"He's lost a mother, he's short for his age, he made a bit of a mess of things with his attitude on the track team.he has to learn to walk again, and he's wondering if he'll ever run again, too. We can care as much as we want to, but he has to do it by himself." - Anne Gee Byrd as physical therapist Mary Bruce in "It's a Mile from Here to Glory"
After School Specials: 1978-79 DVD Review
By Jonathan Boudreaux
Beginning in the early 1970s, kids could run home from school to watch The ABC After School Special, a dramatic anthology that ran weekday afternoons several times each season. Often based on novels for young adults, these specials centered on teens struggling through personal difficulties, including alcoholism, death, tragic accidents, and having to wear eye-straining polyester outfits. Life was tough in the 1970s!
Many of these specials - which are like junior versions of Lifetime TV movies, complete with appearances by cast members of Little House on the Prairie - were produced by Martin Tahse. In Fall 2004, two collections of his After School Special productions were released on DVD: After School Specials 1974-76 and 1976-77. With the release of two more collections, 1978-79 and 1979-80, TV fans can revisit the days of bell bottoms, frizzy hair, and cars the size of parade floats.
"It's a Mile from Here to Glory"
Based on the novel by Robert C. Lee
Original air date: 5/5/78
Early MacLaren (Steve Shaw) is having a tough year. Six months ago, his mother died, and his father (James G. Richardson), a farmer, has been emotionally distant since it happened. A high school freshman, Early is an easy target for bullies. He is physically immature at a school in which the average student's age appears to be 35. (One fellow student even has a tattoo, and others are so downright elderly that they're already experiencing male-pattern baldness.) After getting into a fight with a bully on the bus, the school's principal forces him to run 20 laps as punishment. (For those of you who barely like to walk, much less run, that's 5 miles.) The bully is wheezing and doubled over in pain before his second lap, but Early completes the task without even breaking a sweat, thus winning an invitation to join the track team. Soon, he's breaking school track records, gaining the respect of fellow students, and even attracting the attention of girls, all of which goes to his head. Sure, he's a little conceited and selfish now, but everything's great. The end!
Well, not exactly. This is an After School Special, so his happiness is destined to be short-lived. While at an out-of-town meet, Early misses his chance to break a record. That's bad enough, but as he's walking dejectedly back to the bus, Early is run down by a avocado-green Pinto. (I guess they really were rolling deathtraps!) Both of his legs are smashed, and without intense therapy, he may never walk again, much less run. With the help of Mary Bruce (Anne Gee Byrd), a tough-as-nails physical therapist, he begins the long road to recovery.
This is easily the weakest of the specials in this collection. The predictable, derivative plot seems like a point-by-point copy of the similarly-themed '70s tearjerker Ice Castles. That film is by no means a classic, but at least Ice Castles' feature-length running time allowed it to fully flesh out its characters and storyline. "Glory" is simultaneously slow and rushed, its plot lurching from event to event without enough transitional material to keep us fully interested. "It's a Mile from Here to Glory" is a pretty accurate title - this particular After School Special misses glory by a mile.
"Thank You, Jackie Robinson"
Based on the novel by Barbara Cohen
Original air date: 10/11/78 as "A Home Run for Love"
This change-of-pace episode is filmed in black and white since it is set in "New Jersey, 1947, when many films were still made in black and white." Twelve-year-old Sammy (Ronnie Scribner) is an avid fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He's never been to Ebbetts Field to see them play, though. Sammy's father died when he was seven, leaving Sammy, his mother (Anne Gee Byrd), and his sister (Desperate Housewives' Felicity Huffman, here billed as "Flicka Huffman") to run the family's hotel. Sammy is delighted to learn that Davey (Charles Lampkin), the hotel's new cook, is also a Dodgers fan. Despite their differences - African-American Davey is sixty years old - the two bond over their mutual love of Jackie Robinson, and soon are regularly attending Dodgers games with Davey's daughter and son-in-law (Niva Ruschell and J. Jay Saunders). Everything is fine until Davey's heart condition threatens to once again leave Sammy without a father figure.
"Thank You, Jackie Robinson" is immensely entertaining without being preachy. It subtly teaches about race relations not by spouting tired platitudes but through the use of expertly chosen words and images. When a white patron at the ball field casts a derisive glance toward the Davey and Sammy, the image is more telling and powerful than any dialogue could have been. The episode's black and white photography and better-than-usual production values create a strong sense of time and place. Add in flawless performances by the entire cast - Lampkin is especially effective - and "Thank You, Jackie Robinson" earns a place on the "must-see" lists of fans of quality TV.
