The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh 1.3

There’s a really strange moment early in episode three where it just repeats a scene from episode one. It’s very curious, almost as though they might have done a “previously on…” but they didn’t want to make anybody who missed either of the first two installments on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color think that they really needed to have seen them to follow the narrative. I guess that speaks to producers’ and networks’ estimation of their audience’s intelligence in 1964.

Our son enjoyed the third part more than the second, and I did as well. It’s a really tense story where the Scarecrow has to put a very complex plan together very quickly to free two prisoners from the general, and he has to rely on making a bet on one man’s better nature for it to succeed. Superbly directed and acted, just like the other two, this was a real treat.

I’ll go to my grave grumbling that Disney didn’t make a full season of these. The story comes to a reasonable stopping point, but there’s a lot more that they could have done with this premise. Nevertheless, what we got was even better than I had been hoping for over the last thirty years. This is up there with 20,000 Leagues as one of the most entertaining things that Disney did back in its classic period. Get yourself a Disney Movie Club subscription and see for yourself.

The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh 1.2

For thirty years, I was mildly annoyed that this program was so difficult for people to watch. Now I’m absolutely infuriated that Disney only made three episodes of it. I understand “we make three episodes, we can cut it into a movie.” That’s not good enough for me anymore. There should’ve been twenty-four of these, minimum. I’m sure Disney could do it now and do an acceptable, serviceable job, but I want twenty-four episodes with Patrick McGoohan and George Cole and all the guest stars of the day. This one features Patrick Wymark as a member of the Scarecrow’s gang. General Pugh figures out his haste in paying off old debts quite suddenly means that he must be a smuggler. So our hero has to make an example of the traitor before he can squeal.

So our son’s not enjoying this as much as I am. Nobody is, ever, probably. This time, he grumbled aloud that he was “ready for some Scarecrow action.” What he got was quite surprising. Wymark is put on trial before an assemblage of his masked fellows. I guessed how it would be resolved, but the rest of the hour was satisfyingly twisty and unpredictable, with Dr. Syn having to stay a step ahead of some very intelligent villains. The kid enjoyed the first episode more than this, with a footnote that its opening chase scene felt “like fluff,” and was therefore unnecessary, but he allowed that the two courtroom scenes this time – one in an official court and one for smugglers to judge their own – were pretty good.

The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh 1.1

There was a little shouting around these parts a couple of months ago, the sort of all capital letters bellowing in which one engages when a lost media treasure shows up unexpectedly. Here, it was the thunderous revelation that Disney had released a no-frills but very nice collection of something I’ve wanted to see for more than thirty years: The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh. I read about it in that great, great old book of classic television Harry and Wally’s Favorite TV Shows, and only seen a clip and some pictures. In a truncated movie version, it showed in British movie theaters at Christmas 1963, and showed up in full form across three episodes of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in February 1964, meaning Patrick McGoohan made it in between the half hour run and the hour-long seasons of Danger Man.

So there it was, sitting in Disney’s subscription Movie Club, on Blu-ray since late 2019. They don’t draw much attention to these things, do they? Also on Blu-ray exclusive to this club, by the way, are a whole pile of good old live action films that we’ve watched for these pages: Return to Oz, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the only Witch Mountain movies that matter, Watcher in the Woods, even The Black Hole, which isn’t worth my dollars to upgrade, but the others certainly are. You may balk at joining a subscription club, but honestly, anybody who can’t get their money’s worth out of this thing isn’t trying very hard.

So anyway, a paycheck later – okay, not that much – I finally had this, along with all these long-sought treasures, which, back in 2018, I wrote about, figuring I’d have to resort to a bootleg to ever see it. Delightful timing. I made room on the schedule to watch it this month, and tonight, I enjoyed every minute of it. Patrick McGoohan plays the mild-mannered vicar Dr. Syn, who is, by night, the Robin Hood of the Dover Coasts. George Cole is his assistant, Jill Curzon has a tiny role, and Geoffrey Keen is the general who has been commanded by the king to bring in this smuggler by any means necessary. In episode one, he brings a Naval press gang to the area to round up all able-bodied men until someone confesses who is really running this smuggling ring.

