job better. Still, they did what they could remaking The Bad News Bears. It just should never have happened.


Related posts:
• No. 1 The Bad News Bears (1976)
• No. 2 The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977)
• No. 3 The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978)

The Bad News Bears, No. 3 - The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978)

The Bad News Bears Go to Japan is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Seriously.

Not a single part of the movie works. It is a poor sequel. It has an incomprehensible, lazy, nearly nonexistent plot. The acting is lousy. The titular Bears get barely anything to do, those few who do return. There are hardly any jokes in what’s meant as a comedy. The directing is shoddy and listless. If ever I’ve seen a franchise killer, this is it.

And on top of all that, the DVD isn’t compatible with my computer. So no pics.

There’s an interesting phenomenon with sequels, where the first sequel often does far better than its quality merits, over love of the original. Often the gross even outshines the first film’s box office take, working on accumulated memories of the first (theatrical, home video, etc.). It’s often not until the second sequel that you get an idea for how beloved Part Two really was, which is why is behooves potential franchise-mongers to maintain quality at this early stage.

The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (aka # 2) was popular on par with The Bad News Bears, at least as far as moneymaking went. Of course it made a complete mess of continuity and realism, in the underdog sports genre where such things shouldn’t even be possible. Examining the producer credits on Part Three, Go to Japan, the desperation is instantly obvious, how Part One’s director, Michael Ritchie, was anxious to press on with a stillborn Bad News Bears franchise at all costs. As Go to Japan’s theatrical performance attests, it seems no one but the producers desired more Bad News Bears movies.

No one…except the Japanese. As befits a nation even more baseball-obsessed than the U.S. (it’s their # 1 sport, other than Pokémon fighting), they loved everything Bad News Bears. So it didn’t matter if the domestic audiences found Go to Japan horrid tripe, for some reason the Japanese would eagerly eat up a condescending and storyless travelogue of their own country. They’re a weird people that way. And it guarantees something resembling profitability for Go to Japan, even if this move is an admission that the franchise is kaput.

All this desperation was palpable, even to the unremarkable child stars who can only claim the prior two films to their résumés. So very many of the “bad news” Little League Bears are bye-bye, leaving a very sad returning cast indeed.

Gone: Tanner Boyle, Timmy Lupus, Alfred Ogilvie, Jose Agilar. Oh, and also Carmen, but we could care less about him.

Returning: Ahmad Rahim (Erin Blunt), the other Agilar boy (George Gonzales), Jimmy Feldman the Useless (Brett Marx), Rudi Stein the Even More Useless (David Pollock), and Mike Engelberg (Jeffrey Louis Star, who’d only joined the cast in Breaking Training, such is his worth).

Amongst these kids, the only ones with “personality” are Ahmad, Agilar and Engleberg – those personalities being “black,” “Mexican” and “fat,” respectively. You know, what’s visually communicable. In the entire picture, there is honestly NO effort made to personify these kids, or do anything whatsoever with ‘em! So why were they so eager to make a third Bad News Bears?

Oh, and to round out the roster and force things to a manageable baseball team size are three new ciphers with just as much indisctinction: E.R.W. Tillyard III (Matthew Anton), Abe Bernstein (Abraham Unger) and Mustapha Rahin (Scoody Thornton).

I only know of the first two by online sources; nothing in the film points ‘em out, or grants names, or anything. But Mustapha makes his presence known, as he is Ahmad’s little brother, and a chance for Bad News Bears to go epitomize the worst of child acting. We’re talking cloying, precocious, mush-mouthed, the sort of thing that’d inspire “aahs” from the studio audience on an ‘80s sitcom. This is sub-Gary Coleman bad; hell, it’s sub-Shavar Ross bad! Every moment wasted on Mustapha is a moment that could’ve done something, anything with an original Bear!

There’s gotta be an adult on hand, coordinating this freak show. As William Devane has done like Walter Matthau and abandoned ship (how’s that for a ringing endorsement?), again they gotta create a new “role model” from whole cloth. Cue – and it pains me to type this – Tony Curtis in just about the least dignified performance ever perpetrated by a Hollywood legend. Curtis plays Marvin Lazar, a conman, shyster and showbiz phony of the sort I doubt has ever existed in real life. It’s a chance for a dreadfully awful variation on Curtis’ Cary Grant impersonation from Some Like It Hot, several decades out of date and played with all the subtlety of a “Saturday Night Live” character. Lazar is a hatefully amoral dipshit, and he has no arc. And this is meant to be our main character?!

What down-on-his-luck director did they wrangle to helm this abomination? John Berry (not Barry, who’s awesome), returning from a lengthy Hollywood exile over the McCarthy era Communist blacklists. Prior to this, Berry worked during the Golden Age of Hollywood with stars such as Lillian Gish and Veronica lake, making films like From This Day Forward, Cross My Heart, Casbah, and many other things I feel deficient for not knowing about previously (I don’t watch enough post-midnight TCM, apparently). Evidently, Berry was pretty mediocre in the great days, and Go to Japan is proof he hadn’t improved with age. And as Berry’s last completed film, this is pretty fucking sorrowful.

