Four Inevitable Disney Live-Action Remakes

Predicting when the Jonas Brothers will supplant Kurt Russell and Robert Forster.

“The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes” (1969)
Directed by Robert Butler

Kurt Russell was a big part of Disney’s live-action output in the late 1960s and early 1980s. In “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes,” he played a college student whose university acquires one of the first computers, even though the dean of Medfield College declares that getting a single machine is “a luxury that we just cannot afford!” After it goes on the fritz, Russell’s character has to fetch a replacement part. When he tries to install it while standing on a wet floor, he gets hit with a massive electric shock and becomes a brainiac. Once again, Wikipedia proves unreliable; it claims powerful jolts of electricity are often used as torture or capital punishment, but doesn’t mention once that it can also give you the brain of a computer. In a post-”Animal House” age, the sedate collegiate life of “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes,” where everyone has well-groomed helmet-head hair and kids are too busy practicing for an academic quiz show to drink or carouse, is awfully dated (to say nothing about a computer run on punch cards and magnetic tape). Still, there’s something to that teenager-computer hybrid, especially in a world where, thanks to PDAs, most kids are teenager-computer hybrids. Plus, no property will lay moldering on the shelf for long with a title this friendly to product placement: “The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes?” How about “The iMac Wore Converse?” Zac Efron would work nicely in the title role and Kurt Russell could return as A.J. Arno, the powerful industrialist (played in the original by Cesar Romero) who donates a magical desktop to the school. Remakes love that kind of symmetry. (In fact, Disney fave Dean Jones returned to play a rival dean when Disney remade the film a first time for ABC’s “Wonderful World of Disney” with Kurt Cameron in 1995.)

“The Watcher in the Woods” (1980)
Directed by John Hough

The recent IFC News podcast on traumatic kids’ movies brought this property to our attention, after listeners wrote us in droves, chastising us for forgetting to mention it. It bears a bunch of boilerplate live-action Disney plot points — a family moving to a new house, kids trying to solve a mystery, adults sabotaging their efforts — but they’re assembled by director John Hough (who also helmed the original “Escape to Witch Mountain”) with an unusually vivid eye for terror. After Jan (Lynn-Holly Johnson) and her folks move into an old English manor set deep in the woods, she begins to have visions of a blindfolded girl calling out for help, while her little sister Ellie (Kyle Richards) becomes prone to possession, writing backwards on windows and mirrors. Stylistically, this movie has way more in common with Sam Raimi’s “Evil Dead” series than any kids movie should, thanks to a bevy of snap-zooms and long voyeuristic point-of-view shots from the perspective of someone following an innocent girl through the woods. How much horror to include was a source of constant disagreement on the set and in the editing room, but even the toned-down version that survived — after the original was yanked from theaters and given a drastically different new ending — is still vastly spookier than just about every other family film ever made. “The Watcher in the Woods” is easily the best movie on this list, with evocative photography and memorable performances (Bette Davis with crazy lady hair!). It holds up unusually well. So, naturally, we expect this remake especially soon, particularly since its lead role is the perfect age to be played by a popular Disney Channel star like Miley Cyrus or — better yet — Selena Gomez, whose TV show “Wizards of Waverly Place” dovetails nicely with “The Watcher”‘s supernatural themes.

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