The World's Greatest Athlete

Bang average.

'The World's Greatest Athlete' feels like a mixture of stuff we've seen before in this era of Disney. It doesn't do enough to make an impact on me, not helped by silliness of the story and meh casting.

John Amos is the best part of this, I enjoyed what he brings to the table here. Away from him I'm struggling to remember any others already, Roscoe Lee Browne - who is in one of my favourite films, 'Treasure Planet' - is alright but I found his character boring.

I think there's actually potential there with the overall premise, but as usual with this studio's early decades they choose to make it dumb and silly rather than meaningful - it would take a load of tweaking, but I reckon this would make a better coming-of-age/underdog story with a more proper tone. That would make it a completely different film, admittedly.

Lastly, the score is surprisingly solid while the end scene is its most amusing moment. Those two things and Amos aside, this is a bland one.

This is a fish out of water story in which coach John Amos and sidekick Tim Conway find a young jungle man and figure he'd be a great athlete if he were taken to civilization to compete in athletic competitions. So they give it a try. Like many Disney films from the early 1970s, it's loaded with silly humor and contrived sentiment, yet there is a certain charm that may endear it to the younger members of its audience.

After a few decades of knowing about this '70s Disney comedy, I finally took my borrowed DVD and watched The World's Greatest Athlete. In this one, Coach John Amos and his assistant Tim Conway have been on the losing end of various sports endeavors for so long that dean Billy De Wolfe (in a too-brief role)-who's accompanied by his son Danny Goldman-remind them of just one more year on their contract. Amos tears it up and goes to Africa with Conway to get away from it all. There they find Jan-Michael Vincent who outruns a tiger. The only way they can get him, though, is if he saves one of them...I'll stop there and just say that this is one of those silly family comedies that was the House of Mickey's bread-and-butter during the decade that the other major studios were making big box office and winning Oscars with more mature fare. With the Tarzan-inspired story and many well-established special effects, there are quite a few chuckles here-and even a big laugh concerning a wheelchair-bound old man who can "suddenly" walk-that I admit to doing while watching. And it's fun seeing Conway either putting his head where it sometimes doesn't belong or getting moved by a voodoo doll once owned by a witch doctor played by Roscoe Lee Browne. But the stuff involving Nancy Walker as a near-sighted landlady and Goldman as the dean's interloping son I could do without. And stunning Dayle Haddon as Vincent's girlfriend (called Jane, of course) is just window dressing. Still, this is harmless fare that should provide enough enjoyable distraction for 90 minutes especially as you watch such real-life announcers like Frank Gifford and Howard Cosell join in on the fun. P.S. I just found out, via the IMDb site, that Mr. Goldman was the voice of Brainy Smurf on the "Smurfs" TV cartoon show.

While not mentioned in the IMDb credit page, "locations" used in production, most (if not all) of the track and field filming was done at Cal State L.A., in the heat of the summer. I had the privilege of working in the film as an extra, and found the cast and crew to be friendly and professional. Tim Conway was funny on/off camera, and he had co-stars in tears during most of the shooting. The one question I asked one of the directors was how they chose a tiger for a young Tarzan-like character who came from Kenya? No tigers in Africa! This tiger (a huge female Bengal tiger) was well-trained,and most of us were allowed to pet her with her trainer's approval. No trained lion could be located in time for filming, according to my source. They should have had JMV come from India or south-east Asia. Nonetheless, the film was entertaining to watch, and a joy to be a small part of.

When Coach John Amos and his assistant Tim Conway go looking for athletic talent for Merryvale College, they say they'll travel anywhere. And in The World's Greatest Athlete they go to East Africa in search of a legendary jungle boy raised in the wild whose athletic prowess is beyond belief.

The subject of their search is Jan-Michael Vincent who plays the young Tarzan like man and he's every inch the athlete that former Tarzans like Johnny Weissmuller, Glenn Morris, and Buster Crabbe were. They have to use a little trickery to get him out of the jungle and away from his foster father, witch doctor Roscoe Lee Browne. Browne knows all the jungle remedies, but he's lived in the world outside the Kenyan veld and he's up to its challenges.

But he's still got concern for his foster son who ain't used to civilization and all the things that entails. Among which include women in the person of shapely Dayle Haddon who covers him on the academic end of things at college. Talk about remedial education though, this is really stretching it.

She's also got a jealous suitor in Danny Goldman. Goldman's a little ferret of a schemer, the would be Iago sends for Browne from Kenya to work his voodoo magic to get Vincent back to the woodland wilds and a clear path for Goldman back to Haddon. If that means him losing the big NCAA track meet where Vincent is going to represent Maryvale in all events like Jim Thorpe did years ago for Carlisle, so be it.

Jan-Michael Vincent looks just fabulous in a loin cloth. I'm surprised he never was cast in a straight out Tarzan film. He actually did appear in one years later when he was much older and the bad guy in that one. Of course he just had to utter "Me Nanu.......You Jane" to Haddon whose character name of course was Jane.

Vincent and Haddon get great support from the whole cast, especially Tim Conway who has to deal with being shrunk to three inches in height by Browne in a bar. Conway gets a nice fifteen minute sequence trying to deal with his unfamiliar surroundings. Nancy Walker has a fine bit as a Mrs. Magoo landlady who can't recognize a tiger that Vincent has brought from Africa as a pet. He must have gotten him from the zoo in Mombasa because as most kids know, tigers aren't native to Africa.

This was the final feature film appearance of Billy DeWolfe who plays the dean of the college and Goldman's uncle. I suspect he would have had more of a role had health permitted it.

The World's Greatest Athlete is one of Disney's better screen comedies for the Seventies. And as we learn in the end, Jan-Michael Vincent might not just be The World's Greatest Athlete.