The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers
In 1976, Walter Matthau’s “The Bad News Bears” began the “misfits v. the champs” kid’s sports movie genre. Their box office success was quickly followed up by the “Sandlot” franchise and it wasn’t long before Disney jumped into the rink with a hockey version of the tale. A group of misfit kids who are on the bottom of the athletic food chain ban together under unbelievable odds with a damaged coach and take on the champions who discarded them in the first place.
The original 90’s series of Mighty Duck films features Emilio Estevez as Gordan Bombay, an injured pro hockey player who works off his community service hours by volunteering to coach a horrible neighborhood hockey team. “Spoilers” Bombay and the charming ragtag team discover the joy of “playing” hockey while bonding as a family and the result is a championship. The new series once again brings back Estevez as a bitter Bombay who now hates hockey and working with kids. The Mighty Ducks franchise which he started with some quacking kids is now a mega-franchise and the ten-time state champions. As expected, it is now the home of the over-achieving, robotic, fanatic players who would push over their own grandmothers to get score a goal and have lost all sense of enjoyment and civility in sports. So now it is up to a caring mom of a discarded player and a group of rejects to convince Bombay to let them use his ice rink and coach the new team self-named the “Don’t Bothers”.
Although the series doesn’t break new ground, it is charming family fun with Lauren Graham as Alex Morrow, the dedicated mom, who launches the campaign to start the team of reject hockey players. Graham, a seasoned TV/film actor (Gilmore Girls, Bad Santa), has all the right levels to pull off the occasionally, over-the-top cheesy moments of the show making them palatable. Estevez is back as Bombay whose character has inexplicably gone through a complete reset with almost no trace of his original growth. Estevez isn’t an actor who has shown range in his career and he doesn’t tread new territory here either though it seems odd that we are going back through the same arc as before with the exact same character. But it doesn’t matter since he is surrounded by a cast of delightful newcomers. Brady Noon (Good Boys) as Evan Morrow is enjoyable as the self-deprecating “everyman” frontman of the team. Maxwell Brooke Simkins (Sleepover, The Book of Tommy) is top-notch as Morrow’s comedic sidekick, Nick Gaines. The two boys are believable with great chemistry in their quest to start the team.
The series pokes fun at itself and allows the audience in on the joke. The result is good-natured humor that resists tearing down flawed characters as a source of humor and asks itself valid questions. “Do we take little league sports too seriously?” “Have we forgotten how to have fun?” In a culture where parents are being thrown out of games for cursing the refs, this seems to be a much healthier and certainly more enjoyable take on youth sports.
Content-wise, Disney keeps this family-friendly. There is a little bathroom humor and some full-out body smashing during the hockey games, but compared to most youth-oriented shows out now, this is VERY kid-friendly. A great watch for the whole family.
Content Overview
Language: “God” is thrown out a few times
Violence: Hockey body slams and punches within the game
Sexual Content: Innocent childhood crushes from afar
Questionable Content: Mild Gastrointestinal humor
