Up, Up and Away
The Fantastic Four meets Leave It to Beaver
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Up, Up and Away
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Starring Robert Townsend and Michael J. Pagan
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Written and Directed By Robert Townsend
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The Disney Channel
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90 Minutes
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Airs Jan. 25, 27 and 31, 2000
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Review by Kenneth Newquist
 ife's not easy for superpowered teenagers trying to get along in a
world that doesn't understand them. But life is even harder for teens who
don't have superpowers, especially when their parents do.
In Disney's Up, Up and Away, Scott Marshall (Pagan) is
the sole "normal" in his superpowered family. His dad (Townsend) is
a mild-mannered orthodontist who fights crime as Bronze Eagle. His
mother is a similarly mild-mannered businesswoman who takes on the bad
guys as Warrior Woman. His older brother Adam rounds out their
crime-fighting trio with super speed and electrical powers. Even his little
sister, a budding pyromaniac, can shoot laser beams out of her eyes.
And then there's Scott, who has no superpowers and who probably will
never have any. That's because his 14th birthday is only days away, and no
superhero has ever gotten his or her powers after turning 14.
The pressure on him is intense--his dad's been looking forward to the
big day ever since Scott was born. His family has scheduled a huge superhero
party for him at which he'll be introduced with his own costume and secret
identity. Not wanting to disappoint his parents, Scott starts pretending
that he really does have superpowers, and that white lie rapidly grows out
of control.
But his adolescent conundrum is complicated by the altruistic goals of
a group known as the Earth Protectors. Its founder has created an ingenious
piece of mind-control software that will allow her to seize the brains of
American children and force them to be good little environmentalists.
Meanwhile, her partner has more nefarious plans--aimed at world
domination.
Golden Age fun
Like its siblings-in-spirit, Mystery Men and Galaxy Quest,
Up, Up and Away gently parodies and has fun with the superhero genre without
tearing down the originals. It draws inspiration from old-time
superheroes like Superman, Flash Gordon, and Buck Rogers, who dominated pulp
and film in a time when the good guys weren't as crazy as the bad guys.
The movie's special effects are up to the task at hand, and the costumes
are as vintage as Bronze Eagle's and Warrior Woman's ideals. Comic book
fans will chuckle as the typical superhero banter between Bronze Eagle and
Warrior Woman turns from crime fighting to marital squabbling. The movie is
peppered with inside jokes that older fans will appreciate, and the story's
interesting enough to hold the attention of its early adolescent target
audience.
Lack of detail can ruin a movie like this, but Up, Up and Away avoids
that trap. It provides all the behind-the-scenes elements folks expect to
see with a superpowered family. Their weird meals consist entirely of green
vegetables; a common household item can drain their powers; and the children
use their powers to aid the forces of good ... and to annoy one other.
The movie's antagonist is a little disappointing; mind-controlling mad
scientists are a staple of bad science fiction television shows, and this
film does little to improve or even mock the cliché. And overall the movie is not as focused or as fast-moving as big-budget
features like Galaxy Quest, but it's got a good message and some good
laughs.
Up, Up and Away is a fun weekend movie to watch with your kids.
-- Ken
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Fantasia
After 60 years Walt Disney's dream is realized--or is it?
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Fantasia
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Rated G
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Starring Steve Martin, Bette Midler, Angela Lansbury, James Earl Jones,
Penn and Teller
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Walt Disney Pictures
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IMAX
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75 Minutes
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Review by Tasha Robinson
ike its predecessor, Fantasia 2000 is a collection of animated shorts set to music, and usually without any dialogue. Originally, Walt Disney intended his 1940 experimental film
Fantasia as the first in a series; new segments were to be shuffled
in and out, so that the movie was never the same twice. As Steve Martin
(one of a series of celebrity hosts) tactfully puts it at the
beginning of Fantasia 2000, the plan "fell by the wayside--until
now."
