Dusty Plus: Exploring the Dark and Dusty Corners of Disney Plus: Recent Episodes
Kristine and Bill Parker
Hosts Kristine and Bill Parker take a weekly journey through the weirdest, least-known and, sometimes, worst movies and shows Disney+ has to offer.
Kristine and Bill tackle 1996's Schwarzenegger vehicle "Jingle All the Way." COME for the weird intro sketch that is basically what gets us into this movie! STAY for Bill confusing the bands Sleater-Kinney and Rilo Kiley! WRAP YOURSELF IN important financial figures regarding both movies and holiday toys.
A lot about snowmen and traditions--surprisingly little about the Mediterranean Monk Seal! Bill and Kristine talk the not terrible, but disastrously marketed and placed, "Olaf's Frozen Adventure."
It's a bite-sized episode for a bite-sized movie, as we watch a Christmas special from the Muppets dark ages, just three years before Jason Siegel came riding in to save the brand. Celebrity cameos, utterly forgettable songs, and all the Muppets things you're used to except for the heart! Come be kind of vaguely sad with us.
What. A. Week! We're back right on schedule with a new episode, on the 1961 film Babes in Toyland. Also, we're learning a new space, so we're sorry for the not-great audio quality! But please join us as we discuss a truly weird, why-does-this-exist sort-of-holiday classic.
Fat kids at fat camp, but their fatness isn't the joke, and that's so great! Also Stiller and Meara, and Paul Feig! Kristine and Bill visit the weird Judd Apatow Disney comedy they missed in 1995, "Heavyweights," and reminisce about a summer camp life they themselves only sort of ever had.
Kristine and Bill talk about The Swiss Family Robinson (1960), based, as so many adventure films are, on a book written in German a century and a half earlier by a father who really liked Robinson Crusoe and had wanted to teach his four sons about ethics and nature and stuff.
With the Ducks back in the zeitgeist thanks to "Mighty Ducks: Game Changers," Kristine and Bill watch the last, most forgettable and very definitely the worst of the Mighty Ducks trilogy, the one they couldn't just call "Mighty Ducks 3" because this was the nineties and that's not extreme enough. Joshua "Pacey" Jackson! Kenan "what up with that" Thompson! We rip off Ask Me Another with some parody songs and just canNOT believe how bad this movie's sound effects are. Come on, it'll be fun!
Kristine and Bill watch and discuss another pre-Renaissance animated classic, and one that neither of them had seen before. We talk about the book upon which it's kind of sort of arguably based (basically, they borrowed some names and the title), Pearl Bailey and Sandy Duncan, foreign variations on what seems like a pretty simple movie title, and a proto-"OK Boomer!" or four.
Animal stories don't really do it for Bill, but he picked 1991's White Fang, based pretty loosely on Jack London's novel, nonetheless. Ethan Hawke in his first starring role, London's short but incredibly wild life, the movie with two very different soundtracks that used them both, and so much more!
We discuss the 1956 film "Davy Crockett and the River Pirates," which is really just two episodes of the 1955 miniseries "Davy Crockett" mashed together. THRILL at the game-show-skit intro with sound effects and everything! RECOIL and then ABSOLUTELY BOOGIE DOWN with the coolest and weirdest version of The Ballad of Davy Crockett you could ever imagine! SIGH WITH RELIEF that, while the "cultural depictions" warning is well earned by this one, it's much less problematic than it could've been!
Time for another Fifth Monday Favorite! Bill picked the 2016 feature Moana, but it's definitely a favorite of both of ours. Come along for a deeper look at the music, the work of trying to make sure a culture you're depicting is treated the right way, the real-life thousand-year "Long Pause," and tall Conchord, shiny crab and stealth Māori Jemaine Clement!
Kristine and Bill discuss the 1977 live-action feature "Candleshoe," starting a young and impressive Jodie Foster alongside the not-young and completely charming Helen Hayes and David Niven! Come scam some pirate treasure with us.
It's DTV time again! With a couple big-name returning voices and two new songs by late-Millennial/early-Gen-Z idol Phil Collins, this direct-to-DVD sequel to the 1999 classic is a little better than the average, maybe? Glenn Close! George Carlin! Super-racist Edgar Rice Burroughs! Swing through the jungle of this one with us!
Kristine and Bill discuss the 2005 computer-animated mess "Valiant," surrounding a troop of carrier pigeons tasked with delivering an important message during World War II. Ewan McGregor! What Disney was actually doing during WWII (lots of propaganda)! Lots of hints about why we hate Ricky Gervais! An intro featuring our littlest guy! This one really has it all, folks.