Even at its start, The Bad News Bears Go to Japan has many strikes against it (two, let’s say). It feels the need to build on the unlikely plot of Breaking Training, positing a Bears team more respected than ever, even while it’s reduced to the dreggiest of its dregs. (Wow, “dreggiest” is apparently a real word!) Despite being a “second place team from a minor pre-teen league in Van Nuys” (the movie actually says this, in a too-little-too-late moment of context), they’re somehow national treasures, and regular fixtures on the television. And while the remaining Bears watch at home, it is this pre-taped TV show which is responsible for all the sequel-setting exposition. That is a mightily clunky method.

As an attempt to resolve the “no-cursing” problem from Breaking Training (without, you know, letting the Bears swear), Engleberg is allowed a cuss. Once. On TV. Bleeped out. Then never another bad word uttered again (from the kids; Curtis gets a few). That doesn’t solve the problem, it just highlights it more!

Curtis’ Lazar sees the Bears on this very same TV show, sitting calmly and doing nothing of interest. Desperate for an entertainment triumph (for some damned unclear reason), Lazar decides he shall make stars of these Bears. This reasoning is never properly explored, a shame since it’s the basis for the entire movie. Specifically, Lazar decides he shall fly the Bears over to Japan to face that country’s best Little League team, something which is apparently very easy to arrange (it’s briefly stated the actual U.S. champions have dropped out of such an engagement). And since the Bad News Bears sequel universe is one where parents are all morons, it takes Lazar no effort at all to wrangle up these Bears, without a proper game plan or travel itinerary, and whisk them off to Japan. Jesus, people, are you trying to get your kids abused?!

The main point of The Bad News Bears Go to Japan, such as it is, is to showcase Japan. This is the only unique proposition this sequel brings to the Bears table – a location change. How thoroughly bereft of inspiration were they? It seems the idea was that Japan, that mystical and unknowable land of winds and ghosts, was to carry the entire film on its own, that pointing a listless camera at whatever the filmmakers found in this foreign nation would be enough to overcome characters who are either nonexistent or rancid. It’s never quite racist, not even in the Lost in Translation “ain’t they short?” kinda way, but it is very offensive nonetheless.

Here’s the thing: The Bad News Bears Go to Japan is supposed to be a comedy. It has no jokes. Instead, the assumption is that simply showing Japan, as it is, will account for “humor,” that it’d be funny to non-Japanese that they play baseball, drive cars, speak words, have technologies, and breathe through their noses. I can’t even picture this slack-jawed “exoticism” passing in the ‘70s. And it’s filmed with zero flair. The approach is mired somewhere between a travelogue documentary and a Bad News Bears movie, without being either one. The events we see are staged, scripted, intentional, and yet they play like 90 minutes of stuff they just saw going on in Japan. It is bad.

Also, the soundtrack uses Chinese music! Eh, if it’s Asian…

For what passes as a “plot,” to give an idea of how dysfunctional it is: The Bears have their baseball match against the Japanese team (whose shirts simply say “Japan,” so I guess the team is called the Japans). The Bears are so terrible at the game of baseball now that they fall to infighting at the top of the first inning. Lazar (who’s never seen them play before, and whose entire career is riding on this game) has invited a horde of Japanese media types to hype this game into some sort of vague international…thing. I doubt even Lazar knows what he’s trying to do, except he expects worldwide coverage of it. But with the score 10 – 1 (in favor of the Japans) at the end of the first, the media people tire of the Bears in a very believable way, and leave.

Of note: Just about the only Asian worthy enough to warrant an acting credit in this film is Tomisaburo Wakayama as Coach Shimizu. This guy was the star of the kickass Lone Wolf and Cub chanbara film series, and therefore deserved better.

So the baseball game (the poorly, poorly directed baseball game) that we’d expect to be the focus, the climax of The Bad News Bears Go to Japan, rather ends 20 minutes in. That leaves the Bears and Lazar to float aimlessly throughout the island like a yūrei. From now on, they mostly stare without interest or involvement at whatever “cultural” thing they run across. The Bears don’t even get dialogue. It’s literally just The Bad News Bears GO to Japan, and nothing else. It’s not even The Bad News Bears INTERACT With Japan. Yeesh!

Meanwhile…It turns out Kelly Leak (Jackie Earle Haley) is in this movie, though I’d neglected him in the desultory “Bears round-up” above. That’s because he doesn’t even ever appear onscreen with his fellow Bears, with the exception of the baseball scenes (which are severely light on the ground). It’s almost as though he was thrown in as an afterthought, a reshoot, which is very likely the case. So anyway, “bad boy” Kelly is also in Japan…

And how do they utilize the future Academy Award-nominee? With a romantic subplot! And not just any romantic subplot…The worst, least essential romantic subplot in motion picture history!

For as Kelly strolls the Shinjuku district, he spies an attractive Japanese girl who never once even utters her name (or any English), so I don’t even know what to call her. So that actress escapes a citation. Kelly follows (read: stalks) this girl all throughout urban Tokyo, despite repeated displays of hatred on her part. We all know the maxim that romantic comedy behavior could earn a prison term in real life? This is the epitome of that! Kelly even freaking sneaks into the girl’s house, completely without invitation or anything. At last she acquiesces, and decides to romance it up with him, if it’ll just move this crap on to another phase.