That simple phrase turns a painful 60-year history into a tiny hiccup
between conception and fruition: Disney corporate revisionism at its
finest. Walt's initial vision was scrapped because the staggeringly
expensive Fantasia was a critical and financial flop. It reportedly
didn't turn a profit until the 1950s, and its current image as a Disney
masterpiece didn't begin to flower until the 1960s, when it suddenly
achieved popularity as a hippie "head flick."
Disney's marketing machine glossed neatly over all this with a
triumphant 50th-anniversary reissue, billing the original as "Walt Disney's
most celebrated, most acclaimed and most requested film--Walt Disney's
greatest triumph." It's only a short step between this bubbly huckstering and
the nearly all-new Fantasia 2000, which revisits Walt's old ideas
with glitzy new animation.
The new film opens with a welter of shiny computer graphics,
overwhelming a much-curtailed version of Barrett Deems' original
Fantasia introduction. He promises an abstract opener: Beethoven's
"Symphony No. 5" is duly interpreted as a battle between origami-like
winged shapes. In subsequent segments, Ottorino Respighi's "Pines of Rome"
somehow become Ottorino Respighi's "Magical Flying Whales"; Camille
Saint-Saëns' "Carnival of the Animals - Finale" is the background for a
flock of flamingos fighting over a yo-yo; "Pomp And Circumstance" turns
into a Donald and Daisy Duck romance; and George Gershwin's jazzy "Rhapsody
in Blue" tells the stories of a variety of New York natives.
The film's more dramatic segments include Stravinsky's 1919 "Firebird
Suite" as a clash between a nurturing wood-nymph and a fiery volcano demon,
and a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's "Steadfast Tin Soldier" set to
a Shostakovich piano concerto. And finally, the Mickey Mouse version of
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice" is repeated in its entirety from the original
Fantasia.
All gloss, no guts
Limiting the initial Fantasia 2000 release to IMAX theaters was a
stroke of genius on someone's part; the hypnotically huge screen overwhelms
the senses, blocking out virtually all other considerations. Such as the
disappointing brevity of both the movie and its individual segments (the
original Fantasia was two full hours). Such as the flat sterility of
Disney's computer animation, compared to the studio's old hand-painted cel
work. Such as the discomfiting familiarity of most of the ideas--from the
Noah's-Ark animal trek in "Pomp And Circumstance," which echoes "The Lion
King," to the "Firebird" segment, which imitates Princess Mononoke, many of Fantasia
2000's best images are borrowed from other movies. In many cases the
ideas are bald retreads of the original Fantasia--dancing
flamingos instead of dancing ostriches, a clowning baby flying whale
instead of clowning baby flying horses, a demon made of fire instead of one
made of stone, and so forth.
In fact, the whole spirit of Fantasia 2000 is best summed up by
the sequence that transmogrifies a flat, silhouetted Mickey Mouse,
speaking to conductor Leopold Stokowski in the original Fantasia,
into a rounded, detailed, fully-animated Mickey adjusting the lapels of
conductor James Levine. The scene is both comfortingly familiar and
irritatingly imitative. While it's clearly meant to show off the strides
Disney's made in animation technology, it just as clearly shows that the studio
still employs old formulas instead of developing radically new
material.
Fantasia 2000 is generally pretty to look at and listen to, but
it's nowhere near as daring as the original. It's a soothing but high-tech
regurgitation of allegories and fairy stories made familiar by 60 years of
onscreen repetition. Only the Gershwin sequence stands out as unique--it
captures both the mood of the music and the mood of New York City in a
dramatically creative visual style, based on the work of caricaturist Al
Hirschfeld. It follows a complex storyline without compromising the music.
It takes risks. The rest of Fantasia 2000 doesn't.
Speaking of not taking risks, I don't suppose it'll surprise anyone that
Disney edits out the tragic ending--and the moral message--of
Andersen's "Steadfast Tin Soldier."
-- Tasha
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