There’s something not right about a movie wherein a black guy (who says his “great-grandparents came from this part of Africa”) travels to Zambia and finds a white guy who’s a champion athlete. Who has a pet tiger he brought from India when his missionary parents lived there, because okay, why not? Also, the black guy later cites Jim Thorpe as the previous contender for World’s Greatest Athlete. When asked what happened to Thorpe, what he did wrong, the answer was not immediately “racism.” And let’s be real—if you don’t want to bring up racism in athletics, maybe don’t bring up Jim Thorpe?

Sam Archer (John Amos) is the coach of apparently all the teams at Merrivale College, for some reason not ever-popular Medfield. His assistant is Milo Jackson, played by top-billed Tim Conway. All the teams are losing, because their athletes are terrible. Archer quits, and Milo goes with him. To relax, Archer decides to go on safari, and Milo goes with them. They are admiring how fast a cheetah can run when one of their bearers (Don Pedro Colley, possibly) tells them that the cheetah may be fast, but not as fast as Nanu (Jan-Michael Vincent). Archer sees Nanu, and he is faster and stronger and so forth than all the animals. So he desperately wants to take Nanu back to the college and plot happens.

A whole lot of plot, some of which I missed because I didn’t bother to pause the movie when leaving for a bit. Anyway, Archer gets his job back, and Jane (Dayle Haddon) agrees to tutor Nanu, and they trick their blind landlady (Nancy Walker) into believing Nanu’s tiger is really a person, and Jane’s boyfriend Leopold Maxwell (Danny Goldman) is jealous and tries to get his father the dean (Billy De Wolfe) to I missed it, and Nanu’s godfather and witch doctor Gazenga (Roscoe Lee Browne) decides Nanu’s spirit is being corrupted and comes to take him back, and, yeah, stuff. I don’t know; I was ignoring it as much as possible.

The one thing I will say, to get this out of the way, is that naming the guy “Nanu” wasn’t funny yet. Mork and Mindy wouldn’t air for another five years. Robin Williams was starting at Julliard at the time. Now, it also didn’t make any sense, as Nanu was the son of white missionaries who had also lived in India. And while not everyone in the village spoke flawless English, you know, Gazenga spoke like Roscoe Lee Browne. So his “me Nanu” routine didn’t make sense, either, even assuming his parents had decided to give him a Romanian last name as a first name instead of, like, George.

Also, oh, boy, with the racism. That one guy keeps calling Archer “bwana,” which, okay. It’s an actual word in Swahili, admittedly not a language spoken in Zambia. But Archer’s great-grandparents are, if you math it out, people probably born in a time when there was not much immigration of black Africans into the United States, meaning the line reads as though it would make more sense to be delivered by a white guy about, like, Croatia or somewhere. Which doesn’t work with any of the rest of the story. It’s as though they’ve tried to make Archer as white as possible while still played by a black actor, and the eponymous African character is then a white guy. And the witch doctor is the sort of thing that was a stereotype from World War II movies, where you’d get the Japanese officer who learned English at an American college and then went home and imbibed Japanese culture.

In fact, the only two black people who are given personality in this movie are Archer and Gazenga, so yeah, that’s unsettling. And Gazenga has as far as I can tell raised Nanu to be as unaware of, like, everything as possible. And there’s this tribal Thing where someone who saves someone’s life is then responsible and has to follow them everywhere, even back to a hut to get a hat, but it doesn’t apply when it’s a woman because of course it doesn’t. Women don’t come across much better in this movie than black people, I can tell you.

There is also a long and inexplicable sequence wherein Gazenga shrinks Milo, possibly with magic, or possibly makes him believe he’s been shrunk, only he falls into a drink and a woman’s purse and whatever. It’s apparently one of the most expensive sequences in the movie, and it adds nothing except five or ten minutes of length to the movie. Tim Conway doesn’t even get to be his standard wacky Tim Conway character, because they don’t put that much development into him.

I don’t remember ever having seen this movie before. If I had, I wouldn’t have offered to do it for Year of the Month. Now, I’m not sure if it’s one of the movies I managed to miss when and if they played it on the Disney Channel when I was a kid. Maybe I saw it and forgot about it; that’s happened once or twice. There are even a few movies where there’s a scene that I remember as a glimmer when I catch them again. The climax is vaguely familiar, I guess, but it blends in with a ton of other sports-themed Disney movies of the era. At least Nanu isn’t cheating?

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