The rest, entire rest of this subplot is comprised of romantic montages. Seriously, there’s no dialogue, no nothing, just still long shots of Kelly and…Girl standing motionlessly next to each other in a variety of settings, one after another. Seeing as Kelly is pre-sexual in age, and merely a one-week tourist in Japan, I dunno where they think they’re going with this, but a lazy filmmaker will insert romance wherever it don’t belong whenever emotion otherwise fails him. I have nothing to say about Kelly’s involvement in this picture.

Lazar spends this time struggling to reignite media interest in a Bears/Japans baseball game. He never explains his ideas clearly to anybody, not even the countless other aging white men who are suddenly here in Tokyo. Chalk it up to my growing apathy towards this motion picture, but I couldn’t even be arsed to note who they were. So very many scenes follow which are supposed to be a part of Lazar’s big media frenzy ploy, so it’d’ve been nice to know what he was up to. For what scant plot there is, screenwriter Paul Brickman sure does a lousy job of clarifying it.

Most of Lazar’s unclear efforts involve illegally finding ways to sneak his Bears onto Japanese television. One effort concerns some martial arts fight, allowing the first overt Rocky reverence in the series. We watch fighters (American fighters) for roughly 7 minutes, without a cutaway to Lazar or the Bears or anyone. This movie is worthless. It mistakes a growing non-Asian interest in kung fu with an excuse to just showcase the most lackluster kung fu imaginable, sans editing.

At last Lazar, via a means I don’t even want to start thinking about, convinces the Japanese boxing champion to face Lazar in the ring, with cameras rolling. Oh, and Lazar is wearing a Mexican luchadore outfit – and I realize I’ve just made this movie sound 10x more interesting than it is. The idea is that Lazar will get thoroughly beaten within an inch of his life – a cause I can get behind! – whereupon the Bears in the audience shall descend upon the Japanese boxer and defeat him. And he didn’t even tell the Bears beforehand! He simply trusts they will do this – which they do. Luckily it goes over well(ish), with no child getting sent to the emergency room or morgue. And the cameras eat it up! This movie is retarded.

What they see in these Bears, who’s to say. Memories from the first, for there’s nothing here… Anyway, the Bears will again play the, uh, the Japans, only this time with proper television hype. Part of that hype is an appearance on a Japanese talk show. Now, is the idea of the “Happy Days” theme being sung in Japanese inherently hilarious to you? Better hope so. How ‘bout “Moon River?” Or “Take Me Out To the Ballgame” sung in Engrish? Really, that’s what Go to Japan has become now, just a gawking yokel marveling at Japanese TV. Something YouTube is much better at!

Now it’s a Godzilla knockoff (because without doing research, Godzilla = Japan). One of the Japanese players does a baseball bat ad, smacks about Fauxzilla and speaks in Japanese – which is on its own meant to be the joke. GOD DAMN THIS MOVIE STRAIGHT TO THE DEPTHS OF HELL!

Skipping over a whole sumo-load of more worthless crap, we get to the game. Which is being played in an actual goddamn stadium, as opposed to the dirt field they’d reserved the first time around. The time has come, with like 20 minutes left, for something halfway resembling drama to be awkwardly inserted into the film. This means temptation for Lazar, as his fellow crackers suggest throwing in some ringers to ensure a good score to make this game a better TV sell.

This is supposed to be the moment where Lazar proves he’s grown as a human being, by hanging around endlessly with children. He does not. He accepts the ringers, and goes to cuss out his beloved Bears too, for good measure. Right, so they’re building up to a character arc later…right? Nope! Lazar doesn’t care, he never learns, and…well…

It seems someone forgot to tell John Berry the central tenet of the sports comedy, that the underdog team does well in the final game. The Bears suck more than ever now, if that’s possible to comprehend. I officially cease paying any attention to this movie, letting the DVD spin away to a disinterested room as I play Tetris online. Imagine my surprise, then, when I look back at the TV only to see the in-film Japanese audience treating the match with equal distaste! They storm out of the stadium early, L.A. style, as no one can even bother pretending that The Bad News Bears Go to Japan has any value.

Not only does Lazar not get the showbiz success he’d pined away for in such disgusting vocalisms, but even Shimizu is fired over the debacle! Way to ruin many people’s lives, Lazar! You ASS! And not only that, the movie goes all tasteless in its epilogue and suggests Shimizu is enthusiastically contemplating seppuku!

Astoundingly, even now the moviemakers somehow think they can salvage a feel good ending out of this fecal matter. Shimizu goes to the window to best stab his gut open in full view of Tokyo, when he sees in the dirt field below the Bears happily playing baseball with the Japans, just like that. Of course they could only choose to do this spontaneous thing off screen, because otherwise there’d be no way this film could coherently convey the decision. This somehow unites Shimizu and Lazar, one of them a jobless and dishonored old man, the other one awaiting inevitable lawsuits from his fellow agents (they even spell this out). And yet the music swells, as though there is “happiness” in this cynical and debased conclusion. DEATH! DEATH TO ALL WHO MADE THIS!