I’ve said for years that Disney’s been foolish leaving money on the table by not making this more available, and now that I’ve seen part one, I stand by that. This is really, really good stuff. It’s fairly bloodless, with guns shot out of hands and blows thrown out of shot, but it’s exciting and intelligent. The general is ruthless but not dumb, and nothing’s played for laughs. Admittedly I watch a lot of old teevee, but this felt quite timeless, honestly. A remake’s director could film this script again tomorrow and not need to change very much. There’s perhaps more music than a modern production might employ, but you can hear Thurl Ravenscroft in the theme tune, and that’s never a bad thing.

Actually, while nothing is played for laughs, there is a knee-slapper at the beginning. Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color was hosted by Unca Walt himself, who gave a little introduction to whatever the program was showing in any given week. This time, Walt bafflingly told audiences that the Scarecrow, Dr. Syn, was a real historical person, and that the locals still talk about him. I guess nobody told him that this is a fictional character who was created just fifty years previously. Thanks for green-lighting this great show, Walt, but we’ll skip what you have to say tomorrow evening, okay?

The Watcher in the Woods (1980)

Earlier today, I wrote about how I’ve been upgrading my DVDs to Blu-rays, where I can, what with studios being pretty selfish in some cases. About a week ago, I learned that several Disney live-action films that I enjoy and own can only be purchased through the Mouse’s old-fashioned subscription service, like the old Columbia House Record Club. Among these treats: The Watcher in the Woods. Well, you can pay through the nose for them one at a time on eBay, or you can count that there’s six you want, and five you’re obliged to buy, and sign up. Unfortunately, Watcher has yet to arrive, and I wasn’t going to delay watching this on Halloween weekend, so the DVD’ll do.

Hmmm. Hope the Blu-ray’s got these two alternate endings on it. Wonder what that’s about? (*reads) Oh! Wow!

Anyway, I remember a little stir when Watcher was released, and the media started asking whether it was too scary for children, and why Disney had suddenly started making horror films. I didn’t remember the fuss about it being yanked from theaters for more than a year, with Vincent McEveety called in to give John Hough’s film a new finale. Maybe that’s why David McCallum unceremoniously vanishes from the movie halfway through.

Anyway, Watcher was based on a novel, and the great Brian Clemens was called in to adapt it. Feels a lot like what he did was basically pen an episode of Thriller, right down to the token American girls in jeopardy. As we frequently saw in that anthology series, a British man is married to an American woman, played here by Carroll Baker, who was actually the American lead in a 1976 Thriller. They have two girls, and they get involved in a freaky series of supernatural events that has something to do with the mysterious disappearance of Bette Davis’s character’s daughter thirty years ago. Clemens’ script was rewritten by three others, including Gerry Day and Rosemary Anne Sisson, and apparently they still cocked up the ending and it had to be reshot months and months later.

Despite the remarkably troubled production, the finished product is still a really solid ghost story for the Goosebumps-age crowd, helped by some fabulous photography and some great camera tricks. We all enjoyed the way that something unseen is constantly following characters from the woods, and how the massive winds that whip up around them feel so much like part of the forest. There are weak links, certainly. The three witnesses to the original incident are incredibly unbelievable when they insist on refusing to talk about it, and Lynn-Holly Johnson, who plays the older daughter, is Michael Caine-in-The Swarm-level intense. But it simply looks so impressive and so real that these are just quibbles. It’s a very nice looking scary movie for younger viewers.

Our son enjoyed it, but it didn’t leave him half as rattled as Sleepy Hollow did last week. Hmmmm. Maybe we should have gone with Watcher a year ago. The media forty years ago was wrong, unsurprisingly. This isn’t too scary for children at all.

Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

Ray Bradbury Month continues with a movie you should probably watch on an evening other than July 4th. For starters, the season’s wrong, and then you have to start it with the sun still up, and then yahoos start shooting bottle rockets. This is a quiet, creepy movie, when the music’s not too unbearable, anyway. It deserved better than we gave it.

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a pretty good film. I wouldn’t call it better than that, but it’s probably a film that’s going to have greater impact on younger viewers. There’s a lot here to like, but there’s also a lot that gets in the way of liking it. There are a couple of places where a threat gets sidelined by a long talk with somebody, usually Jason Robards, and it just kills the momentum stone dead. During the film’s biggest failure, our two young heroes are rushing home from a creepy carnival with a spectral green gas following them. But the kids have to get tucked in to their respective bedrooms and then Jason Robards has to meditate on the power of regret for five minutes before the nightmare gas catches up. Maybe it’s the music’s fault: it tells us that something very urgent is about to happen, and it doesn’t, for hours.

So anyway, Wicked was a quarter-century labor of love from Bradbury. It started as a screenplay in 1959 or so, became a novel in 1962, and finally went before the camera twenty years later, with lots of location filming in Vermont. Jonathan Pryce plays Mr. Dark, the leader of “the autumn people,” who show up with an October carnival every forty or fifty years to grant wishes and steal souls from the lonely and sad townspeople. You can see a far better story than the production before the carnival shows up. There is way too much music, but the supporting characters are introduced with sharp enough sketches that they’re easily remembered a half-hour later when things start going very wrong.

When Mr. Dark and his gang show up on a strange train, things pick up for a while, with fits and starts and frustrations punctuating some powerfully good set pieces. Pryce completely dominates the film. He has a big moral showdown with Robards and the blasted director doesn’t even allow Robards to stand up and face him. Supporting roles are filled by some fine actors like Diane Ladd, Pam Grier, and Angelo Rossitto, and there are some splendid scares, one involving a couple of hundred tarantulas and another had our son giving a very, very sharp gasp when Mr. Dark’s two hands come up behind the boys as they’re hiding in the library.

I think the set pieces might stick with our kid, but overall it is nowhere as tense as it should be, and the hints about what’s keeping the hero kids so unhappy are either frustratingly vague or hammered in with too much force. It’s genuinely not a bad film, but I was disappointed that it wasn’t as good as I remembered it. I’d like to see it issued on Blu-ray with a beefy set of bonus features, but I can’t swear that even the tarantulas would make it a pre-order priority.

Today’s feature was a gift from Nikka Valken, and I invite you all to check out her Society 6 page and buy some of her fun artwork!

The Rocketeer (1991)

Around these parts, the late comic artist Dave Stevens is best remembered for two things. The one you can’t have known about was providing the cover of a notorious issue of Eclipse Comics’ DNAgents that featured the sexy female lead in her underwear posing like a classic pinup. I bought that issue when I was in high school, didn’t think twice about whether I might need to discreetly put the other three or four comics I bought on the top of the stack, and suffered the wrath of my outraged mother for the better part of a month after she saw it. Knowing a good thing, Eclipse issued the cover as a poster. I may have had a cheesecake photo or two on my wall as a teenager, but even I wasn’t so dumb as to buy that poster.

The other thing is, of course, creating the throwback superhero the Rocketeer, although he did surprisingly little with a character that ended up as the star of a big, fun, Disney adventure film. There’s honestly not a lot of Stevens Rocketeer work in print, which kind of reminds me of how very little Steve Ditko Hawk & Dove there is. Stevens created the project as a love letter to icons from his youth like the Rocket Men from Republic’s adventure serials, Rondo Hatton, Bettie Page. I gave our son a quick visual rundown of the three last night, selecting a nice, tame picture of Bettie, nothing as envelope-pushing as that DNAgents cover, and he went to bed very, very skeptical about this movie.

