What’s wrong with The Mighty Ducks?
Jun 2 2008 — 2:00am
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13 comments in past 24 hours
Weight loss must be come with healthy. International Jobs on Click
Archanfel
Nov 8 2009 - 4:28 am →
Can't be more predictable than yankees.
jalbin
Nov 7 2009 - 11:53 pm →
Enh, at least some good came out of it. Eventually.
Erica M
Nov 7 2009 - 10:25 pm →
If Hardy can find his form from two years ago it will be a fantastic trade. Go-go was at best a defensive center fielder. If he could have learne...
Dougie_D
Nov 7 2009 - 9:37 pm →
I agree. The Yankees are boringly predictable.
This is why the Twins are the Twins and the Yankees are the Yankees. Let's see, should we go for Hardy or Teixera? Hmmm.
Tom Bartel
Nov 7 2009 - 12:07 pm →
I tink peraps it is te curc of Crist, Marybet414.
Cristina Cordova
Nov 7 2009 - 11:58 am →
If I can c(h)ime in...I left the 'H' behind years ago and indeed there is no better way. The church of Crist... Bless you all.
Marybeth414
Nov 7 2009 - 11:13 am →
I like the guy, but I have to admit he was a bit disappointing.
Cristina Cordova
Nov 7 2009 - 11:01 am →
Just about every time we went to a game at the dome, you'd hear "fans" (quote marks emphasized) trashing GoGo loudly, which made me want to stand ...
40 Reader Comments
11:08 am
I didn’t ask, I told.
11:26 am
“FAIL.”
No no no. This isn’t okay.
11:29 am
Another one to add, the love interest in the first one is supposedly a poor single mother in Minneapolis, however, it looks like she rents a pretty nice brownstone in Loring Park, which probably rents for about $1200/month when the movie was made.
11:34 am
@Mike. It’s not right but it’s okay.
@alie. good call.
11:34 am
That was funny!
11:39 am
Nice job, Bix, but at some point I wish you had referred to it as “Bad News Bears on Ice.”
11:39 am
They were also rollerblading in Camp Snoopy during D2. My little sister and I found that to be pretty dubious.
11:42 am
MDII is one of the few movies I’ve walked out of. I saw it at the Roseville 4 on a Tuesday, so was only walking away from $1’s worth of “entertainment.” Thanks for working through it, Bixby.
11:47 am
I cannot get to this link, or any link at The Rake.
11:48 am
@ed
I was an extra in the movie. At least I sat in the stands while they played Trinidad and Iceland. I’m not quite clear on why they didn’t put me on the Trinidad side. I am fairly certain I ended up on the cutting room floor.
12:06 pm
Thanks for reminding me of a movie I watched long before moving to Minnesota. I barely remember what happened in it and never watched the 2nd or 3rd movie. Just be happy a movie was made in Minnesota.
12:20 pm
I was an extra on Mighty Ducks. I say that with no pride at all.
12:23 pm
I was an extra in “Breaking Away” — the movie, not the teevee series.
12:25 pm
Off topic, but Bo Diddley died, and I’m a little blue.
12:31 pm
I was an extra in Ice Castles.
Robbie Benson…YUM!
@justbob…Were you in the big stadium scene at the end? I love the movie almost as much as I love Meatballs.
12:39 pm
“@justbob…Were you in the big stadium scene at the end?”
Yep. I lived in a dorm at IU the first two years, and our team was placed right next to the “Cutters” in the big scene. We chatted with the stars (none of whom were really stars, including a very young Dennis Quad) during breaks in filming.
RIP, Bo Diddley.
12:40 pm
“@justbob…Were you in the big stadium scene at the end?”
Yep. I lived in a dorm at IU the first two years, and our team was placed right next to the “Cutters” in the big scene. We chatted with the stars (none of whom were really stars, including a very young Dennis Quad) during breaks in filming.
RIP, Bo Diddley.
12:41 pm
Two click Bob strikes again.
Breaking Away is a great, great film.
12:42 pm
Double Post!