You’d think there nothing more to say at this film’s end, as there is no point in dwelling upon the none-too-soon end of The Bad News Bears as a franchise. But the myopic producers still refused to believe they’d suctioned this ravaged cinematic corpse dry. Come March 24, 1979, for a mighty run of 23 whole episodes, CBS ran a sitcom: “The Bad News Bears.” This is some bargain bin pop cultural effluvia here, something too surreal to even contemplate. It didn’t work. The show enjoyed poor ratings, even while it tried replaying the beloved Part One Coach Buttermaker storyline (with a new Buttermaker, natch). It was canceled.

Two lousy sequels and one lousy TV show later, and all anyone can remember is 1976’s The Bad News Bears. At least its memory wasn’t sullied, despite the producers’ best efforts. That was a good movie, but completely undeserving of a franchise! Not all movies can sustain serialization, and The Bad News Bears is a prime example of why some story types shouldn’t be sequelized. Of course, they can still be remade…


Related posts:
• No. 1 The Bad News Bears (1976)
• No. 2 The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977)
• No. 4 Bad News Bears (2005)

The Bad News Bears, No. 2 - The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977)

There were a lot of strikes against a Bad News Bears sequel from the start. First of all, The Bad News Bears was never designed to have a sequel. Most underdog sports stories are not, for the very simple reason that by the end of the movie, their stars are no longer the underdogs. To continue, even if you’re simply retelling the same story beats with some variation (the attitude of all but the most successful sequels), either the sports team will have to be reset back to underdogs, or the conflict will have to be intensified so their learning curve can continue.

Seeing as it was the ‘70s, the Bears baseball team lost at the end of their original – but not without “learning a life lesson” and coming very, veeeery close to victory. So the Rocky II course of action was open to ‘em, to play the wicked Yankees for real this next year, with winning the only option. Never mind that scheme totally undermines the point of The Bad News Bears! Or never mind that scheme entirely, for it’s not what happens. Instead what happens is…oh, it’s complicated, we’ll get to that.

But first, another challenge: the headlining stars of Part One are gone. Farewell Walter Matthau and Tatum O’Neil, with essentially zero fanfare and equally no explanation. That leaves (most of) the rest of the Bears, kids now taking on main character status in Coach Buttermaker’s absence. It’s like promoting Paul Walker to lead in 2 Fast 2 Furious, but for sequel-desperate producers it’ll have to do. At least they had Jackie Earle Haley as a child (rather than child molester), whose bad boy Kelly Leak automatically ascends to lead.


Most of the other remembered Bears are back in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training – a title I still can’t quite parse out, despite whole nanoseconds of meditation upon it. At least the roster with personality remains, never mind that means it’s mostly benchwarmers now:

Tanner Boyle (Chris Barnes), the most essential returning ingredient, seeing as his loudmouthed vulgarity (noticeably reduced, per spineless parental critiques, ignoring that was the reason the first was so popular) is the Bears’ identity. He also proves to be the team’s heart.

Ahmad Abdul-Rahim (Erin Blunt), Hank Aaron enthusiast – though that fact is simply forgotten about in Breaking Training, rendering Ahmad simply “the token.”

Mexicans Jose and Miguel Agilar (Jaime Escobedo, George Gonzales), who get double the dialogue they got in the first. So they now say two words between ‘em.

Jimmy Feldman, notable only because actor Brett Marx is the grandson of Gummo Marx, the only Marx Brother who didn’t bother appearing in film (though Zeppo may as well have declined, for the difference it made).

Rudi Stein (David Pollock), the Jew.

Alfred Ogilvie (Alfred W. Lutter), the team’s statistician. This is closer than ever now to a superpower, as Ogilvie basically runs strategy. He could make a killing as a sports bookie when older.

Also returning is essential fat kid Mike Engleberg, though actor Jeffrey Louis Star is new. Among the returning Bears, this is the only recasting, because all fat kids are alike, right?

Let’s not forget team runt Lupus (Quinn Smith), even if his broken leg gives him a mere one scene in Breaking Training. Maybe it was Smith’s parents holding out, or something, but lemonade is made as Lupus’ plight becomes the driving force for the Bears this time. In an example of the kids parroting Knute Rockne All American, Tanner reuses that classic film’s rousing pre-game speech (“Win just one for the Gipper” – so excellently parodied in Airplane!). Now it’s “Win just one for the Looper.” This is the moment of highest intended-drama in Breaking Training, so it’s a shame all the power rides on one’s memory of a then-37-year-old movie.


But what of their game? ‘Cause there’s gotta be a big climactic game, to follow the newly-cemented sports comedy playbook. Well, it’s a “game in Houston.” That’s all we’re fed for quite a long time, as the Bears wend their way from Los Angeles to Houston, a destination the movie paints as heaven-on-earth, not some know-nothing freaking one-horse-town like Los Angeles. Sheesh!

Whatever this big game is, it mustn’t be all that hoity-toity, since the pre-teens are driving themselves across the desert, in a “Scooby” van Kelly stole from – let’s just ignore where, and also forget how Kelly was essentially a drug dealer in Part One. There’s not even a coach now, Matthau MIA, so it’s just the kids. Reality gets a bone thrown to it briefly as the kids con their parents into thinking the local groundskeeping moron is their coach, though this is quickly entering the Home Alone 2, 3 Ninjas Kick Back realm of kid fantasy.

