Ah, the year nineteen hundred and ninety-seven: perhaps not exactly a spectacular year for the Walt Disney Company. Disney distributed such films as George of the Jungle, part of the unmurderable trend of live-action remakes of old cartoons; Jungle 2 Jungle, a remake of a dismally received French comedy that Disney had dubbed into English and released stateside just a year earlier; RocketMan, starring Master Thespian Harland Williams; and Hercules, which wasn't bad or anything, but it lead to an embarrassing snub from the Greek government, so it's humiliating enough regardless. Arguably the most perplexingly enduring Disney film from 1997 was Air Bud, a modest box office success that launched a direct-to-DVD series, which persists to this day, for some reason. The original film was an unspectacular but sweet tale of a basketball-playing Golden Retriever who helps out a lonely, depressive youth living in the hell that is small town America, by showing him the true warmth and happiness that can only come from owning a basketball-playing Golden Retriever. And those in the audience learned a valuable lesson, too: not only is there nothing in the rulebook that says a dog can't play basketball, there's also apparently no rule anywhere that says you have to actually attend a high school to be part of its school teams or anything. (Plus, the dog was actually the same dog some might remember from Full House, which makes his career after the end of that series officially more successful than Dave Coulier's.)
After filming the first film, of course, the dog died, as dogs are wont to do; but that didn't stop Disney from finding other stand-in Golden Retrievers (and lousy puppetry when the sport of the day required it) to create a series of sequels. As it turns out, Buddy was also capable of playing American football, European football, baseball, and most embarrassingly of all, girls' beach volleyball, which also neglects to have a rule against players being dudes. Apparently, sales were slowing by this point, or maybe they were just running out of sports Americans would recognize - hockey's more the realm of those ultra-foreign Canadians, after all - but, whatever the reason, the important producer-type people realised that a very clever revamp was needed to keep the series afloat. And that brings us to Air Buddies, a not-so-very-clever revamp, which bet a lot on the basic concept that everybody likes puppies, everybody likes dialogue, and as such, everybody LOOOOOOOVES it when puppies have dialogue, especially professional film critics. Plopping this disc into the delicate technological underbelly of my DVD player, I found myself pretending to wonder whether this could actually restore the series to its fondly remembered heyday that I'm pretending existed at some point. Hopefully you'll pretend to wonder that, too, so I won't feel quite so silly answering it. Please?