It's not dark or dusty, but it's new to us! Kristine and Bill close out Black History Month with a look at the excellent 2016 biopic, Hidden Figures.
We watch the new-to-Disney+, 1997 Wonderful World of Disney remake of the classic TV musical Cinderella, starring Brandy and Whitney Houston. with a supporting cast full of Broadway legends. Included: some incoherencies (Bill thinks) in the classic Cinderella story, deep-ish dives into the biographies of Whitney, Brandy, and Victor Garber, and how Bernadette Peters is (and is also extremely not) like Helen Mirren! Dig it.
Don Knotts! Don Knotts again! The history of actual apple dumplings! Kristine and Bill dive into the 1975 Disney hit "The Apple Dumpling Gang and come out with...something. Tim Conway and Don Knotts are very funny in this film that otherwise makes no gosh-darn sense!
Kristine and Bill talk about the 2013 in-the-Cars-universe-yet-not-by-Pixar head scratcher, Planes. How cool are Julia Louis-Dreyfus and John Cleese? How could this movie have been, you know, good? All this and more, plus a very trippy and disturbing trip through fan theories that attempt to explain the Cars universe, which is really upsetting when you think about it for a while. Come check it out!
It's the third Lilo & Stitch movie, naturally titled "Lilo & Stitch 2." Kristine and Bill talk through this extremely unnecessary direct-to-video sequel, the not-Hawaiian Hawaiians, Bill's huge problem with the ending, and so much more! Come join our 'ohana.
It's Hayley Mills again! And Dean Jones again! The two Disney Legends' paths meet as amateur and pro crime-fighters, respectively, who hope to follow a precocious cat to a pair of probably-murderous bank robbers. Let's talk about it!
Kristine and Bill open up a real . . . bad movie as they deal with CAN OF WORMS, a 1999 Disney Channel original. Weird puppets and animatronics and early CGI and stuff all come to earth to annoy a kid, whose life was pretty good to begin with actually!
Happy brazzle dazzle new year! We're back with one of Bill's childhood favorites, picked by Kristine. Pete's Dragon might be too well-known to really qualify for our show, if only because of the 2016 "reimagining," but Kristine had never seen it, and we bet some of you hadn't, either. An adorable cartoon dragon, sweet seventies songs, child slavery, alcoholism and graphic murder threats make this film, which opened on the same day as Star Wars, a reallllllly interesting one to revisit!
Kristine and Bill tackle the Hallmark Christmas movie of Disney+ Christmas movies, 2011's "`12 Dates of Christmas," starring the extremely likable Amy Smart and Mark-Paul Gosselaar. We sing our own movie-specific version of that infernal song, talk about its history and the long, proud history of people ripping off the brilliant 1993 film Groundhog Day, and discover a lot more to like than we expected in this ABC Family hidden gem.
Disney just released this movie in November of 2018--in theaters and everything--but we have no memory of it and we love The Nutcracker, so The Nutcracker and the Four Realms is our movie this week. So many beautiful women of so many different ages in Mackenzie Foy, Keira Knightley and Helen Mirren! And also, uh...they use SOME of Tchaikovsky's music, and the effects are pretty good! ...So yeah, this one's a mess, but come along for the ride with us.
It's back into the bowels of the DCOMverse for this week's festive offering, "'Twas the Night," starring now-world-renowned actor Bryan Cranston as the sleazy-uncle-turned Santa and co-starring so, SO many Canadians.
It's another Fifth Monday Favorite, and Kristine picked one of our favorite fairly new family traditions: 1992's heartwarming The Muppet Christmas Carol. We talk about Sir Michael Caine, writer Jerry Juhl, songwriting genius Paul Williams, and so much more. Come along--after all, there's only 25 or so more sleeps 'til Christmas.
It's our (the show's) birthday! We celebrate with kind of a supersized episode on the largely forgotten 2010 video-game-based blockbuster that reminds us that absolutely nothing is off-limits to white people. The very not-Persian Jake Gyllenhaal and Gemma Arterton swashbuckle and smolder their way through the generically ancient Middle East in a film that gives us a LOT to talk about (and not just all the whitewashing)! Come along!
We watch the dubbed version of Disney's first Chinese venture, about a magic gourd who emerges from a lake to torture a boy and/or make all his dreams come true. There's just not much out there about this one to talk about, so it's short and informal. Enjoy!
50 of these already? It's Kristine's birthday this week, so Bill picked a lesser-known film from one of her favorites, the Muppets. The brilliant Billy Connolly, Tim Curry and Jennifer Saunders join everybody's favorite felt heroes in retelling Robert Louis Stevenson's classic, the Muppets' last theatrical release before the big 2011 comeback.