Okay, so it’s a kids’ fantasy, where competence drains from a person as age increases. They still need a pitcher, in order to be a baseball team and all (ya think?). Kelly pulls one out of thin air, practically, with no references or anything: Carmen Rozonni (Jimmy Baio), a New York thug and castoff West Side Story extra. So…one new character. That’s some under-ambitious sequelizing, that is. And Carmen can’t even pitch! Whoopsie on that one, Kelly, but at least it reduces the team somewhat back to underdog status.


The Bears don’t even learn of Carmen’s crippling ineptitude until they randomly accept a game against a gang of New Mexico toughs, as they wend their way through various road movie montages. In fact, the whole team looks pretty incapable of the baseball basics here. Of course, there was a lot more to the ’76 Bears than just the players listed above. There were also the unnamed workhorses who could play. It’s just the benchwarmers now, as stated (also Kelly), which is a stupidly artificial way to up the stakes.

So again, what game are these ballpark dregs heading to, so many hundreds of miles away? Well, it’s in the Astrodome, we know that much. And it’s against the Toros, the Texas State Champs. (Bears vs. Bulls? Sounds like the stock market.) Later on it turns out this is all a charity exhibition game, with nothing at stake at all (other than a whole movie’s running time).

The Game falls apart even more when we examine it. Why did the coachless, pitcherless, bargain basement Bears get invited to this thing, when they were the second place team in their local San Fernando Little League? Dialogue continually refers to the Bears as “California’s beloved” or some other noncommittal thing. They’re treated like the state champs, which is how this’d make sense, except there’s no way that could’ve happened in under a year. That’s the kind of awkward situation this sequel puts us in, where the raised stakes do not mesh with the continuity of the first.

But behind every questionable Texas business venture, there’s always the same explanation:


Yeah, that guy. No different than in 1943’s Clancy Street Boys, and no different today. In Breaking Training, he’s called Sy Orlansky (Clifton James, player of – ugh! – Sheriff J.W. Pepper in Live and Let Die and The Man With the Golden Gun). Sy owns and operates Anheuser Busch, at least in the fictional sense where it’s located in Texas, not St. Louis. For Budweiser product placement, that’s a huge step up from Buttermaker’s liquor receptacle of choice. So a hopping-mad Texan billionaire made all this happen, which is maybe the simplest justification for the strangeness of this whole plot.

Anyway, the Bears make it to Texas and immediately run afoul of the police, seeing as they’re a dozen or so unaccompanied minors three states afield (that’s Western states, where that means something). The cops don’t care about that stolen van (“It’s out of my jurisdiction” – okay, sure, whatever), but the Bears need a coach. It’s the law! Luckily Kelly knows a convenient candidate/source-of-drama right here in Houston!


For that’s where his father Mike Leak lives (William Devane, a “that guy” I’ve seen in dozens of films but can never place). Boy, good thing some drunken plutocrat in, say, Montreal didn’t invite them to an expo! And after half a sports comedy wasted on road trip shenanigans, this is the filmmakers’ late-hour effort to insert in some honest drama into the mix. For this is the first time Kelley’s seen Mike in 8 years. It’s not wholly unlike the character scenes between Buttermaker and Amanda in Part One, more so even in presentation than in premise. Only it’s worse. That weakens this relationship, leaving it to the actors alone to do what they can with it.

The Bears insist they only need Mike as a token adult representative; they don’t need no coach! Their continued inability to play halfway functional baseball says otherwise, however. Mike resolves to coach them, for baseball is naturally something he’s great at, being a self-respecting all-American male with a blue collar job. That means a replay of the “Buttermaker turns the team around” scenes that formed so very much of The Bad News Bears, only on a reduced timeframe, and with a much less interesting adult figure (Mike is too faultless to be entertaining, son’s estrangement aside).


So with less than a day before they play the greatest Little League team in all of Texas, I tell you what, Mike teaches the Bears the following: How to field a ball. How to throw. How to bat. How to run the bases. You know, a bunch of things you’d think a team in this predicament would know. Carmen gets the best arc of all, as a simple catchphrase is all he needs to go from “never pitched” to “pitches at competition level” in an instant. There was a low key realism to The Bad News Bears, which Breaking Training is desperate to reclaim, without doing any of the work. The result is a meandering thing, with little momentum and little identity.

Okay, so the Toros appear to harass the Bears, since ya gotta make the rival team villainous at some point. These kids have no personalities, beyond “Texan.” That means they play baseball real good-like, and are very capable with the word “faggot.” Not that the movie stereotypes or anything. They corner Kelly, with lots of nasty things to say about Mike – leaving the whole gigantic “California” target completely alone. Rather than fight them (arc!), Kelly runs away all dramatic-like. That’s Rorschach, everyone!


The day of the big Game comes – the very next day. Lest we think all these crowds are amassing to watch some Californian ragamuffins, let it be known it’s only a four inning game, since the Houston Astros need the field to continue recovering from their horrendous 1975 season. Astros cameos aside (they mean nothing to me), how ‘bout that Astrodome? Oh sure, it’s hugely important in the history of sports stadium architecture, but it’s treated here with the sort of reverence usually reserved for the City of Oz.


