Statistics actually show that populations of immigrants, including ones in the country illegally, have lower crime rates. But the immigrant in today’s feature isn’t in the country a week before he’s gotten involved with organized crime and broken into a secured military base. Not to mention weird ’70s law about gold which I don’t fully understand but which has come up in this column before. I don’t think this is in service to a broader political point; I just think Disney movies tend to have a far more cavalier attitude toward the law than people realize.
Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7 (voiced by Ronnie Schell and played by siblings named Rumple and Amber) is part of a surveying mission of our solar system. His ship is damaged, and he crashes on Earth, where the Army takes control of his ship. He needs to fix it in order to get home, as his people are unable to send a rescue mission. He follows the military brass to the Energy Research Laboratory, where they are hoping to find people who will unlock the secrets of his ship. While General Stilton (Harry Morgan) scoffs at the theories of Dr. Frank Wilson (Ken Berry), Our Hero is intrigued and approaches him for help. Frank is surprised by the whole thing, not least because Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7 is a cat.
Promptly dubbed “Jake” for the convenience of the audience, Zunar-J-5/9 Doric-4-7 tells Frank that they must find a way to fix the ship. This involves large quantities of Org 12, which turns out to be gold. With the help of Frank’s neighbour and colleague, Dr. Norman Link (McLean Stevenson), they decide to raise the money for the gold by betting on sports events, which they will fix using the powers of a collar Jake wears that boosts telekinesis and telepathy. Meanwhile, another neighbour/colleague, Dr. Elizabeth Bartlett (Sandy Duncan), is trying to date Frank and hook Jake up with her cat, Lucybelle, and a shadowy organization represented by operative Stallwood (Roddy McDowell) is trying to take control of Jake’s collar.
It once again strikes me that a lot of Disney movies have plots that rely on Our Ostensible Heroes’ cheating on various sporting events. Jake is using his collar to fix football games. And horse races. And pool matches. And, yes, they need quite a lot of money very quickly, for reasons. Having the ship powered by vast quantities of gold drives a fair chunk of plot. Jake’s bar of it is burnt out in ways that I’ve never understood; what can you do to gold, pure elemental gold, that renders it unusable? And, yes, it’s in the magic shrunken form, but can you maybe unshrink it, sell it, and have the money to buy gold that isn’t broken? But no—cheating on sports.
It also means that we have the curiously Runyonesque mobsters who seem to appear in the occasional Disney movie. We’ve talked about The North Avenue Irregulars and its reminder that organized crime is bad for a community, but the mobsters here seem almost wholesome, maintaining a picturesque pool hall on a charming little square. Tom Pedi, who plays Honest Harry, was in two different movie versions of “Little Miss Marker,” the actual Runyon story, over the years, and for a long time I thought he’d been in Guys and Dolls. He and Earnest Ernie (Jesse White) might easily be singing at us to sit down, we’re rockin’ the boat.
The movie walks a strange line between distrust for the government and trust for it. Our main characters are governmental employees, of a sort—at very minimum, the Energy Research Laboratory has always slightly reminded me of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, only a little less focused. It’s the kind of vague pure research that’s actually paid considerable dividends to science over the years; it isn’t hard to imagine Frank with a Nobel Prize somewhere on down the line for something he thought of while receiving government funding for doing nothing in particular but Thinking Great Thoughts.
On the other hand, of course, there’s General Stilton and the incompetence of the military surrounding him. Jake does not believe he can just go to Stilton and tell him what’s going on, because he believes that the military will be more likely to harm than help. I can’t even say he’s wrong. Stilton seems unlikely to help Jake leave the planet with all of his secrets. And it is far easier than it ought to be to sneak around that base; Frank shouldn’t even have been able to get onto it in the first place.
Still, we clearly can’t trust private enterprise, either; we don’t know much about Mr. Olympus (William Price), but he is of a sort with Ray Milland’s Aristotle Bolt from Escape to Witch Mountain, even unto their names drawing on Greek history. But Olympus is willing to kidnap an innocent woman—and her cat—to get Jake to do what he wants. That’s worse than the gangsters, in a lot of ways!
The movie plays strangely with the idea of loyalty, I think. Jake doesn’t talk much about the society from which he has come; quite rightly, he’s taking more time to focus on how to get home. There’s no time. But they won’t send a rescue mission; it’s implied that they never will. So how much loyalty does he owe them? The US military types in this movie are trying to protect their country from what might be malign outside forces; how much loyalty does Frank owe them, since he isn’t even in the military? What is Jake’s loyalty to Frank and vice versa—since Jake is helpless without his collar, why shouldn’t Frank just steal the collar, especially the spare from the ship? No one voices these questions, but they’re there.
Also there is the question of how attracted Jake should be to Lucybelle just because she’s a cat. Do we have any reason to believe that she’s a hyperintelligent cat, like he is? Or does that not matter to him at all? Are all Earth cats potentially as smart as Jake? If not, are they even actually the same species as he is? Actually, my brain is going a lot of places with that “romance” that are kind of unsettling. I’ll be generous enough not to share.