From ghosts and ghouls straight on to aliens, Kristine and Bill talk about the 1999 Christopher Lloyd and Jeff Daniels feature My Favorite Martian. It's based on a mid-sixties sitcom, and we've got quite a bit of that in here too (it's on Amazon Prime). We take a look at the marketing, such as it was, for this mega-flop, plus deep dives on Lloyd, Daniels and the one real link between series and movie, Ray Walston.
It's the last week of the month of ghosts and goblins, and Kristine and Bill tackle one of the all-time favorites in the DCOM catalog--1998's Halloweentown. The wonderful Debbie Reynolds! A child star turned karate champion! A big baddie with a very, very questionable plan! The small town in Oregon that still holds a month-long festival celebrating this movie every fall! And so much more...
It's a cult favorite NOW, but Bill was one of like six people who saw Hocus Pocus in the theater back in 1993, so it qualifies. Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker overact wonderfully in this Halloween classic as three witches, out to eat the life force of an adorable young child (Thora Birch) guarded by two pretty horny teens (Omri Katz, Vinessa Shaw). Come do 90s things with us!
Our month of ghosts and goblins and geese and ganders continues with 2002's Disney Channel Original Movie "The Scream Team," starring a very young Kat Dennings, Eric Idle and Kathy Najimy. It's not scary, there are very few screams and it has one of the worst theme songs you've ever heard, but we find the fun. Come along and enjoy!
In our second foray into Disney-ride-based films, it's Eddie Murphy in 2003's The Haunted Mansion, which came out just a few months after the first Pirates of the Caribbean and did...well, it also sold some tickets! We talk a bit about our brush with COVID-19 (also known as "the 'vid" and "the dash-nineteen," if you're cool), and a lot about the various Haunted Mansion attractions around the world, including one very gross, very true urban legend.
A family movie set in the middle of the Vietnam War, about three soldiers trying to transport an elephant 300 miles across the country? What could possibly go right?
Kristine and Bill try to talk their way through the pain of 1995's Operation Dumbo Drop, starring Ray Liotta, Danny Glover and Denis Leary. There's a cool elephant!
In January 2015, nearly a full year before The Force Awakens, Disney and LucasFilm kicked off their marriage in a bit of a strange way, with George Lucas' pet project, the animated fairytale and rock opera Strange Magic. Kristine and Bill (and, at the start, their son Dan) talk about it, about the interminable list of songs George slammed in there, about the Uncanny Valley, and probably too much more!
It's like a Muppets movie, if you weren't really even remotely familiar with or interested in the individual Muppets, and the singing was very bad! Kristine and Bill tackle 2002's "The Country Bears," with Haley Joel Osment, Diedrich Bader, Bonnie Raitt and Don Henley, Queen Latifah, and Elton John doing...something.
Kristine and Bill watch the 1973 animated feature Robin Hood. Follow the adventures of the MERRY MENagerie! Plus: "King of the Road" performer and cartoon rooster Roger Miller, some truly baffling song lyrics, and Reynard the Fox.
It's Bill's first Fifth Friday Favorites episode, and he goes with maybe his FAVORITE favorite: 2011's The Muppets. All the cameos! All the Muppeteers! Bret McKenzie and the Muppety goodness of Flight of the Conchords! It's all here.
Bill and Kristine discuss Disney's 1993 adaptation of the Mark Twain novel "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," starring Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance and featuring just about every other actor in the world. Jason Robards! Robbie Hagrid Coltrane! Gabrielle from Xena! Dopey Anne Heche! Plus, deep dives on Wood, composer Bill Conti, Twain himself, and some of the many, many other adaptations of his greatest work.
Kristine and Bill revisit another Disney Channel Original Movie they were too old for. It's not great, but Katey Sagal is! Also: other, better cautionary sci-fi tales, a terrible Jeff Goldblum impression, an even worse Hobbit pun, the Simpsons, and one of the worst songs you've ever heard. This one might ramble a bit! Come join us.
Haley Mills! Hollywood legends Pola Negri and Eli Wallach! Suspense, mystery and young love! Poster artists creepily sexualizing Haley Mills! Mancini and Hepburn get Disneyfied in this 1964 jewel-heist-in-Crete film. Come get groovy with us!
