It is this odd affection for the Touchstone aesthetic that led me in the direction of Captain Ron, although I was just as inspired by Captain Ron ’s poster, which is, in its own unspeakably awful way, perfect. It’s a glorious train wreck of all the worst poster-making tropes of the past 30 years. I appreciated that when the Touchstone logo came onscreen at the start of the movie, chances were good I would then be able to turn off many of the critical faculties of my brain and give myself over to a slick, silly bit of formula that wouldn’t tax me intellectually any more than a sitcom might. ![]() I enjoyed them precisely because of their sunny, moronic mediocrity. In a related development, I was a friendless child who did not lose his virginity early.Ĭaptain Ron‘s poster is a glorious train wreck of all the worst poster-making tropes of the past 30 years.Īs a kid and teen, I didn’t enjoy Touchstone movies like the Marlon Wayans/Kadeem Hardison vehicle and supernatural basketball film The Sixth Man or the James Belushi/Charles Grodin mismatched buddy romp Taking Care Of Business despite their mediocrity. I loved these bland, undistinguished time-wasters and basic cable slot-pluggers so much that I would go to the library and read the novelizations of movies I couldn’t rent, so the youthful me was able to experience the Mark Twain quasi-adaptation Unidentified Flying Oddball in multiple forms. In many ways, these movies were descendants of the live-action movies Disney cranked out for kids in the late 1960s and 1970s - pleasant distractions sometimes bumped up to classics through the generous, myopic lens of childhood nostalgia. The films released by first Touchstone Films and then Touchstone Pictures ran towards brightly colored, high-concept, modestly budgeted comedies and light dramas with fizzy pop soundtracks and familiar if affordable stars like Martin Short. ![]() ![]() Though Touchstone has released some great films through the years - like Rushmore and Who Framed Roger Rabbit - and films that have captured the public’s imagination in a fierce way - like Good Morning, Vietnam, Pretty Woman, Ernest Saves Christmas, and Turner & Hooch - the banner’s house style favored cheerful, family-friendly mediocrity. Oh sure, they may have contained “adult” elements like the aforementioned five second flash of nudity or some casual swearing, but really they were for kids, teenagers, and emotionally stunted adults. It was a way for Disney to release a movie with, say, something as horrifying as a brief glimpse of the nipple of a beautiful naked woman in a playful and innocent context, or a child saying “sh–,” without engendering a flood of angry mail from apoplectic parents vowing to defrost the cryogenically frozen corpse of Walt Disney and kick him hard in the testicles, should his minions ever traumatize their innocent urchins that way again.īut as a latchkey kid whose fondest memories are all pop-culture-based, I appreciated that Touchstone made movies for adults that weren’t really for adults at all. Touchstone began as a way for Disney to release films aimed more at adults without compromising perhaps the most sterling reputation in all of children’s entertainment, at least before Pixar came along (and Pixar, of course, is part of Disney, and matured and developed in its nurturing shade).
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