We Want The D

Go back a couple hundred episodes and you'll hear our rather lukewarm reception to the 90s live action remake of 101 Dalmatians. Take all of our comments and criticisms of that move and add one degree, and you basically have our take on 102 DALMATIANS. The leads are blander (and stupider), Glenn Close is more unhinged (and her costuming more fabulous), and the hijinks are zanier. But, the plot is...

Go back a couple hundred episodes and you'll hear our rather lukewarm reception to the 90s live action remake of 101 Dalmatians. Take all of our comments and criticisms of that move and add one degree, and you basically have our take on 102 DALMATIANS. The leads are blander (and stupider), Glenn Close is more unhinged (and her costuming more fabulous), and the hijinks are zanier. But, the plot is...

We've seen enough Disney westerns to think we've seen it all - singing cowboys, spliced-in nature footage, white people dressed up as Indigenous people, etc. And a lot of that stuff is still present and accounted for in THE WILD COUNTRY. But this particular western takes itself so seriously and uses the genre's tropes and iconography so well that we have no choice to declare it the best Disney wes...

Frequent We Want the D listeners may recall that our hosts have a lil' bit of baggage when it comes to Disney adapting the work of Mark Twain. But fear not, for their adaptation of what is called the first (or only) great American novel - THE ADVENTURES OF HUCK FINN - is a welcome break in the trend. And much like the novel it's based on, there's no shortage of analysis and discussion to be had. 

It's time for another one of Disney's period costume dramas, only THE FIGHTING PRINCE OF DONEGAL puts a little bit of a twist on the formula. See, while most of these types of movies were made and released in the 1950s, this one came out in 1966. What does that mean, you ask? Well, instead of starring Richard Todd, this one stars the guy who played Hayley Mills' love interest in The Moon Spinners,...

The Summer of Muppets continues with the latest and to date last theatrical Muppet movie - MUPPETS MOST WANTED. If Disney's 2011 relaunch of the franchise in earnest was a heartfelt and loving tribute to the madcap gang, this follow-up is a reminder that the Muppets are capable of being absolutely off-the-wall zany in just the best way. Packed with more cameos than perhaps any other Muppet movie,...

Here's the thing, D-Lovers: it's not that G-FORCE - a Disney movie that answers the unasked question "what if guinea pigs were spies?" - doesn't merit any criticism. There's far too many Black Eyed Peas needle drops for that to be the case. It's just that, in our hosts' estimation, it doesn't merit the  amount of criticism it has received. Because at the end of the day, there are a lot worse spy m...

If only the differences between the original That Darn Cat! and this 90s remake was the missing explanation mark. Disappointingly, this movie doesn't really live up to its predecessor in any real way. But it's also just way, way too strange to say it's an outright bad movie. The tone is stunningly bizarre unlike anything we've seen so far on this Disney odyssey, creating more questions and rabbit...

Welcome back to the 80s, D-Sciples, the most turbulent decade of Disney. They're up, they're (mostly) down, they're trying out weird things to varying degrees of success. And TRENCHCOAT is definitely one of their oddest, and to be frank least successful experiments. It's not for lack of trying, at least on the part of Margot Kidder, but it's hard to pull off a movie that's trying to spoof the spy...

We know what you're thinking, D-Lovers - "What the heck is a MOON PILOT?" That's an easy one to explain, it's another word for an astronaut. Explaining what the heck the Disney movie MOON PILOT is, however, is a more challenging question. In some ways it's a contemporary farce about the space race and red scare, in others it's a romance between an all-American chimp-minder and a French alien. Most...

Weigh and anchor and hoist the main sail, we're heading back to the high seas with MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND! Disney's second kick at the can at a Muppet movie where they adapt a work of classic literature, will this movie measure up to the precedent set by their version of the Dickens classic, or will good ol' Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure tale come up short? For our hosts, it mostly depends wh...

It's a landmark episode of We Want The D as our finish out our first proper decade of Disney movies. And it's somewhat appropriate that we end the 1940s with SO DEAR TO MY HEART, a movie ostensibly adapted from a book about a boy and his sheep, but as all the best early Disney movies do also provides some insight into Daddy Walt's psyche and how he viewed (or at least liked to view) his childhood....

