***POSSIBLE SPOILERS!***
Somebody on this board wondered if there has been anything else said about it that hasn't been said before. To their surprise, I can. I've actually thought of this as a dog-loving movie, as well as a baseball movie or a movie that's nostalgic for baby-boomer childhoods. The only dog-loving move that tops this one is the remake of "Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey" from the same year, but then again, the presence of Sassy also makes this a cat-loving movie.
Tom Guiry plays "Scotty" Smalls, a somewhat nerdy kid who just moved into a suburb of Los Angeles with his mother and stepfather(Karen Allen and Denis Leary, respectively). His mother isn't so pleased with the idea of Scotty spending so much of his summertime indoors, so she sends him out into the neighborhood hoping he'll make friends. Along the way, he sees these kids playing baseball in some cheap old sandlot. They need another kid, so the leader of this gang, Benjamin Franklin "The Jet" Rodriguez invites him over. Most of the kids reject him, but not Benny.
The movie show the kid's antics throughout their neighborhood, and surprisingly very few of them are baseball related. Though they do defeat a junior-high team, it's not treated as the big deal most baseball-related movies tend to be. Other antics include Squints' lust for teenage lifeguard Wendy Peffercorn, a huge mishap with chewing tobacco and carnival rides, and most importantly a local junkyard dog on the other side of the fence hyped up as a monster. This dog has a habit of stealing any ball that comes near his yard. After running out of balls, Smalls borrows his step-father's autographed Babe Ruth baseball, and you guessed it; The Beast grabs that one too. From then on, it's an endless montage of failed attempts to get the ball back, until Benny has a dream where he's visited by the ghost of Babe Ruth(Art LaFleur), who encourages him to go take the ball back himself. And once he does, you can be sure that chaos is inevitable throughout the neighborhood.
When "The Beast" is finally defeated. it's a bittersweet victory, like the sinking of the Bismarck, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unlike those three events, there are no casualties, unless you count the death of a local urban legend, which is further solidified when the kids finally confront the dog's owner(James Earl Jones), and explain what they've been doing.
Having said all that, it's not without flaws. The flashback scenes where Squints hypes up the legend of The Beast were supposed to take place 20 years earlier, but feature cars made as late as 1966. There's also the issue of how an African-American like Mr. Mertle would've been allowed to play baseball with the greats of 30 years earlier at a time when Major League Baseball was all-white. Nitpicks like this though shouldn't keep anybody from enjoying what can now be called a classic.
Somebody on this board wondered if there has been anything else said about it that hasn't been said before. To their surprise, I can. I've actually thought of this as a dog-loving movie, as well as a baseball movie or a movie that's nostalgic for baby-boomer childhoods. The only dog-loving move that tops this one is the remake of "Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey" from the same year, but then again, the presence of Sassy also makes this a cat-loving movie.
Tom Guiry plays "Scotty" Smalls, a somewhat nerdy kid who just moved into a suburb of Los Angeles with his mother and stepfather(Karen Allen and Denis Leary, respectively). His mother isn't so pleased with the idea of Scotty spending so much of his summertime indoors, so she sends him out into the neighborhood hoping he'll make friends. Along the way, he sees these kids playing baseball in some cheap old sandlot. They need another kid, so the leader of this gang, Benjamin Franklin "The Jet" Rodriguez invites him over. Most of the kids reject him, but not Benny.
The movie show the kid's antics throughout their neighborhood, and surprisingly very few of them are baseball related. Though they do defeat a junior-high team, it's not treated as the big deal most baseball-related movies tend to be. Other antics include Squints' lust for teenage lifeguard Wendy Peffercorn, a huge mishap with chewing tobacco and carnival rides, and most importantly a local junkyard dog on the other side of the fence hyped up as a monster. This dog has a habit of stealing any ball that comes near his yard. After running out of balls, Smalls borrows his step-father's autographed Babe Ruth baseball, and you guessed it; The Beast grabs that one too. From then on, it's an endless montage of failed attempts to get the ball back, until Benny has a dream where he's visited by the ghost of Babe Ruth(Art LaFleur), who encourages him to go take the ball back himself. And once he does, you can be sure that chaos is inevitable throughout the neighborhood.
When "The Beast" is finally defeated. it's a bittersweet victory, like the sinking of the Bismarck, or the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unlike those three events, there are no casualties, unless you count the death of a local urban legend, which is further solidified when the kids finally confront the dog's owner(James Earl Jones), and explain what they've been doing.
Having said all that, it's not without flaws. The flashback scenes where Squints hypes up the legend of The Beast were supposed to take place 20 years earlier, but feature cars made as late as 1966. There's also the issue of how an African-American like Mr. Mertle would've been allowed to play baseball with the greats of 30 years earlier at a time when Major League Baseball was all-white. Nitpicks like this though shouldn't keep anybody from enjoying what can now be called a classic.