Pre-Order The New Adventures of Pippi Longstocking (Blu-ray) Available for Preorder (1 Viewer)

[Ronald Epstein]

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[titch]

A very strange way for the director of Battle Of The Bulge, The Longest Day, and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines to end his career with. Pippi Longstocking is a treasured Swedish TV childhood classic, first broadcast in 1969. Any Scandinavian child, who grew up in in the 1970's, will remember the TV series extremely fondly.

 

[battlebeast]

A very strange way for the director of Battle Of The Bulge, The Longest Day, and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines to end his career with. Pippi Longstocking is a treasured Swedish TV childhood classic, first broadcast in 1969. Any Scandinavian child, who grew up in in the 1970's, will remember the TV series extremely fondly.

I remember the animated series from the 90s... or early 2000s.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

When I was in elementary school, from first to third grade whenever the weather would force recess to be indoors, they’d wheel out the video cart and play chunks of this movie. I’ve seen it countless times in 30 minute chunks but never once from start to finish.

 

[MatthewA]

Hollywood wants one more chance at Pippi.

A very strange way for the director of Battle Of The Bulge, The Longest Day, and Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines to end his career with.

He also directed Swiss Family Robinson for Disney in 1960 while two of those movies are Disney-by-proxy because they were Fox films. Here, he also wrote the screenplay. In Hollywood, you're only as good as your last movie, and his was The Pirate Movie. That counted as good enough to handle a G-rated pseudo-musical. At least this time they didn't self-consciously try for a PG.

Columbia was trying to ease itself out of Coca-Cola's grasp and was burnt out on musicals after inheriting A Chorus Line from Embassy and having needed home video and non-US markets to make back money mostly spent before the Coke/Columbia merger on Annie (they even hired the same casting agent, Garrison True, a former actor who once appeared on Green Acres, to do a casting/PR "search" for the title character). But they still thought it was good enough for a theatrical release unlike their Irwin Allen TV miniseries version of Alice in Wonderland. So they partnered with Svensk Filmindustri, shot it in Florida at a TV studio, and downplayed the musical aspects as much as they could by having professional singers overdub the actors when they are singing. It's also weird that the music sounds specifically like the late 1980s yet the visual setting seems to be smack dab in the middle of the 1950s.

Ironically, it was Disney who had most of the family audience Columbia hoped for that summer because of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and I remember The Disney Channel showed it quite a bit after its pretty short theatrical appearance which I apparently missed. Despite the cool-looking poster, I don't remember much of a publicity push.

 

[darkrock17]

I saw this regularly on HBO in the 90's and owned the 1969 film on VHS.

The 1969 theme song




Scrubbing Day was my favorite song from the 1988 film.

 

[MatthewA]

Eileen Brennan was a singer, and she was in the original Irene Molloy in Hello, Dolly! on Broadway, but here, her character of Miss Bannister doesn't get a musical moment in the film.

 

[Jason_V]

Oh heck. We had recorded this off of tv at some point growing up and watched it unendingly. This is a blast from the past!

 

[ScottRE]

I remember watching the Siskel & Ebert review of this film. After they played the clip with the song "Pippi Longstocking is coming in to your town" one of them said "is that a threat?"

I laughed so hard, I missed the rest of the review.

 

[MatthewA]

Eileen Brennan's singing:



Now I realized that Clue isn't even a musical but almost everyone in it has experience either with stage or screen musicals or with rock music parodies.

I remember watching the Siskel & Ebert review of this film. After they played the clip with the song "Pippi Longstocking is coming in to your town" one of them said "is that a threat?"

I laughed so hard, I missed the rest of the review.

Unfortunately, despite a lot of S&E reviews having been uploaded, I couldn't find this one. I recall Leonard Maltin's biggest problem with the film was Pippi herself, whom IIRC he called "a brat" in that reference book of his that used to be in practically every video store in the US.

The bad reviews must have hurt because it couldn't even break the top 100 grossing films of the year. Even Mac & Me and Big Top Pee-Wee* beat it!

*That must have been a little consolation to Kris Kristofferson after the failure of Heaven's Gate, which it also beat.