Superdad Information

Superdad is a 1973 American comedy film by Walt Disney Productions and starring Bob Crane, Barbara Rush, Kurt Russell, Joe Flynn, and Kathleen Cody. The film marks the on-screen debut of Bruno Kirby.

This film was an attempt by the Disney company to address the generation gap and the social upheaval of the Vietnam era, but it was a critical and commercial failure.

Plot

Charlie McCready (Bob Crane) tries to wrest his daughter Wendy (Kathleen Cody) from her childhood friends, whom he believes have no ambition. He especially disapproves of her boyfriend, Bart (Kurt Russell). Initially he makes a few attempts to bridge the generation gap, but he fails. Late in the summer, Wendy receives a letter informing her that she's won a full scholarship to her parents' alma mater, Huttington College. Unbeknownst to her, the letter is fake; her father has paid the first year's tuition himself, and had a friend at the college send the letter to her. He did this so Wendy would not attend City College with Bart and her other friends.

Charlie later visits Wendy at Huttington, and discovers that the college has changed considerably since he attended there. Wendy later discovers his plot, and joins the campus counterculture as a way of getting even. She inadvertently becomes engaged to a hippie artist named Klotch. Charlie attempts to intervene on her behalf, and ends up in a fistfight with Klotch. Fortunately, Wendy's boyfriend Bart comes to the rescue. At this point, Charlie learns that Bart had turned down a scholarship to Huttingdon so he could be near Wendy. The movie ends with Wendy's marriage to Bart.

Home viewing

After its theatrical release, it appeared on The Wonderful World of Disney. To date it has not been widely released on DVD (made available exclusively to members of the Disney Movie Club in that format), but it did have a limited release on VHS. It was also recently released on iTunes.

In other media

Superdad was featured in the biographical film Auto Focus, with Bob Crane (Greg Kinnear) seeing his role as the leading man in this Disney film as a way to revive his career following the retirement of his hit series Hogan's Heroes. Footage of the film is shown where Crane is on water skis (Kinnear in a re-shoot of that scene), along with a voice-over of how Superdad sat on the shelves for a year before flopping at the box office.