Air Bud (1997)
Rated: PG
Runtime: 98 minutes
Stars: Buddy the Dog, Kevin Zegers, Bill Cobbs
Director: Charles Martin Smith
Plot: Buddy is a dog who is a sidekick in a clown’s birthday party show. Buddy’s big trick involves bouncing a ball off his nose. After escaping from the evil clown, Buddy teams up with Josh (Kevin Zegers), a boy who has lost his father in an accident, and who also loves to play basketball. Mysterious school janitor Arthur Chaney (Bill Cobbs) is a former pro basketball player for the Knicks who takes over coaching responsibilities and brings the team together with the help of Buddy and teamwork.
Rating—out of 5 basketballs: 0
Tournament Seed: 16—team makes the tournament only because each conference has to have an automatic qualifier. Has no chance of winning a game. Avoid picking for any reason.
Not much happens in this movie. Unless you count all the times we see Josh feeding Buddy pudding. There is really only one scene with any music, and it is a bad montage where Josh is giving Buddy a bath with the song “Splish Splash” playing. I was expecting a lot more of Buddy playing basketball for the team (the appropriately named Timberwolves), but we are stuck with mostly trick shots at halftime until the championship game. A few players foul out and a few more get injured, and since the rule book doesn’t mention “no dogs allowed”, and since Buddy is a registered member of the team who practices and travels with the team, he is allowed to play. Note to self: buy a basketball team and stock it with robots, because if it doesn’t say anything against it in the rule book, then it should be ok. The only thing that had potential to be cool was the Arthur Chaney character, but he was ruined with unfunny scenes of dog chaos around him.
These are the types of basketball movies I wasn’t looking forward to watching/reviewing. But a poetic exchange between Josh and Arthur sums up my feelings about the purpose of this blog:
Arthur: “I don’t get it.”
Josh: “You don’t get what?”
Arthur: “Why you putting yourself through this.”
Josh: “I guess I just like basketball.”
It's hard to believe this lump actually spawned a bajillion sequels and spin offs. I remember watching this in the store and wondering when the dog was going to start playing basketball. If I remember right, this whole thing started because they had one of those "kids show and tell" type series of commercials on the Disney Channel, and one of them was a boy who had a golden retreiver who could make shots from the paint when they threw the ball at him. He'd whack it in the hoop with his face. I felt bad for him back then, but now I'm angry at him for starting this string of movies.
ReplyDeleteI walked around the new release wall the other day at videostop and I swear I saw at least 8 Air Bud/Buddies movies...
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