So of course he enjoyed the heck out of it once it got going. It’s a very good adventure film full of explosions, stunts, and gunfights. It was directed by Joe Johnston, a director whose work I really enjoy, and he brought some terrific performances and energy to a really fine and tight script. I think the only flaw in the film is that it needs an establishing shot of the Hollywoodland sign early on, before the last four letters get abruptly blown up in the end. It stars Bill Campbell and Jennifer Connelly as the leads, with Timothy Dalton as the villain, and a powerhouse assortment of great character actors from the period, including Alan Arkin, Eddie Jones, Terry O’Quinn, Jon Polito, and Paul Sorvino, backing them.

It’s surprising that a film this good was made in the era it was. Thirty years ago, movies based on comic books were uncommon and largely awful, and the Rocketeer was hardly a household name. He – I mean she – may become one before much longer, though. One of the Disney channels has a new cartoon starring Cliff Secord’s great granddaughter as the modern Rocketeer. She could be the next Doc McStuffins! But I like the low-tech and throwback charm of this movie, with G-men and gangsters and Nazi saboteurs and Hollywood royalty and restaurants in buildings that look like bulldogs. It’s even got Howard Hughes in it! I’ve explained the Howard Hughes analogues that we’ve seen in this blog to our son before, in episodes of The Bionic Woman and The Ghosts of Motley Hall, but this is the first time the actual historical figure is a character in the narrative!

I paused the movie early on to make a point with our son. He was rewatching 2019’s Godzilla: King of the Monsters last night, and we talked about how I’m just not as wowed by modern special effects as what they did in older movies. There are certainly some very interesting shots and compositions in the monster movie – Ghidrah’s reveal is breathtaking, and better than his introduction in any classic Toho film – but when everything amazing is done on computers, there’s less of a wow factor for me. There’s a bit early on in The Rocketeer when Cliff lands a tiny one-seater plane without landing gear, on fire, on a dirt track runway. I am more impressed with what the special effects team and stuntmen accomplished under the hot California sun that afternoon than I am anything in any modern Godzilla movie. I hope one day he’ll agree.

I do have a couple of minor complaints about the product we watched. I picked up the DVD from the era when they were advertising DisneyMovieRewards.com on everything, and firstly, the transfer is downright godawful, very soft and artifacty. And it doesn’t have a very, very good 40-second teaser trailer that you used to see, with the letters in “rocketeer” punctuating some very quick cuts of the action; it has one of those “spoil everything” trailers, for a film you now need not see. I’m tempted to upgrade this to a better Blu-ray edition. It’s a good film that deserves a good home media experience.

Tron (1982)

I always liked the video game of Tron more than the movie, even though I wasn’t very good at it. I could never finish the third level. Do you remember the game? The cabinet was all black light and faux neon, and you had to clear four sub-games on each level: the tanks, the light cycles, the grid spiders, and the breakout. It got exponentially more difficult with each clear of the four and I don’t know I ever completed even one of the sub-games on level three, but it was incredibly fun and I didn’t mind spending all those quarters trying.

I also liked the toys a lot, and have been chuckling over this one little kid freaking out in the action figure aisle of our local Lionel Play World for almost forty years now. The light cycles used zip-cords and would be really perfect for our place now, with our hardwood floors. The package read “the futuristic light cycle,” and some small boy didn’t know that word and thought it said “fantastic.” So the child flipped out and started screaming “Mom! Mom! It’s the fantastic light cycle! The fantastic light cycle!” Mom said “That’s nice, dear,” and wasn’t about to spend seven or eight dollars on a piece of plastic, leaving the kid desolately crying and choking out between sobs “fantastic light cycle, faaaaaaantastic liiiiiiight cycle…” for what I remember as just short of forever.

I remember the game and that kid much better than I remember the movie. I know I saw it in theaters once as well as a few times on HBO, but the details were all gone before this morning.