The last time we saw a Disney movie adapted from a Roald Dahl classic, we were a little dismayed at how the team behind The Nightmare Before Christmas handled the translation of James and the Giant Peach from page to screen. Surely THE BFG will fare better, though. It's decades later and it's Steven Feakin' Spielberg making his first and (to date) only Disney movie. And look, the man is one of the...

In the original Homeward Bound, Shadow, Sassy and Chance make a harrowing, one might say incredible, journey through the wilderness to be reunited with their owners, braving all manner of natural hazards and dangers. HOMEWARD BOUND II: LOST IN SAN FRANCISCO offers a somewhat different set of obstacles. Wild animals and waterfalls have been replaced by raging house fires and, er, a dog love triangl...

It's time to raise the curtain on the Summer of Muppets! Our latest summer series will be a most sensational, celebrational look at the Disney films that feature these beloved Muppet characters, starting with 2011's THE MUPPETS, which was a bit of a relaunch of the brand under the Disney banner. One that our hosts find largely successful in capturing what makes this cast of characters so special,...

If you've listened to our last few episodes, or even just take a cursory glance at the movie titles, you'll know we've been spending more than our fair share of time talking about Disney animal movies. Unfortunately, NAPOLEON AND SAMANTHA doesn't break that trend. Fortunately, however, things are a little more...exotic in this movie, and not just because the animal in question is an old, milk-lovi...

Wayne Gretzky. Don Bradman. Usain Bolt. There are some athletes who are so far ahead of their peers they will likely forever hold the title of GOAT in their respective fields. But the biggest GOAT of all may be a horse - a horse named SECRETARIAT. Secretariat ran three races very fast, and as a result, a lot of rich white people got a whole lot richer, and so of course Disney made a movie about it...

It's our 300th episode! And we couldn't be more happy to be talking about perennial underdog Disney movie TANGLED. Not only did it lose in several straight polls for past anniversary episodes, it somehow feels like this movie never quite gets its due, despite how good it is, always in the shadow of its younger, colder cousin. But no longer, as our hosts sing its praises from the top of a tower in...

At first blush, it doesn't seem like there's anything in Disney's FOLLOW ME, BOYS! that we haven't seen before. It's not the first time we've seen Kurt Russell, Fred MacMurray or Vera Miles. It's not the first time we've seen Disney create a whole small town on their studio backlot. It's not the first time we've had wacky punctuation in the title. But just because it's all been done, doesn't mean...

Not all live action remakes are created equal, and in the case of LADY AND THE TRAMP that means being a movie that has the look and feel of a direct-to-Disney+ release. That is to say, it's not all that bad as far as these remakes go, it just feels more inessential than usual. Sure, there's some dynamite voice casting, some nicely expanded roles for the non-dog characters, and it's way less racist...

On the surface, Disney's RASCAL may appear to be yet another entry in the long list of Disney's "boy and his dog" movies - only this time the dog is a bandit-masked, human-handed, cute lil' raccoon. But in fact, Disney's RASCAL is actually about another one of our favourite recurring Disney themes - children who have not properly grieved the loss of a parent. In this one, all the animal hijinks, o...

Stop us if you've heard this one before: James Garner, fleeing from a dangerous scenario he wants no part of, gets mixed up with a little boy he only sort of barely tolerates, meets a widowed woman living all on her own in a lonely, isolated location, and through gruffness and the power of 1970s masculinity endears himself to all and escapes danger. No, we didn't rewatch that Castaway Cowboy movie...

You may recall from episodes past that our hosts have no small amount of fondness for the bite-sized stories featuring the critters who inhabit the Hundred Acre Wood. Stretch a story to feature-length and throw the most chaotic and thoughtless of those characters into the center of it, however, and it's a whole different story. THE TIGGER MOVIE is no doubt a favourite of a certain, pre-school aged...

There's a lot of deception going on at the core of Disney's TONKA. The cover/poster doesn't really give any indication of who the title character really is, so it's not until the opening theme song starts to refer to Tonka's powerful hooves and glossy coat that you might start to clue in. Then there's the fact that this movie is based on an actual historical horse, but he was never called Tonka at...

Historically, Disney's never really been able to knock it out of the park when it comes to Ron Miller-era movies that feature hapless leads going up against bumbling criminal enterprises. NEVER A DULL MOMENT doesn't exactly defy that trend, but it comes close. Likely thanks to having the criminal mastermind be a complex, art-loving Edward G. Robinson, filling his ranks with an eclectic group of he...