cult film freak: JAN-MICHAEL VINCENT IS DISNEY'S WORLD'S GREATEST ATHLETE

Written by James M. Tate / 6/30/2018 / No comments / action , adventure , college , comedy , disney , jan-michael vincent , john amos , seventies , sport , tim conway

JAN-MICHAEL VINCENT IS DISNEY'S WORLD'S GREATEST ATHLETE

6/30/2018 | No comment

Original Lobby Card Autographed by Jan-Michael Vincent YEAR: 1973

John Amos and Tim Conway, the most strangely-cast comedic duo in history, are coaches at a loser junior college full of extremely inept athletes. They take a trip to Africa (where Amos's grandparents came from) and find the greatest athlete in the world... and wouldn't ya know, he's white!

Rating: ***1/2

A young, ripped Jan-Michael Vincent plays Nanu, a Tarzan clone who Amos and Conway trick into returning to the States to gain them a reputation as awesome coaches. The best scenes in this adventurous, parody-pulpy first act occurs as Vincent shows his home-turf skills, from triumphantly racing Cheetahs upon gloriously horrible real projection effects (hell, even Hitchcock's VistaVision epics suffered those) to the usual tree-swinging frolic...

There's really no strong villain like most Disney films, just a selfish businessmen (with his snotty son) and an antagonistic witch doctor (Roscoe Lee Browne), introduced in the Africa sequence, who causes Vincent's Nanu, while he, via montage, exceeds at every sport on all the college's teams until (like in every Disney flick about special powers) losing his abilities for a while, which, dragging about seven-minutes too long, grinds on the nerves as wrongly first-billed Tim Conway has only one solo scene, being voodoo-shrunk to the size of an insect and has to escape from a martini glass: But mostly this ATHLETE centers on Amos, Vincent, a wide-eyed, somewhat plain-Jane ingenue, and a lovable tiger in this just-above-average Disney outing.

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Tags : action , adventure , college , comedy , disney , jan-michael vincent , john amos , seventies , sport , tim conway

James M. Tate

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