With a mere four innings of play, this climactic game can actually proceed without editing. (Not many sports movies can boast likewise.) There’s some standard tension beforehand, as everyone worries where Kelly is. That allows him to make a dramatic entrance right on cue, just as Tanner is doing his “Looper” speech. Give ‘em a break with this cliché, though, it was a long time ago and they hadn’t perfected it yet.

That out of the way, the game can go like all such movie games must: The bad guys take an early lead, all seems lost, then the goodies make an unlikely 11th hour turnaround against all odds and win with pluck and wackiness. That’s mostly how it goes here, and the Toros are allowed to look like giant assholes (that is, look Texan).

There’s one notable moment: Half way through the game, an Astros official gathers the umps to declare the game over early on account of “You didn’t play it fast enough.” There’s a mostly subtle inference that the Toros and Astros are in on some gigantic baseball conspiracy, which is petty and stupid and cheap and therefore exceedingly realistic. The Bears are ushered off the field, to make way for the pros, leaving only little Tanner alone, refusing to budge. This is the most poetic image in Breaking Training.


Umpires chase Tanner around, as he throws a base at their groins. I feel bad that I laughed. And slowly, first one person, then many, the assembled crowds begin a chant: “Let them play!” On it goes, the volume growing and growing, as Breaking Training, against the odds, earns its own immortality in the sports genre. Hell, the moment’s even moved out to real life, such as at the 2002 All-Star Game – in response to the same bureaucratic foolishness. Then there’s movies like Beerfest and Dodgeball, which reference/parody the moment.

Of course, in the face of such a swelling, the game will continue. This marks the turnaround point for the Bears, as the Toros never once again score (just as the Bears hadn’t scored once yet). And it being a baseball movie of a most formulaic nature, the final play cannot be anything but a two outs, bases loaded, down by three, two strikes scenario. You know, the most exciting single moment in all of sports (barring perhaps a soccer shootout), and the lone reason baseball is interesting. Carmen gets to hit the winning home run, for some reason, and the Bears win this time. Which is more suspenseful than in most sequels, considering the Part One loss.

Director Michael Pressmen, formerly of The Great Texas Dynamite Chase (huh?) and later of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze (another recent post!), is not much of a visionary, and brings a mostly flat and professional sheen to The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. Of course Michael Ritchie isn’t the greatest of directors either, but his Bad News Bears at least had a way with actors and tone, even if the technical merits were somehow worse. In fact, Breaking Training depicts the least inspiring sort of sequel stagnation. It gains a larger budget, for new locations and better cameras, which ultimately makes it just resemble all other films of the period. Nearly everything that made the first work is scuttled or sabotaged, from the actors to the tone to the storyline (entirely too convoluted this time). None of the first’s nostalgic presentation of Little League remains, leaving only the most surface-level comedy. One could feel strongly about The Bad News Bears; one could hardly feel anything for this.


Related posts:
• No. 1 The Bad News Bears (1976)
• No. 3 The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978)
• No. 4 Bad News Bears (2005)

The Bad News Bears, No. 1 - The Bad News Bears (1976)

We come now to the “underdog sports comedy” subgenre, surely one of the most prescribed and formulaic movie types. It is my contention that all such generic forms have at least the potential for a good movie, a masterpiece. Consider the reviled slasher subgenre; then consider Halloween. So very often the most successful attempt is, if not the first, then the cementer of the form, the reason future rip-offs even happen in the first place.

So it is for The Bad News Bears. In its broadest strokes, this is the most basic underdog flick. You have your team of misfits and loser kids (more specifically, “a bunch of Jews, spics, niggers, pansies, and a booger-eating moron”), brought together by a down-and-out loser coach. These antagonists grow to love each other, to excel at their sport, and make it to the championship game. The season’s first game is even against that same “villain team” they must later properly face.

And the sport is baseball. Little League.

With such a basic basis, the quality of The Bad News Bears – and it is a good movie, in its minor-key way – comes more from how the story is treated. Of course, this early on, without formula already in place (though The Longest Yard beat it), The Bad News Bears actually has something to say about sports beyond some standard “winning good, sportsmanship good” pabulum. Hence the eventual formula comes naturally, while it would be far more awkward for Rudy, The Karate Kid, Major League, Hoosiers, Slap Shot, The Mighty Ducks (a total plagiary of this movie!), and now even films not nominally about sports at all!

Okay, so we pretty much know the whole story already. That means director Michael Ritchie (also known for Fletch…and, er, Fletch Lives) can play with the tone and the characterization. The result is pretty shaggy dog on its own, not quite slice-of-life, not quite a peculiar stoner comedy, but something of that nature, a laconic, lazy beast content to whittle away 90% of its existence on one glamorous San Fernando Valley baseball diamond with one adult and various kids.

Various kids with notable, but not unrealistic or obscene, potty mouths. The lazy cult of the Bears (or da Bears, as they’d say where I live) mainly loves it for this reason. It’s the PG film in all its ‘70s glory, back when that rating meant something: The likelihood of “bullshit” getting uttered on a regular basis, along with innumerable “craps” and “hells” and “damns” and “God damns” and “God damn it all to hells” and of course racial epithets. It’s strangely inviting, for this swearing never comes across as desperate puerility, but genuine; the distinction between The Bad News Bears and so very much contemporary poo-poo comedy.


