This turns out to have been a feature in the way that Saludos Amigos is a feature—it’s actually six minutes longer than Saludos Amigos. In fact, it initially screened in theatres along with last week’s picture, bringing the pair to barely over two hours. A way to kill time with the kids. It ended up on The Wonderful World of Disney with, from what I can tell, no trimming at all. Which makes it better than a lot of other Disney movies from this era, after all. The entire double feature is about the same length as The Happiest Millionaire.

A truck driver (Pete Logan) is driving a trailer along a highway when his brakes catch fire. He pulls over to the side of the road, and the horse in his trailer escapes. It’s an extremely expensive yearling thoroughbred. It’s found by Goyo (Rick Natoli), a young Native American boy. (Navajo, I suspect.) He rescues it from a mud hole and decides to keep it. Its real owner, Fran Harper (Angel Tompkins), is clearly an extremely wealthy woman. She even hires a helicopter to search the area where the horse escaped. Goyo bonds with the horse, but it’s not his. It doesn’t belong to the pair of thieves (Carlos Rivas and Alex Tinne) who decide to steal it from him, either.

The movie starts with the single most ‘60s way of establishing you’re dealing with hip young kids—the kids who let the truck driver know about the smoke coming from his wheels are in dune buggies. They go chasing it across the desert in them. Which Captain Planet taught me as a child is really bad for the environment, though, because off-roading tears up the ground and kills plants and insects and things. Still, teenagers in the ‘60s didn’t have Captain Planet to tell them that, so it’s one of those things that’s just a symbol of the era.

The movie focuses on either Goyo or Fran; the world of the white people and the world of the Navajo seems to be crossed over solely by Father O’Flaherty (Judson Pratt). The music around him keeps trying and failing to start up “The Irish Washerwoman,” as though even the movie knows that would be a step too far. There’s a scene at “the Indian village” where Fran is trying to find out if anyone there has seen her horse, and her words have to be translated. Now, I know it’s possible to grow up in the US not speaking English as a first language—Wes Studi did it, for example. But that they need a white dude to translate is a little unreal.

Oh, and the music. Which is in part by Randy Sparks. If that name is familiar to you, but you can’t place it, welcome to where I’m at. But I did my job for you and did research. Randy Sparks, born Lloyd Arrington Sparks, made his musical debut at The Purple Onion, the San Francisco club that was also the debut of people like Phyllis Diller and Maya Angelou. In 1960, he started a group called The Randy Sparks Three. From there, he added a ton more people and changed the group name to The New Christy Minstrels. Finding that name explained a lot.

I couldn’t even pay money to rent this; reward me for tracking it down anyway by contributing to my Patreon or Ko-fi!