Mary-Kate & Ashley have to save their great godmother’s ranch from evil Martin Mull!
Movie Nights: How the West was Fun (1994)
Mary-Kate & Ashley have to save their great godmother’s ranch from evil Martin Mull!
12 Comments Comments RSS
All minorities are magical and mysterious! That’s why we can treat them like shit!
I love all these really stilted and awkward lines that no kid would ever say; way to go writers!
Insurance salespeople are right up there with lawyers, oilmen, and real estate developers on the sliding scale of movie evil.
If they wanted an eeeeevil development project for the characters to have to save the ranch from, surely they could have picked something more nefarious than…an amusement park.
Also, whooooops! Ya gotta do Little Bigfoot [which looks like true horror] now!
I’m still waiting for Baby Ghost. It stars Joe Estevez, and Allison hearts him. 😉
Yes! I’ve been especially loving your Mary Kate and Ashley episodes.
Evil Martin Mull (who’s too talented for a gig like this, honestly) ends up falling down a waterfall and is seen in a neck brace and bandages on both arms during the party at the films conclusion. He doesn’t go to prison for attempted murder or anything like that because you know, that would be mean.
I’ll never understand 90s Hollywood’s obsession with dead moms in kids’ movies. Mary-Kate and Ashley’s dad says “My wife died three years ago.”, everyone goes “Aw” for three seconds and then it’s “Oh well, back to the fun!” There are other ways to evoke sympathy for the kid protagonist besides making them half orphans. Someone please think outside the freakin’ box!
I believe the way they approach the dead Mom is one of those outdated tropes still holding over in the 90s.
Divorce used to be somewhat taboo in family friendly entertainment for many decades, but how do you work a surprise romantic sub-plot geared towards the parents in the audience into a light hearted family movie?
Have a dead parent!
This one goes back a ways. Not only does it leave things open for a romance without offending “the sanctity of marriage” or whatever, but it immediately grants the kids and widow or widower some cheap sympathy because we all hate to think of losing loved ones.
In recent years, this trope has become outdated as the vast majority of marriages end in divorce and it’s such a normal part of life now. You still might see this held over in productions geared to religious audiences, but in the mainstream not so much anymore.
Divorce was very much a taboo subject on television until the late ’70s. Nice people didn’t get divorced. So Mike and Carol Brady of “The Brady Bunch” both had dead spouses, Bill Bixby’s character on “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” was a widower, as was Richard Long’s character on “Nanny and the Professor,” and the title character in “Alice” was a widow. Mary Richards on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” was originally written has being recently divorced, but was changed at the network’s insistence to having been jilted at the altar. It probably wasn’t until the fourth season of “Rhoda” in 1977 that there was a main character in a prime-time TV series who was divorced.
Dang. Martin Mull’s career must have been at a low point before being cast as Mr. Kraft on Sabrina the Teenage Witch.
Ah, the good ol’ mystical Native American trope. It fits right in with what I said on your Saved By the Bell review.
Speaking of tropes, this is another movie that seems to hit all the ones of a 90s kids movie. Then again, it’s a Mary-Kate and Ashley movie, so of course it’s formulaic. I would be surprised if it was anything else.
This movie wasn’t fun. Why must you people lie to me?!?
The tag is inconsistent. Previous videos were tagged with mary-kate and ashley, but this is mary-kate & ashley.
I was the one who pointed out this the last time this happened, too. I don’t know what noticing something like that says about me.
These are my favorite! And evil Martin Mull! You’re too kind