Don’t try that on the Helicarrier, David Warner. Tony Stark’ll bust you.

Our son wasn’t completely blown away, but it certainly entertained him. He said that he loved the look of the film, which is what most people remember more than the story, which is really by-the-numbers. Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, and David Warner are the stars, with smaller roles for Barnard Hughes, Peter Jurasik, and former Shazam! star Jackson Bostwick as one of the henchmen. It was the music, which was written by Wendy Carlos, that stood out most to me this morning. During the solar-sailed ship sequence, I was thinking that having a soundtrack of this would not be a bad idea at all, which I never think, even when I’m watching something Bernard Herrmann scored.

It’s impossible for a kid born in the 21st century to see this movie’s animation with the same perspective we had then. It remains really interesting to watch – the front-seat view from the cycles during the race is quite exciting – but, much like the video for the Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing,” animation has progressed so far that we just don’t “see” the 3D that we did the first time around. Even though the spectacle has been blunted by time, it’s not a bad flick for what it is: the rebels escape and move from A to B to destroy the enemy complex, a perfectly engaging plot for kids. Wikipedia suggests that some critics from the day thought it was “incoherent,” which means they must have had a very long nap in the middle of the press screening.

Of course, the biggest element that’s been blunted by time is the idea that we need to fear an evil supercomputer like the Master Control Program taking control of the Pentagon and the Kremlin. No, these days we’re more aware that human garbage can disrupt the hell out of our world using much smaller systems. I wish the Master Control Program would zap Zuckerberg into a video game and de-res him in a round of electronic jai-alai.

The Island at the Top of the World (1974)

Our son was four when we started this blog, and while he remembers many of the programs and movies that we watched in its first couple of years – in part from repetition – many others have faded away. That’s the nature of memory of preschoolers; we all have a few solid memories from age four and five, but it takes more than a single viewing of even an exciting movie that a kid really enjoys to sink in during the years when there’s so much else in the world to absorb and remember. And if it’s a movie that I got from the library, then there’s no opportunity for repetition.

So since some other action-adventure films in the Jules Verne tradition and style – the various takes on Journey to the Center of the Earth and In Search of the Castaways – have largely faded from his memory, Disney’s 1974 adaptation of Ian Cameron’s novel The Lost Ones wasn’t nearly as familiar and old hat to him as it was to his parents. We had never seen this film before, and yet we kind of did.

One thing I really appreciated: this film gets in gear immediately. I was talking with an old pal about the unbearably bloated Godzilla: King of the Monsters this weekend and told him how I just missed ninety minute movies. I checked the running time, saw this movie was only an hour and a half long, and breathed a happy sigh of relief. The characters and situations are introduced on the go, and all the background events necessary to get the expedition started are explained as we’re moving along with them.

Island stars David Hartman as a turn-of-the-century scientist. And yeah, it’s the same guy who’d later host Good Morning America forever, which might’ve sparked the same oddball reaction from me as when people in Britain learn that the longtime Blue Peter presenter Peter Purves had been in Doctor Who for a year in the sixties. Donald Sinden plays the millionaire looking for his missing son, Jacques Marin is the captain of an airship, and Mako, who guest-starred in everything in the 1970s, plays an Eskimo guide.

So was it any good? It certainly didn’t do anything new, and every plot beat, from the lost civilization to the gods being angry to characters who we thought were dead showing up again to the only female having a heart of gold to help our heroes, was one we’ve seen before. The science was absurd and the movie keeps confusing archaeology with anthropology. But it still unfolded at a pleasantly brisk pace, and kept the kiddo excited and surprised, and it gives us lava, explosions, hidden passages, whirlpools, and dangerous animals. If you’ve never seen it before, or if you’re young enough that you might as well not have, then it’s a splendid picture.

This post has been written amid the remarkable distraction of our son watching The Avengers for the tenth time.

