Review #260: 'Pete's Dragon' (1977)

Pete (Sean Marshall) is a poor orphan boy who arrives in the small town of Passamaquoddy to escape his cruel, slave-driving adopted parents. The residents are generally nice folk, only they don't take too well to Pete due to his large, mainly invisible dragon named Elliott. The first person to see it is local loveable drunk Lampie (Mickey Rooney), who makes his concerns known only to be laughed at. So Pete is taken in by Lampie's daughter Nora (Helen Reddy), a lighthouse worker who is still pining for her partner who disappeared at sea almost a year prior. Trouble starts to brew though when a medicine wheeler-dealer named Dr. Terminus (Jim Dale) arrives in town and sees profit in the dragon.

One of Disney's few attempts to cash in on the success of Mary Poppins (1964), combining live-action with animation, Pete's Dragon is one of their lesser known efforts (although it does have it's nostalgia-filled fanbase). It was made in a time where freckly ginger kids were considered cute and likeable child characters, and the adults overacted to the point where they looked like they were presenting a children's TV show. Containing very few memorable songs (if any) and some very shoddy animation, Pete's Dragon is one of Disney's laziest and poorest productions. None of Disney's classic animators (the 'Nine Old Men') worked on the film and it shows. Of what little dragon there is, it appears very little effort or imagination was put into it.

Thank the lord then, for Dr. Terminus, played with enjoyable enthusiasm by Jim Dale (who appeared in a few Carry On films) who saves the film from complete embarrassment. He gets the best song 'Passamaquoddy', in which he tries to charm the townsfolk into buying his crap medicine that has already made one of them fat and turned another one of their hair pink, while repeatedly mispronouncing the name of the town. He's like a malpractising Del Boy, and is so enjoyable that I was rooting for him to get his hands on the annoying ginger kid and his crappily animated dragon. Not a total failure then, but instantly forgettable, overlong, excruciatingly squeaky-clean, and exhaustively enthusiastic.


Directed by: Don Chaffey
Starring: Sean Marshall, Helen Reddy, Jim Dale, Mickey Rooney, Red Buttons, Shelley Winters
Country: USA

Rating: **

Tom Gillespie