I home sick, using the Ancient Apple, and I am halfway through a G&T, so yes, I CAN blame ethanol.
12:44 pm
I got that one on DVD. It’s on my top ten list of sports movies… which one of these days I’ll post to my blog. It also includes Lagaan, Bull Durham, and the original Rocky. But not The Mighty Ducks.
12:45 pm
Slapshot!
12:46 pm
I own Slapshot and Slapshot 2.
And yes, the sequel is a bad as you think it is.
12:47 pm
I hope you included “Rhubarb,” Kurtis. Best cat/baseball movie ever made, IMHO.
12:47 pm
To tie it slightly everything back together, Jackie Earle Haley who played Moocher in Breaking Away also played Kelly Leak in the Bad News Bears movies and was Dave in Losin It with Tom Cruise.
Other breaking away alums Daniel Stern and Paul Dooley.
12:49 pm
I’d also like to add that Slapshot is such a better movie to watch right before playing hockey than any of the Ducks movie but will result in more penalties (but is so worth it).
12:50 pm
But, you have to foil up first!
12:52 pm
I love Slap Shot. uh-oh — I wrote about it oncet.
Reprint!
MINNEAPOLIS NATIVE George Roy Hill’s 1977 film Slap Shot is a terrific, vicious satire, following hockey coach Paul Newman’s deliberate efforts to turn his ailing team from mediocre to champions simply by encouraging them to behave as violently as possible on the ice. The team, dubbed the Charlestown Chiefs and based on the real-life Johnstown Jets, takes to Newman’s plotting with varied levels of enthusiasm. One, a rather dim dimestore mystic, renames himself “killer” and begins wearing a cape when off the ice, while the team’s only college educated player spends most of the movie rolling his eyes in disappointment and refusing to, in his words, “goon it up” for Newman.
The Chiefs’ three newest players, a trio of stringy haired, coke bottle-bespectacled brothers named Hanson, require no encouragement at all from Newman. They’re naturally goons: For them, hockey is as much about fighting as it is about skating. When Newman first meets the brothers, they are assaulting a soda machine. He later catches them playing with slot cars in their hotel room, screaming at each other and flinging the cars off the tracks. Hurrying back to the hockey rink, Newman confronts the Chief’s manager. “You cheap son of a bitch!” he cries. “Those guys are retarded!”
On the ice, however, the Hanson brothers are murderous. They tape aluminum foil to their knuckles (”Puttin’ on the foil!” they proclaim. “Every game!”), assault any player within reach, and even climb into the stands and throw wild punches after an audience member tosses a keychain at them. As the Chiefs begin to win games, the Hansons become local celebrities, and busloads of girls wearing novelty Groucho glasses start to follow the Chiefs’ tour bus. “They’re folk heroes!” Newman declares. “They’re criminals,” a policeman responds, and Newman shrugs. “Most folk heroes started out as criminals,” he retorts.
Slap Shot sometimes seems to be a sibling film to 1977’s Rollerball, a dystopian science fiction film in which the most popular game of the future is an ultraviolent game of roller derby. Much of Slap Shot seems intended as farce, such as the film’s repeated references to an unseen player named Ogie Ogilthorpe, a creature of such uncontained violence that he has been banned for life from the game of hockey and deported to Canada, which, in turn, deported him back to the United States.
But a little bit of digging reveals that Ogilthorpe isn’t as absurd as he first seems. The character is based on a real player, Bill “Goldie” Goldthorpe of Thunder Bay, Ontario, who was led to games with a police escort, had once leapt out of penalty box to attack a referee, and was regularly jailed for off-ice scuffles. In fact, Goldthorpe was reportedly slated to play himself in the film, but flung a soda bottle at Paul Newman’s brother.
Slap Shot began life as an idea for a documentary. Screenwriter Nancy Dowd, who would later write for Saturday Night Live, followed the Johnstown Jets for a year, when he brother Ned Dowd was a teammate. (Ned would eventually fill the role as Ogie Ogilthorpe in the film). She approached George Roy Hill with anecdotes from her experiences, and he suggested that they might make for a terrific comedy, rather than a documentary. As a result, Slap Shot is set in an unusually authentic setting. Charlestown is an ailing mill town, looking at mass layoffs, filmed in the actual town that inspired it: Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where the steel mill was actually closing.
