There are two ways for a picture like this to end, and the movie leans into it by having the narrator (Walter Pidgeon) tell us before the opening credits are even over that the raccoon had been a part of the family “for a while, at least.” I’ve been referring to this movie for days as “the one where the raccoon probably dies.” Your choices are “the animal dies” and “the animal has to be returned to the wild.” Even proto-Manic Pixie Dream Girl Leslie Burke could not stay in Jesse’s life, and not just because the girl on whom the character is based was, and this absolutely true and something I just learned and must share, struck by lightning. To make it easier to decide if you want to watch this or not, the movie has the happier ending.

Sterling North (Bill Mumy) is a young man growing up in Wisconsin a bit over a hundred years ago. His mother has died. His father, Willard (Steve Forrest), is a real estate man who gets most of his pay in barter and drifts around the countryside for work. His sister, Theo (Pamela Toll), has been staying with them, but she has to go back to work in Chicago. On the last day of school, also the day Theo is to leave, Sterling and his father are out in the woods with their dog, Wowzer. They see a lynx scare off a raccoon, who leaves behind one of her kits. Sterling and his father rescue the kit and take it home, where Sterling promises to keep it from being a “varmint.”

What follows is a series of wacky adventures. Theo arranges for a housekeeper, Mrs. Satterfield (Elsa Lanchester), but she won’t work for the Norths unless the animals are left outside, which is not a reasonable request for that sort of family. So the pair decide they will just get along without a housekeeper and not tell Theo. Sterling does what he can to keep the raccoon, whom he of course named Rascal, from bothering people, but nature is what it is.

It’s kind of satisfying to have Theo let a chance to really let Willard have it for neglecting the family. It’s mostly Sterling, but she also feels eventually as though she’s got to stay home. She has to quit her job and not get married and move back to take care of her brother if he’s going to grow up less feral than his pet. And she’s got to do that because her father is going to go ahead and be a dreamer and wander around the country, following his dream in a way that involves being gone for days or weeks at a time. I honestly expected him to marry the teacher, Miss Whalen (Bettye Ackerman), by the end, and I’m glad he didn’t, because that just would’ve meant someone else cleaning up his mess.

I think I’ve read some of the book on which this is based, when I was a kid. It seems likely, given I remember reading a Boy And His Raccoon stuff many years ago. It’s fine, from what I remember, but it’s not one of those things I’ve felt the need to seek out. The only reason I went out of the way to find the movie was, frankly, that there’s not a lot from Disney from 1969, and I’ve already done the most noteworthy of it. Still, it’s better than last week’s, so there’s that, I guess.

This is, among other things, that weird kind of Disney early twentieth century nostalgia that you get a lot of. The book makes it clear that this is the summer of 1918. The older brother, who does not exist in the movie, is fighting in World War I. Book-Sterling gets the Spanish Flu, even. This movie isn’t quite so specific, but a major part of the plot involves a race between a skittish horse and an honest-to-Gods Stanley Steamer. That puts you in a very narrow era, as the company would go out of business in the ‘20s. Disney liked this amorphous era and set many movies in it in the ‘60s—the era, really, of Walt’s youth.

I’m not sure why this movie is so hard to track down. In our scale of The Castaway Cowboy, it’s definitely in the category of Better. Okay, it’s an exceedingly white film, but at least that means we don’t end up cringing at how minorities are treated? Not a lot of what happens really follows from anything else, inasmuch as it’s more vignettes than anything else, but it does give you a solid example of why pet raccoons aren’t necessarily good ideas.

That’s right—it’s another movie I had to rent. Keep me going by supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!