It's a new one to both of us--the 1985 adventure film following Meredith Salenger's Natty Gann (not to be confused with Meredith Salenger's Natalie Gann from Race to Witch Mountain!) as she meets up with a very young John Cusack, an amazing wolf/dog, and SO MUCH MORE traveling through the 1935 U.S. to catch back up with her dad. We loved this one almost as much as you'll love hearing us talk about it! I'm so, so sorry for the opening joke.
Mullets! Tim Curry! Charlie Sheen! Maybe the worst pop song ever created! Kristine and Bill delve into the beautiful disaster that is the 1993 film "The Three Musketeers." Suggested talking points include horse tricks, mus-cat-eers, and what in the world does "all for one and all for love" mean?
A nice low air conditioner hum Bill didn't notice until editing joins us for this week's episode, where we're covering the Dwayne "the Rock" Johnson 2009 follow-up to 1975's Escape to Witch Mountain, which we covered back in episode 21. Is this a remake? A sequel? A barely-related movie of a different genre? Come puzzle over this and so, so much more with us!
Bill might have picked a movie that's too good and popular for our format, but it was fun! Kristine and Bill talk about the classic Jamaican bobsled comedy Cool Runnings. John Candy and other nice Canadians, really bad Reggae parody (not by us), and some unnecessary Hamilton references!
It's our first installment of Fifth Monday Favorites, so instead of some random crap Kristine picked one of her all-time favorite films, 2000's The Emperor's New Groove. We talk about how it almost never was, how a remake might go, David Spade, and so much more!
Kristine and Bill talk about the unlikely 1976 sequel to 1959's The Sheggy Dog, the ongoing story of the boy-now-middle-aged-man who turns into a sheepdog, staring forever-onscreen-mates Dean Jones and Suzanne Plashette. Tim Conway! Roller derby! Traumatizing Austrian kid lit! Fascism and Black Lives Matter! This episode, weirdly, has all these things!
Kristine and Bill talk about a Disney animated blockbuster that wasn't, the Michael J. Fox-starring Atlantis: The Lost Empire. What worked, what didn't work, an insulting summary of Plato, henchmen with respiratory illnesses--it's all here!
Kristine and Bill discuss the 1991 comic book adaptation "The Rocketeer," a wildly fun look back at the stories of a simpler time, filled with stars and the fathers of stars and also Jan Levinson from The Office. Oh, and Bill has just a BIT of a thing for Jennifer Connelly.
Kristine and Bill talk about the 2006 Disney movie "The Wild," not to be confused with (but always, unavoidably confused with) the 2005 Dreamworks trash pile "Madagascar"). Terrible tag lines! The long and varied career of composer Alan Silvestri! The shockingly common concept of "twin films"! Come along and enjoy.
Kristine and Bill talk about John Carter, the (surprisingly endearing! fantasy blockbuster of 2012, the failure of which cost Disney millions of dollars plus its studio chairman. Stuff borrowed from Avatar! Many things borrowed from it by Avatar, Star Wars, and many others! Loin cloths, but no boob armor! A song parody from Thrilling Adventure Hour! We have fun.
Lindsay Lohan leads a group of teenage sleuths whose teacher has gone missing. High fashion! New York City! A corner spy store literally called The Corner Spy Store! Way too many mentions of the title of the film! This one has it all, and Kristine and Bill get into it.
We stick with Jules Verne for a second week in a row, with this related-to-Disney-by-marriage Fox film featuring James Mason as another Verne leading man, a kick-butt leading lady that Verne never would've thought to give us, house-pet reptiles made to look like giant monsters, possible severe damage to a national park, and considerably less animal abuse than Ben-Hur!
We have guest! Cecil Castellucci is a novelist and comics writer who is the current writer for Batgirl, but she's here to talk about her newest project--watching every Disney movie ever made, in chronological order. Her schedule lined up with one we'd had our eye on this week, so we come together to discuss 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. We interview her, she interviews us, and I hope you have half as good a time as we did.
We had to delay our prior plan by a week, so we get an unexpected delight this week in the 1986 cult classic Flight of the Navigator. Space travel, time travel, effects that hold up surprisingly well, and Pee-Wee Herman!
Disney tried so hard to capitalize on the Star Wars craze, 40 years before it occurred to them to just buy the franchise! Kristine and Bill talk about "The Cat from Outer Space," the 1978 theatrical release about...well, a cat, that came from outer space. It's better than it sounds! Plus, hear Bill refer to Ed Asner as Lou Grant and to Harry Morgan as Henry Morgan!
Kristine and Bill talk about the 1975 film Escape to Witch Mountain, in which two magical alien children try to get home before a rich guy uses them to find oil deposits. It's better than it sounds! Related: toothless bears; Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson; The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.