The adult figure overseeing these future leaders of America is Coach Morris Buttermaker, played by Walter Matthau (nee Matuschanskayasky) in a variation of his Odd Couple schtick. Buttermaker is an inveterate slob, a slovenly, pool-cleaning wastrel, and formerly a major star for the minor leagues. That’s not much different from most subsequent coaches of the genre, so it’s something to say they never dwell upon Buttermaker’s past, summing him up simply by the fact he always has a Budweiser in his hand. But it’s not always Bud; more often, Buttermaker’s pretending his liquor is beer. The casual, uncontroversial acceptance of Buttermaker’s alcoholism is strangely bracing – What other movie features its hero drinking whiskey from the bottle as he drives a dozen pre-teens sans seatbelts in a convertible? That’s not long before the man passes out right there on the pitcher’s mound for all the children to see. Buttermaker is a role model.

The Bad News Bears is known for its child types as much as for Matthau, with all the now-expected team slots filled most effectively – and remember, as an early picture in this sports cycle, The Bad News Bears earns many breaks on its characterization.


Toby Whitewood (David Stambaugh) is the “normal” boy, the one without any eccentricities. Most underdog movies would form the bond between this type and the coach, that being where the cheap drama would come from. The Bad News Bears does not do that, letting Toby mostly vanish into the background. Instead, the importance of Toby is his father, city councilman Bob Whitewood (Ben Piazza), the psychopathic go-getter responsible for promoting this motley assembly of ne’er-do-wells to the toughest baseball league in the region. Where they totally don’t belong. He’s also the one who hires Buttermaker to lead these hooligans to victory. Yes, he’s the asshole competitive parent living vicariously through his disinterested son, and there is a lot more to this particular thread…later.

Rudi Stein (David Pollock) is the pitcher – relief pitcher, really – and an amalgamation of all possible Jewish athlete jokes. There’s not much to Rudi, beyond a similarity to his like-named Notre Dame sportsman.

Alfred Ogilvie (Alfred W. Lutter) is the sort of guy for whom baseball is nothing but statistics and calculations. A sort of nascent Nate Silver, really, highlighting one of the very great problems with baseball as a sport qua sport.


Mike Engelberg (Gary Lee Cavagnaro) is the fat kid, because every sports comedy needs a fat guy. And every group of children has the one tubby lad with a supernaturally enormous gut. Due to his bulk, Engleberg is catcher. He is also seen (oh so briefly) enjoying delicious chocolate at his base, meaning this is where that overplayed damn joke in 3 Ninjas Kick Back came from!

Timmy Lupus (Quinn Smith) is a booger-eating spaz. Seriously, his chief trait is a culinary preference for his own nasal waste. Tasty! He’s also shrimpy, underdeveloped (as a physical human being, at least), and the worst player on the Bears. And that’s saying something!

Ahmad Abdul-Rahim (Erin Blunt) isn’t simply the necessary token black. He’s a militant Black Muslim, in a non-caricatured sort of way, and Hank Aaron is his baseball god. Never mind he knows less about Hank Aaron than…er…me. Ahmad is known to take humiliation so strongly, he will strip off his hated Bears uniform right there on the field.

There are very many more players with less solid personas, of note a couple of Mexican boys who don’t even speak English (but who are short enough to have essentially no strike zones, which Buttermaker will figure out come the championship).


And then there’s Tanner Boyle (Chris Barnes)! In a sense, Tanner is the real star of Bears, a loudmouthed conduit for the greatest comic vulgarities on display. He is the one who famously boils his teammates down to discriminatory categories. He’s also the one who gets the final word in against the Bears’ hated rivals, the Yankees (of course the villains in a baseball movie are the Yankees, as anyone outside of New York would understand). To spoil ahead to the ending (oh come on!, whattaya think’ll happen in a sports comedy?): “Hey Yankees! You can take your apology and your trophy and shove it straight up your ass!” This is the child we all wanted to be growing up, had we any sense…Except for his constant suffering at the hands of others, I guess.

As per the genre, it’s no surprise these Bears, with their Chico’s Bail Bonds-sponsored uniforms, are pretty terrible at baseball. But in real world terms, they’re not that bad at the sport…Okay, they are, but how many 9-year-olds do you expect to competently play a game they don’t understand yet. I doubt I’ve seen very many Little League games raise above the play level the supposedly incompetent Bears start at – this is of course ignoring the Dominican Republic entirely.

Really, the problem with baseball is the incredibly specific roster of skills it demands. It isn’t athletics, in the sense of a sport like soccer or basketball or hockey, where there’s some physical grace to what the athlete does beyond simply having the physically precise form needed to do a thing with a bat and a ball and – God, baseball’s just chess with children, and not in the fun sense like on a gigantic checkered board or anything. It’s golf in a less bucolic setting, with more steroids! Precisely why my fellow Americans think excellence at this particular sport is what distinguishes the evolutionarily advantaged from the weak is beyond me!


So I don’t blame the Bears for sucking; baseball is problematic (but thoroughly effective on screen). But The Bad News Bears being the kind of movie it is, they will undergo a turnaround, and become undefeatably good!...Sorta. Buttermaker realizes that even with some improvement, the team’s record won’t rebound quickly enough for the season. So he brings in some ringers.

