bedknobsbroom

It’s always depressing when you, as an adult, revisit a childhood film favorite and discover that it isn’t
as great as you remember. What’s more vexing is when you revisit a childhood favorite and
discover things have been added to it since you were a kid and ruined it. Yeah that’s right, I’m
talking to you Mr. Lucas! Anyway I recently watched “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” on DVD and was
really looking forward to seeing it again. This movie had it all when I was kid!

The Setting: War War 2 (that’s what I thought it was called back then), London, the Blitz (I didn’t
actually know this term as a child outside of a football video game on my Vectrex).

The Plot: Three children are left orphaned during the Nazi bombings and sent to the British
countryside for safety. They get put in Angela Lansbury’s house before she started doing all that
lame murder writing and discover that she is a witch. She has a flying broom, can turn people into
rabbits and eats all sorts of weird non-fried foods. Then she enchants a bed for them after the
oldest boy (who’s a total punk) blackmails her with telling her heathen secret.

The Pluses: They get to go to Portobello Road, an abandoned mansion and a world of talking
cartoon animals. Then they get to raise an army of reanimated suits of indestructible armor from a
museum to fight the Nazis. This movie kicked the pants off “Mary Poppins” even though the same
freaky child molester-looking dude was in it. If this movie had had Dick Van Dyke in it somewhere it
would have been the greatest live action Disney movie ever!!!

But no!!! They have to release it on DVD with all these added singing parts in it that are totally
useless and lame. This was before Disney utilized a horde of music writing geniuses to churn out
sappy, swelling, tear jerking aria-ballad thingys sung by the most pompous popular light rock icon at
the top of the Billboard charts. This was when they had a bunch of Broadway musical failures trying
to rhyme “match” with “hash.” So they had a lot of poor singing sequences that deserved the
cutting room floor. But oh goody boys and girls the magic of “DVD restoration” has put all these
musical migraines back in for our viewing torment. Hoozah!!! No lie, the Portobello Road scene
now has a dance sequence that easily goes on for fifteen minutes and contains every form of
cultural folk bootie-shaking known to man! Gods Knuckles!

Watching it as an adult does have its advantages, however. The talking cartoon animal soccer
match is still just as entertaining as ever with a special chuckle-inducing nod to the gorilla goal
keeper on the Dirty Yellow team. The creeping chanting of the necromantic armor in the final action
scene is still very cool. And as an adult I can now find much to laugh about when a small, blond, six
year old British boy says: “What’s this got ta do wiff my knob.”

Seriously, though this is still a wonderfully charming and original family film and kids will enjoy it
immensely. Adults may have to chapter skip over some of the musical numbers to make it
bearable. In fact, parents may want to do that anyway otherwise your kids could grow up to be real
wuss bags.