Happy 20th! Kristine and Bill take on their first non-movie, the five-episode DisneyXD animated series "Lego Star Wars All-Stars." Turns out, there's a whole other series you kind of have to be familiar with to enjoy this one! Also, Bill doesn't understand why Lego-branded entertainment is a thing, and Kristine doesn't understand why this series began with a series of autobiography readings from an annoying droid that feels like it's two hours long.
Kristine and Bill discuss The Aristocats, an animated movie that Disney definitely made and put in the theaters! Suggested talking points include Racist Chinese Tigger, dumb butlers and which Gabor was the cop puncher.
Happy belated, quarantined St. Patrick's Day! Kristine and Bill talk about the Irish folklore-based Darby O'Gill and the Little People (much less offensive than it sounds!), in which an old man tricks a leprechaun, forced perspective is used to work magic, and Sean Connery pretends to sing. Enjoy, and stay safe!
Kristine and Bill watch "Gus," Disney's 1976 theatrical hit, somehow, involving a mule that can kick field goals. Ed Asner! Don Knotts! Ridiculous sound effects! A ten-minute scene ripping up a grocery store! This movie really has it all, folks. Stay safe, stay inside, and listen to us talk about a really weird, bad old movie!
Kristine and Bill have their second Twain thing in a row, and second adaptation of "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" in a couple months. This time it's a kid, and he has a Discman and rollerblades, and he says "let's boogie!" It's not great.
Kristine and Bill watch and discuss two very different versions of the Mark Twain classic "The Prince and the Pauper" available on Disney+: a live action film from 1962, and an animated Mickey and friends short from 1990. Now with a new and, we think, improved format!
Bill made Kristine watch Kazaam, the Shaquille O'Neal genie movie, and they develop a lot of affection and understanding for it while also recognizing that it's terrible! If you're new to the pod, this is a good one to start with. Let us know your thoughts on DustyPlusPod at gmail or on Twitter!
Kristine and Bill watch and discuss Oliver and Company, the animated feature just before all those really, really good animated features known as the "Disney Renaissance." Billy Joel, Bette Midler, Dom DeLuise and Charles Dickens--what more could you ask for?
Kristine and Bill wander into someone else's childhood and watch A Goofy Movie, the first entry for both into the Goof Troop-iverse. It's fun!
Kristine and Bill discuss the oddly-named Mark Twain update, which involves a guy traveling back in time in a spaceship to aid a very, very old King Arthur and Sir Gawain.
Kristine and Bill delve into the world of Disney Channel Original Movies (the mass-produced, pre-High School Musical ones!) with Phantom of the Megaplex, a weird little thing people keep saying is loosely based on Phantom of the Opera because the titles sound the same. Kristine serenades you with an original parody, and we marvel at how long ago the year 2000 was.
Kristine and Bill talk about the charming little Angela Lansbury-starring, Mary-Poppins-wannabe Bedknobs and Broomsticks (both versions!), the overlooked "surprise, Nazis!" film genre, and the joys of substitutiary locomotion.
Decades before it decided to buy Star Wars, Disney tried very hard to copy Star Wars. Kristine and Bill talk about the 1979 eerily-familiar space opera The Black Hole, and about what Star Wars got right that this one...did not.
Seven movies in, Kristine and Bill finally disagree on one, as one of them kind of likes this sequel to the excellent "Emperor's New Groove" focusing on Patrick Warburton's Kronk character.
Kristine and Bill discuss one of the first of a long series of direct-to-video sequels (or in this case, a "mid-quel") which finds Belle trying to get the still-a-beast Beast to appreciate the joy and magic of Christmas or something.
They're getting worse, you guys. This week, Kristine and Bill made themselves watch the truly dreary I'll Be Home for Christmas, in which Jonathan Taylor Thomas conducts a lying, thieving reign of terror across the country, but Jessica Biel loves/tolerates him anyway.
Kristine and Bill talk about The Christmas Star, a 1986 made-for-TV movie that had Ed Asner and just about every Christmas movie cliche you can think of.
Kristine and Bill talk (and Bill briefly sings) their way through the in turns delightfully and painfully sixties film comedy "The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes," starring Kurt Russell in one of his early starring roles as the titular computer.
Kristine and Bill talk about the new-to-them-and-surprisingly-pretty-good 1968 theatrical release Blackbeard's Ghost, starring the very talented, very silly Peter Ustinov.
Welcome to Dusty+: Exploring the Dark & Dusty Corners of Disney+. In this inaugural episode, Kristine and Bill Parker talk through the 1985 animated flop "The Black Cauldron."