Daily Briefs 3: Tokyo Drift

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Nothing gold can stay, Ponyboy: As a novel alternative to just cold vetoin’ the new city budget, Mayor Mark Funkhouser will let it become law without his signature, a level of political subtlety we haven’t experienced, ever, from the Funkhouser administration. So I’m attributing that whole thing to professional political consultant Mark Seittman, as opposed to Funkhouser’s previous advisor, Gloria Squitiro, whom we provincial Kansas City hayseeds were unprepared to accept as half of an active political partnership, because she’s a woman. Remember back when she said that, during their ghastly oil spill of a media blitz in January? My, what a long road it’s been since we were embarrassed, regularly, on a national stage. Sometimes I get all nostalgic about that, but then I go out in the garage and drink a few cans of Surge soda from the cases I hoarded back in 2003 when they discontinued it, followed by a few minutes of bench presses, then an abrupt and profound glucose crash and a depressing evening spent flipping through the channels and muttering swears under my breath.

Next week, I’ll compare Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn to politics or something: There’s an all-but-forgotten Disney movie from the 1980s called Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend which I recall seeing on cable television when I was a kid. “A cross between Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.!” proclaimed the Sean Edwards-y Los Angeles Daily News in a whorish blurb that is probably a verbatim reiteration of the pitch that sold Disney on the whole project in the first place. As a measure of its total lack of consequence on pop culture, it starred William Katt after the cancellation of The Greatest American Hero. The plot deals with the discovery of a baby brontosaurus in Africa and some indifferent action scenes involving saving it from bad guys. Now, in a shocking real-life development that brings Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend screaming back into the zeitgeist, some scientists or something have discovered a former Nazi death camp guard living in Cleveland. Now he’s being deported from the United States to stand trial in Germany. Unless William Katt can save him!

At this point, if I were a member of an international tribunal still searching for Nazis, I’d be keeping an eye on the order fulfillment departments of dialysis machine manufacturers and coffins. Before he’s hung or whatever by an international tribunal, maybe anthropologists could study him to find out what antisemites were like back in the olden days, because we’re not going to be uncovering many more of these guys in a non-mummified or undead context.

But anyway, back to Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. It’s the haziest flicker of a memory for me, so I don’t think I can summarize it better than IMDB commenter ary08004, who writes,

People were NOT seeing their movies anymore and the company was not producing the usual wholesome material….at least no what people expected. A major problem: profanity.

Yes, the idiots running the Disney movies during that decade would produce films with swear words – including the Lord’s name in vain, if you can believe that – interspersed in these “family films.” In fact that happens twice here in the first 20 minutes!

This movie, in addition to the language problems, has a nasty tone to it, too, which made it unlikeable almost right from the beginning.

Thankfully, Disney woke up and has produced a lot of great material since these decadent ’80s movies.