First up is the most promising pupil Buttermaker ever tutored, Amanda Whurlitzer. She is played by the young Tatum O’Neal, who’d already won herself an acting Oscar (for Paper Moon) at age 10. That’s the Tatum O’Neal who became Michael Jackson’s first “girlfriend” – and, okay, he too was young then. She even shares top poster billing with Matthau, so big was this child actress in 1976.

To the inestimable credit of The Bad News Bears, nothing is ever made of the fact that Amanda’s a girl. She simply plays good baseball, that’s that. But it takes Buttermaker quite some time to coerce her, as she’s struggling to escape her former tomboy ways. Some degree of legitimate drama comes of his relationship with Amanda, as she’s the daughter of a woman Buttermaker once dated. Expect a lightly-sketched arc where Buttermaker, er, butters her up, only for Amanda to later realize how selfish he’s been this whole time. Couched within the endless baseball games and practices, one after the other, there’s not much time for this subplot to grow beyond its proper bounds. It never irritates, but serves to humanize Buttermaker somewhat.


The other ringer is…is…Holy schnikeys, it that Jackie Earl Haley?! Indeed it is! Eventual player of child molesters Jackie Earl Haley, playing an honest-to-goodness child! (Also the non-Englund Freddy Kreuger.) This is Rorschach, enjoying the childhood I never thought he actually had!

Haley plays Kelly Leak, neighborhood bad boy – rider of motorcycles, smoker of reefer, seller of…unstated illicit substances. He’s also the best athlete in the area, and so instantly happy to join Buttermaker’s ragamuffin brigade, it’s astounding that none of the league’s more mercenary coaches swept the hoodlum up first. (Of course, league manager Cleveland hates Kelly, and is generally a bad person overall in a petty sort of way, which explains it.)


Amanda and Kelly are talented enough to carry the Bears to the league championship against the hated Yankees. They might even be enough to win the game, though at the cost of numerous underhanded injuries from the Yankees’ aggressive play. And there lies The Bad News Bears’ true heart.

Coaching the Yankees is Roy Turner (Vic Morrow), familiar to many not as the exaggerated villains of later in the genre, but as a believably competitive adult who cares a little too much about Little League. The true point of Bears, in its light satirical underpinning, is to expose the futility and pettiness of this attitude. Buttermaker aside, all the adults in The Bad News Bears have overcomplicated and flat out bad reasons for investing their lives in kids’ baseball. It’s serious business, and these people are all assholes. Roy, for instance, goes so far in his drive to win at all costs that he actively smacks his own son around on the pitcher’s mound for all to see. Roy crosses a line. No one says anything, but the point is clear.


Contrast that with Buttermaker. There are moments where he seems to take Roy’s persona, screaming filthy tirades at his players all in favor of victory over all else. But then he sees the hypocrisy and inanity in all that, and makes a vital decision: All those worthless benchwarmers, those poor players he’d replaced early on, they’re playing the ninth inning. And with the Bears down by five! But even though all think Buttermaker is throwing the game away, instead this is a chance for all the screw-ups to earn redemption, make good plays, and in the end –

The Bears lose anyway.

Man, leave it to the 1970s to let the heroes in a feel-good family comedy lose. This is not in isolation; that same year’s Rocky does likewise. Perhaps it was a crippled nation soothing wounds from Vietnam. But it wouldn’t make sense to take a stance against competitiveness in American sports unless you underplay the value of victory. For The Bad News Bears, it’s not about winning, but it’s neither about something as bland as “for the love of the game.” It’s about the kids’ self-confidence, even in the face of failure. That’s a much more wholesome final message than the later era underdog comedies, which say rather “Only by a series of bizarre and unrealistic flukes shall your sad sack team win, and winning is still all that matters.” That’s why Roy’s bad sportsmanship is so important, and why Buttermaker’s own life failure holds sway where other generic failed coaches don’t.

Curiously, the film The Bad News Bears most resembles, in its laconic easiness, is Meatballs, which was itself a proto example of a soon-to-be-ossified subgenre (the camp comedy). Ostensibly, Meatballs can seem a sports comedy as well, with its mantra (“It just doesn’t matter.”) fitting in nicely with The Bad News Bears. Both movies are exceedingly simple. The Bad News Bears is much more realistic, without the abstract excesses of Meatballs (which indicate its relation to nuttier things like Animal House and Ghostbusters).

And in a movie so strongly allied against victory as an end, what do the Bears instead claim as their ultimate prize? Well, to celebrate a well-played game, and a thorough taunting of the Yankees, these children all drown themselves in booze (which naturally populated the ice cooler in the dugout). A legitimate beer frenzy breaks out on home plate, as parents simply look on happily. I love it! Soul-rotting competition = bad. Alcohol and swearing = good. This is actually a much more wholesome message than in most family films (ignoring Buttermaker’s almost guaranteed eventual liver failure). If one can lose sight of the surface offenses, the proliferation of bad language, one will find a far less cynical (but not remotely mawkish) movie at the core.


Related posts:
• No. 2 The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977)
• No. 3 The Bad News Bears Go to Japan (1978)
• No. 4 Bad News Bears (2005)