Dowd based the Hanson brothers on a trio of sibling players she had watched in Johnstown, and she didn’t exaggerate them by much. They didn’t tape foil to their gloves, as in the film, but they did wear golf clubs soaked in ice water. They played with slot cars. They were jailed for attacking audience members. One kept a brick as a pet, keeping it in his locker at the stadium; during a scene in Slap Shot, that exact brick is visible in one of the Hanson Brother’s lockers.
Casting these characters proved difficult. A number of actors auditioned (including, reportedly, Donny Most from Happy Days), but could not skate with the necessary skill. So the casting directors turned to the brothers who had inspired the characters, three teenage siblings from Virginia, MN, named Steve Carlson, Jeff Carlson, and Jack Carlson. Just prior to filming, Jack Carlson was hired for the Edmonton Oilers, as so was replaced by Steve Hanson, who, confusingly, was originally hired to play a character named Carlson. Steve Hanson was also a hockey player with the Chiefs, and all three actors would go on to long careers in professional hockey.
Their notoriety as Slap Shot’s Hanson brothers followed them for much of their career — they relate having to spend hours after games signing Groucho noses for appreciative fans. The two Carlson brothers and Steve Hanson also reprised their roles in an ill-conceived sequel in 2002, a direct-to-video release starring Stephen Baldwin, but a better legacy of the Hanson Brother’s taste for hockey mayhem was Extreme Championship Wrestling’s stable of wrestlers dubbed the Dudley Family, who claimed a common father and all wore taped, thick-rimmed glasses, inspired by the appearance of the Hanson Brothers. Two of the Dudley Family, Brother Ray and Brother Devon, are best known for their use of folding tables as weapons in the wrestling ring. One suspects the Hansons would have approved.
12:54 pm
God, I’m a good writer.
12:55 pm
Mr. Haley was a particularly nice fellow, as I recall, and spent more time hanging with us extras between filming. Now I will have to get Breaking Away on DVD! It’s a very good film, as max says.
12:56 pm
Could you please review the second one? Most people know about the first one but I think that it would be a great public service to educate the masses on S2 since I have blocked it out of my memory.
12:58 pm
Jackie Earle Haley is enjoying a huge comeback right now. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Little Children and will be playing Rorshark in the Watchmen movie, which is an incredible coup of a role for an actor to get.
12:58 pm
I own Slapshot and Slapshot 2.
And yes, the sequel is a bad as you think it is.
Told you so.
1:36 pm
I should start a blog so I can ask “what the fuck is wrong with minnesota regarding public transportation?” and then answer.
2:15 pm
I thought you were already doing that on this blog.
4:46 pm
I think The Mighty Ducks is really the only trilogy to come out of MN. Aren’t we proud.
I went to college with “Adam Banks”. Lots of whispers and sneaky looks. I think he was a business major or something. Figures, right = character from Edina?
4:48 pm
Does that mean we need Even Grumpier Older Men to be made?
4:50 pm
If we’d bothered to get on Venus Cop like we should’ve, we’d already be a third of the way there to a superior trilogy: Venus Cop II: Criminal Desire, and Venus Cop III: Here Come the Love Gods.
4:53 pm
To make Grumpier Old Men you would have to dig up Jack Lemon, Walter Matthieu, and Burgess Meredith. Kevin Pollack is the only male actor from that movie that is still alive.
5:00 pm
Buck Henry is still alive.
10:43 pm
What are the odds that two Jackie Earle Haley vehicles would be mentioned in the same thread? That’s just weird. I saw All the King’s Men this past winter & couldn’t help but think of Kelley Leak every time that he appeared on screen.
Loved Breaking Away. Actually read the book (based on the film) before I saw the movie. I still have the paperback if anyone wants to borrow it.