Chapter 16: The Dog Days of Disney

As of today Disney has made 51 theatrically released animated feature films. Out of those, only about three have had main characters with a full family unit consisting of a mother and a father. There have been no Disney movies thus far with two mothers or two fathers either unless you count the ambiguous relationship between Mr. Toad and Cyril Proudbottom, so it seems they simply have a problem with parents.No doubt as a penance, in 1961 the company that brought you The Devil and Max Devlin (1981) released a Hayley Mills starring, anti-divorce film known as The Parent Trap. In it, a set of estranged identical twins meet by sheer happenstance at camp, trade places, and attempt to bring their divorced parents back together again. The plot immediately appealed to me, even though I had seen the Lindsay Lohan remake. It's a story about the difficulties of preserving the family unit, the unfairness of divorce on young children and the implications of love when faced with the practicalities of life. So naturally Disney sidesteps such themes to make a film as fluffy and unnecessary as a feather boa.Ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a little. The young Hayley Mills who had just started her Disney movie blitz is at her best as the likeable twins Susan and Sharon. Both characters have personalities that are just developed enough to tell them apart but in case its too subtle one has an impossibly old-school New England accent. Their hijinks are fun, their humor agreeable and the end result is one of the more charming performances to come from a child actor.

I'm actually quite concerned for these kids who have to deal with such narcissistic parents. Sure Disney glosses over the reasons why they got divorced in the first place but its easy to see their personalities are just too self-absorbed to be the least bit sympathetic. If you're the proud parents of twins or triplets or sextuplets, you'd be able to narrow in on who's Justin and Dustin wouldn't you? That puzzle would be even less difficult if one of them had been a stranger to you for thirteen or so years but this all seems to be above their heads. Its only when one of them finally blurts out the truth that the families discover there's something rotten in the state of Massachusetts.

The parents get even worse when they reunite and start exchanging rancorous chit-chat. The father (Brian Keith) you see is about to marry a much younger gold digger who, of course, exemplifies the evil stepmother trope we've all come to expect. So it only makes sense that the man's ex-wife (Maureen O'Hara) takes a trip to the coast, unannounced, totting one of two Machiavellian moppets making catty comments, and dressing in the man's bathrobe. She then prances around the grounds while he's entertaining in a twisted game of hide-and-seek. Once they actually meet up, they of course argue until she literally punches him in the face in front of their kids! By that point, the couple was one mimosa away from Thunderdome.

If either of them were smart they'd get a restraining order against each other and shuttle both kids back and forth between California and Massachusetts. Not an idyllic solution, but its better than living with The War of the Roses (1988) 24/7. But alas they do stick it out together in the end because everything is supposed to be cheery, rosy and bright. It's a Disney movie after all; there are no tears in Disney movies! I just fear that kids with divorced parents will see this movie and want to imitate it which is kind of sad when you think about it. Its a hard lesson to learn kids, but sometimes a divorced household is better than one where one parent's in the morgue and the other in jail.