Mary Poppins Returns (2018)

How nice, it seemed, in a world of dreary and utterly unnecessary remakes, for Disney to actually make a sequel to an old film. Except this isn’t a sequel. Mary Poppins Returns is actually a remake of the original, every plot beat completely familiar and done with modern gloss. It follows the template and order of the original’s moments so precisely that the only thing that’s different is the casting and subtle changes to professions. Here we meet the oddball relative who was played by Ed Wynn last time and by Meryl Streep this time, and then we’ll visit the bank, and then we’ll have the great showstopping dance routine that was performed by chimney sweeps last time and by lamplighters this time. Even the mother figure is the same. Last time, she was a suffragette and this time, she’s organizing labor.

That said, while I wished desperately for some moments that would veer wildly away from the original’s format, it certainly succeeded with our favorite seven year-old critic, who remembers the original, but not particularly well. And if I hadn’t seen the original eight or nine times previously, I suppose the only real complaint I’d have is that the villain has no reason whatever to be a villain. Seriously, why is Colin Firth being villainous in this movie? Why does he compound his villainy by pretending to be sympathetic? Is there buried treasure under the Banks house or something and the movie just forgot to tell us?

But in its favor, Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda are practically magical, if not quite perfect, and the songs are nice, and the cameos by Nackvid Keyd and Angela Lansbury, so many years since the last time these actors danced with cartoon animals, certainly made me smile. David Warner takes over as a character from the original movie, and he’s always fun to watch as he bellows and shouts.

And in the category of really big wins for this movie, I have to say that the fantastic musical hall scene built around “The Cover is Not the Book” should go down as one of the absolute best musical numbers in any Disney film, ever. Also, if this film doesn’t win an Oscar for best costumes, something is downright wrong with the world, because the strange pastel-on-porcelain garb that the characters wear on their trip into the cartoon world is like nothing I’ve ever seen before.

In other words, all the elements were in place for a truly fine movie. Everything but an original story. Should Mary Poppins one day return to assist the next generation of Banks children, I hope that family is having a completely different problem for Mary to tackle in a completely different way.

Photo credit: Time.com

The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975)

A couple of months ago, I checked out The Aristocats from the library to show our son. Before the film, there was an ad for other Disney selections and our son hooted. “I want to see that cowboy movie,” he yelled. Well, if we must, I said.

I don’t know how I’ve never seen this movie, but I guess I never did. Between HBO showing all sorts of live-action Disney movies and the public library having summers of films, I thought I must have seen this and forgotten, but I didn’t recognize a frame of it. I guess I must’ve seen the sequel!

For more than an hour, I figured I’d write something brief and possibly dismissive about this silly movie. It’s cute, but it didn’t raise much more than a chuckle. However, that wouldn’t be entirely true. Honesty compels me to report that John McGiver delivers a line about how stupid Theodore and Amos are that, a full minute later, had me gasping for air, I laughed so hard. I mean, you miss a minute of a movie from laughing, you can’t call it a bad movie.

McGiver’s just a small piece of a terrific cast. I’ll always make time for a seventies Disney live-action film because they’re full of great character actors. Everybody seems to think of this as a vehicle for Don Knotts and Tim Conway, but they’re actually providing supporting roles to a story led by Bill Bixby as a hapless gambler suddenly burdened by three orphans. He thinks that a marriage of convenience to a stagecoach driver played by Susan Clark might give the kids a home as well as a chance to nip out and play some poker, but things get complicated when the children, who own a deed to a mine everybody thinks is worthless, unearth a giant gold nugget valued at more than $87,000. Suddenly everybody wants to be part of these kids’ lives. Harry Morgan tries to keep order as the town’s sheriff, judge, and barber, with supporting roles for McGiver, David Wayne, and Slim Pickens.

