The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training

that features the town I grew up in, Houston. If it's a film about paint drying, and was shot in the 70's, I'm there! But, about THIS movie....

"BNB BT" is a decent, but weak follow up to the original. But then most "Part II" movies tend to be, right? Without Tatum O'Neal, and Walter Matthau, the movie seems to just coast. Now, I like William Devane, but it would have had more "bite" with the original leads.

The kids are cute, they play their hearts out, and you just love them. We have the sub-plot with Devane and his son, and then, the BIG FINISH!

Yeah, it was filmed inside the "Seventh Wonder of the World", the Astrodome, famed for such things as, The Billie Jean King-Bobby Riggs "Battle of The Sexes" tennis match, Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, Astro's baseball, Oiler's football( and the short lived USFL Gamblers, too!), and countless other events. Part of the old school charm of watching anything in the 'Dome, was that scoreboard that lights up with the cowboy, and bull, all LONG gone....

It's fun seeing places you knew growing up, AND seeing people who went to your school! The character "Janet" was played by Michelle Fruge, was a cheerleader and was in my graduating class of 1980, from Dulles High School, in Sugar Land Texas. 6 on a scale of 10, for Houston. 4 on a scale of 10 for everything else.

I first saw this movie back in the summer of '77, just before my 9th birthday, and enjoyed it so much that I joined a little league baseball team the following year. That's what this film did for my life.

While people have often criticized this sequel over the absents of both Walter Matthau and Tatum O'Neal from the original cast. I think the criticism would be an accurate and valid one if this sequel was trying to be something like, "Rocky II", for example. Where the sequel is just a slight variation on the original story, except that the hero (or heroes) win at the end of the movie, instead of lose. But that's NOT what this movie was trying to be.

Instead, "The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training" is a road picture at heart. About a group of preteen misfits from the suburbs of Los Angles, California who get swept away by their shared ambitions of playing in the Astrodome in Houston, TX for the National Championship of little league baseball.

Sort of like, "Bless the Beast and Children", meets, "Treasure Island" in the form of a sports movie. Without any pirates or buffalo's serving as metaphors for the doomed spirit of young boys.

But, what I think is a more accurate criticism of this sequel, is that despite the Bears being the West Coast champions at the beginning of the movie, they're apparently a really bad baseball team, who are in desperate need of a decent pitcher.

Twice we see the Bears play baseball prior to the championship game and twice it's like watching the 3-little stooges, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin all on the same baseball team together trying to hit and field a baseball.

That is, until Kelly's long separated father (William Devane) becomes the teams manager shortly after the Bears arrive in Houston. Then, he quickly converts them from a comically bad team into a championship team, after just a few days of practice.

Also, there's the unnecessary family drama conflict at the end of the film between Kelly Leak and his father/team manager which suddenly erupts out of nowhere, for no reason, and feels very forced and too tact on for the audience to empathize with Kelly's sudden outburst of pent-up emotional rage of being abandoned by his father (that everyone likes by now) when he was a very young child.

Then later, in this 70's "Feel Good Summer Sports Movie" - which would eventually become a movie cliché by the mid-80's - all of that sudden serious drama between a divorced father and his abandoned son is all magically resolved by simply winning the big game at the end of the movie.

That's nice, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside at the end too. If only real life was more like that.(sigh)

But, both of those justifiable criticisms of the movie are only a very slight departure from what this movie really excels at in a big way. Which is, creating a huge sense of joy and fun of watching a small band of preteen misfits in their collective pursuit of playing baseball on a national stage, inside the greatest sports stadium in the country and possibly bringing a National Championship back to California with them.

I was with the Bears the entire way through the movie, and I even lived in Texas at the time, and still do.

While I realize that this movie is definitely not for everyone. But, if you were a kid in the 70's, or just want to reconnect with your lost sense of youthful mischief when the world was still just one big adventure? Then this is a must see movie.

The Bears are back but Amanda Whurlitzer and Buttermaker are gone. Kelly Leak (Jackie Earle Haley) drives the new dictatorial coach Manning away. The team is off to the Houston Astrodome to play the Houston Toros. Leak brings on Carmen Ronzonni from back east to be the new pitcher. The boys drive to Houston on their own. They discover that they still suck after playing a roadside game. They get into trouble for their van and Kelly decides to contact his estranged father Mike Leak (William Devane). Sy Orlansky (Clifton James) is the local businessman sponsoring the game.

Most of the gang is back with the exception of the big stars. It's too bad that Walter Matthau and Tatum O'Neal can't return but it may be asking too much for sequels of that era. The story isn't much. I don't know why the Bad News Bears get to play in the Astrodome. There are snippets of fun but mostly it doesn't live up to the original. That is until Tanner runs around and the Let Them Play chant. It's cheesy but effective and it's the Astrodome.

Most of the standard crew (Walter Matthau and Tatum O'Neal are huge absences though) return for this feather-weight sequel to the highly popular original of 1976. This time juvenile delinquent Jackie Earle Haley and his teammates hit the road to Houston to play a little league game in the Astrodome. It seems that Haley's estranged father (William Devane) also lives in Texas and he becomes a focal point as the club lacks a manager. The kids are more grown up this time but their maturity seems to be on the decline as they only care about girls (who are all obviously older than they are) and getting into general mischief. The only real attraction is the Astrodome as the old scoreboard and the novelty of the eighth wonder of the world in 1977 make the closing act of the picture a nostalgic view to a part of sports history that many have already forgotten about. Overall the movie is a stinker with little else to recommend. 2 stars out of 5.

Probably like most kids my age at the time, I found this to be the *second* coolest movie of summer 1977 (gee, what do you suppose was the first). But with age comes awakening and through viewings in my later years the holes in this script broke out like jock itch. Although some of the gaps were plugged in the paperback, it still left a leaky script up there on the screen.

First bad play is the lack of explanation as to why the Bears, and not the league-champion Yankees, get to travel to Houston. Later, the kids are held on suspicion of grand theft auto for their van (which they earlier admitted to secretly "borrowing") but the issue is never resolved, so what's the point of making the vehicle hot in the first place? Of course, the hardest pitch to hit is the idea that a Houston home crowd would unanimously root for a visiting team, regardless of some sappy news story of a kid back home with a broken leg. On that note, the photo given to Lupus of his heroic catch from the first film is said to have been taken by Ogilvie's dad. Yet the photo is nothing more than the actual shot itself from the first film. That would mean that Ogilvie's dad would have to have been standing right next to Lupus in the outfield when that catch was made. Okay, okay. This one *is* nitpicky but I hate when movies flub little details like this. Finally, it's established that the winner of the Houston game will advance to a game in Japan. Yet in the next film, BNB Go to Japan (1978), no mention is made, even by the Bears themselves, of the Houston victory and they travel to the land of the rising sun for other reasons, which they address on a talk show hosted by Regis. Even back *then* the man was everywhere.

Trivia: In Paul Brickman's paperback adaptation of his screenplay, Ronzoni spins a tale of scoring with a babysitter. This monologue would later resurface verbatim years later in Brickman's script for Risky Business (1983), in which Tom Cruise, in an early scene, brags to his buddies about scoring with a babysitter.