"Gaucho"
Based on the novel by Gloria Gonzalez
Original air date: 10/25/78
When he was five, Gaucho (Panchito Gomez) emigrated to the United States from Puerto Rico with his mother (Alma Beltran) and his older brother, Angel (Richard Beauchamp). Almost ten years later, he still dreams of returning with his family to their homeland. Gaucho thought that Angel shared that dream, but when he marries Denise (Anne Stryker), it becomes increasingly obvious that Angel, a recent college graduate, does not plan on abandoning his adoptive country. Denise is an Anglo. Even worse, her brother Jim (Phillip Allen) is a cop, and Gaucho hates cops. Deciding that it is now his responsibility to get his mother back to Puerto Rico, Gaucho takes an after-school job as a runner for a local hood. When one of the deals goes wrong, Gaucho's dreams might be dashed forever.
Viewers who are able to look past the polyester leisure suits and other questionable fashion choices in "Gaucho" will discover a timeless story and a taut script worthy of an independent movie. Gomez's warm, natural performance has us rooting for his character from the first second he appears on screen. Flavorful and gritty, "Gaucho" is a minor classic.
"My Other Mother"
Based on the novel "Which Mother is Mine?" by Joan Oppenheimer
Original air date: 9/26/79 as "Which Mother is Mine?"
Fifteen-year-old Alex (Little House on the Prairie's Melissa Sue Anderson, sporting a frizzy perm that seems borrowed from a Lhasa Apso) has an almost perfect life. Sure, she was abandoned by her mother when she was only five, but in recent years she has found a loving home with a pair of terrific foster parents, Lila and Tom Denis (Happy Days' Marion Ross and L.A. Law's Bruce Kirby). At a party honoring both her sixth anniversary with the Denis family and their filing of formal adoption papers, a dewy-eyed Alex makes a wish before cutting the celebratory cake: "I wish that I'll always be here because I love you, Mom and Dad. I'm really grateful to you for giving me the best home in the world." Which can only mean one thing - that her birth mother (Lee Kessler) will show up to contest the adoption and reclaim her daughter. Alex is determined to shun this interloper, but she begins to soften after her mother takes her to the zoo, hangs out with her at the ice cream parlor, and confesses that she gave up Alex because she became a raging alcoholic after her husband went M.I.A. in Vietnam. With the court date looming, Alex finds herself torn between her real mother and the family that she has grown to love.
Despite its sometimes graceless dialogue, on the fly acting techniques (Anderson often seems to be practicing for her Little House blind scenes, staring blankly into the middle distance), and overly melodramatic score, "My Other Mother" manages to be a credible family drama. The characters are likeable, and it is almost impossible not to become engrossed by their predicament. They are also admirably complex characters - no one here is a villain or a saint. The hour's biggest flaw is its cop out ending that offers absolutely no resolution to any of the issues presented in "My Other Mother." Ambiguous endings are fine, but it is dramatically unsatisfying to simply avoid a resolution altogether. The show's moral seems to be that when life presents us with difficult decisions, we should simply decide not to decide.
Taken as a whole, the After School Specials presented here give us a fascinating look at the cares and concerns attributed to teens by adults in the 1970s. All four of the episodes center on teens that come from broken families. Early's mother in "It's a Mile from Here to Glory" and Sammy's father in "Thank You, Jackie Robinson" died due to illness. Alex's biological father in "My Other Mother" presumably died in Vietnam. Gaucho's father isn't around, but his absence is never explained. The specials almost seem to be obsessed with parental death since this plot device recurs throughout After School Specials 1974-76, 76-77, and 79-80.
Part of this might be attributed to the fact that the producers seem to be trying to jam every special with issues to which each audience member can relate. Some of these characters have more problems than Job. In "It's a Mile from Here to Glory," for example, it isn't enough to aim for an inspirational tale about a boy who must overcome a tragic accident and regain the ability to walk. Instead, the writers add more traumas to Early's weakened body: his mother is dead, he's a shrimp, bullies pick on him, he's painfully shy, success goes to his head, he's not a team player, etc. In "Glory," this backfires because many of Early's character flaws contradict one another, lessening the impact of the piece as a whole.
The four episodes included in 1978-79 are divided onto two DVDs. The DVDs are housed in a single keepcase that includes DVD hubs on both interior surfaces. The cover of the keepcase is designed to resemble a textbook covered in brown kraft paper. The 1974-76 and 1976-77 releases were designed to resemble Trapper Keepers. For this latest wave of releases, the keepcase slides into a cardboard slipcase that mimics a pair of green, metallic school lockers. The overall design isn't as clever as that of the Trapper Keeper boxes, but the packaging still looks terrific.
The menus are the same as those found in the previous releases. After loading the DVD into a player, viewers are taken on a short CGI tour of a school. The menus feature a loose leaf paper design. Full motion images from the disc's episodes play on faux Polaroid snapshots taped to the "page." Viewers can choose to play the episodes or jump to one of four scenes. The segues between the various menus - involving pencils and erasers changing info on the screen - are extremely clever.