But Conway and Knotts do walk away with the proceedings in one perfectly-timed slapstick scene after another. They play criminals so incompetent that the sheriff just lets them wander around freely, because bad guys who can’t afford the bullets to “throw lead” don’t present much of a danger to the public. I can imagine that, in lesser hands, stopping a movie’s narrative for a full five minutes to watch two characters steal a ladder might be an indulgence, but darned if our son didn’t spend every second of them chuckling and giggling. This is perfectly judged comedy for seven year-olds. It ends with a chase and everybody getting dunked in the river, inevitably, but our kid whooped that this was the greatest “chase montage” he’s ever seen, and the “boat fire truck” that Bixby and Pickens find themselves on in the end was his favorite part of the movie.

I’m not entirely sure I need to watch the sequel. Or Million Dollar Duck, if there’s an ad for that hiding on some other DVD at the library. Fingers crossed.

What We’re Not Watching: The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh

We’re not watching Disney’s 1964 mini-series The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh for our blog, because both the original television version and the feature film, called Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow, are out of print. It seems to be one of the most curious omissions from Disney’s extensive library of old live-action material, a project that has only been released in limited editions and returned to the “Disney Vault” to collect dust while bootleggers profit.

Doctor Syn was the hero of a series of juvenile adventure novels written by Russell Thorndyke. Most of the books appeared in the 1930s and were still pretty popular with kids into the seventies. I remember seeing copies in the library with the same sort of design, and appeal, as Jack London’s books, or those lurid 1960s hardbacks-for-kids editions of Kidnapped and Treasure Island. The stories are set in the 1770s, where the Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn appears to be a respectable English vicar in a remote coastal village, but by night, he dresses in a horrifying Scarecrow costume with a glow-in-the-dark mask and leads a band of smugglers, getting in needed material from France to avoid the crippling taxes levied by the king. With the military bent on destroying the ring, and constantly capturing one low-level smuggler or another, it’s full of daring escapes, cunning plans, last-minute rescues, that sort of thing.

There was a feature film at the height of the books’ popularity in the thirties, and then Hammer and Disney went at the source material in the early sixties. Hammer might fairly be accused of hearing a big idea coming down the pipe and rushing something into production. That version stars Peter Cushing as the renamed “Captain Clegg.” Disney’s has Patrick McGoohan as Syn, with George Cole as his ally Mipps. The three-part adaptation was shown on the ABC anthology series Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color in 1964. It also features some familiar faces from 1960s British film and television like Jill Curzon, Geoffrey Keen, and Patrick Wymark.

Like some other Disney material that we’ve seen, Scarecrow was released in a variety of formats and lengths. The 150-minute TV version was edited down to a 100-minute feature film which was shown in several countries. In the 1980s, the series started to get a small, strange, underground buzz as something worth looking out for. You’d see it mentioned here and there as a lost classic worth seeing. The delightful guidebook Harry and Wally’s Favorite TV Shows, essential in its day, singled out McGoohan’s wild and manic performance as the Scarecrow and made it sound like something I needed to see.

It was out on VHS for a while. There was a limited release of an edit of the movie (possibly a little different from the first movie release), but in that old Disney way, it became impossible to find. A limited edition DVD came out in late 2008. You can buy a copy for a few hundred dollars on eBay. You can also get a pirated copy from any number of sellers right this minute for a whole lot less, but we don’t do that at our blog.

The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh has remained in the “Disney Vault” for almost a decade. There are higher profile projects for the Mouse to worry about these days, and smuggling on the Cornish coast hasn’t captured the imagination of any kids in a long time. Still, it’s been about ten years, which is, they say, the average time that the locked-away releases remain in the Vault. Maybe we might see Doctor Syn dust off his mask and scream that terrifying laugh of his again one day soon?

Photo credit: Disney Wiki, which points out that in one of Disney’s recent comic books, the Scarecrow returned to team up with Captain Jack Sparrow, which is probably a far more interesting event than anything that happened in the third, fourth, or fifth Pirates of the Caribbean movies.