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Don Knotts was 50 years old when he made his Disney debut in The Apple Dumpling Gang. He had already won five Emmy Awards for his role as Deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show. He’d also successfully made the transition to feature films with movies like The Incredible Mr. Limpet and The Ghost And Mr. Chicken. But by 1975, he’d reached a bit of an impasse. His return to television, as host of the comedy/variety show The Don Knotts Show, fizzled out after a single season.

Unlike a lot of other Disney contract players, James Garner’s time at the studio was short. On March 27, 1974, nine months after the release of One Little Indian, The Rockford Files made its debut as a TV-movie pilot. The series itself premiered the following fall on September 13, about a month after the release of Garner’s second Disney movie, The Castaway Cowboy. Jim Rockford became Garner’s second iconic role after Bret Maverick.

All the way back in 1959, The Shaggy Dog introduced the world to Walt Disney’s Gimmick Comedies. It had been an enormous hit and its success begat the Flubber movies, the Merlin Jones misadventures, the Dexter Riley trilogy and many more. But as long as Walt was around, it was immune from sequelitis. By 1976, Walt had been in the ground (or, if you prefer the urban legend, on ice) for a decade and the studio he’d founded needed a hit.

There is some dispute over which movie should come next in this chronological survey of Disney films. Wikipedia and IMDb both claim that Treasure Of Matecumbe was released on July 1, 1976. But Disney’s own official list says it came out on the 9th, which would make Gus, the Don Knotts comedy about a football-kicking mule, next up since it debuted on July 7. Ordinarily, I go by whatever the studio itself says.

I said as much when writing about Dumbo last month at the newsletter, but in the run-up to the launch of Disney+ in the fall of 2019, there were rumors that the 1941 film would be edited to remove “the Jim Crow scene”, AKA the scene in which a group of crows that are outlandish and offensive stereotypes of Black men sing “When I See an Elephant Fly”. I remember reading the purported exclusive from one of many Disney fansites, and finding its conclusion to be almost (but not quite) as ridiculous as the crows themselves.

Jonathan Conricus rode his Suzuki V-Strom 650 from his home in Kfar Saba to Tel Aviv. "It's an hour and a half by car, half an hour by bike," says the former international spokesperson for the IDF, the person much of the world saw explaining the chaos and carnage following the October 7 in Israel. Earlier this month, Conricus became a senior fellow at The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, where he believes he can add "

"I'm sorry to use you as a confession booth, generally speaking I don't share my thoughts about Portland with anyone," wrote Jake, whom I'd met briefly during an antifa/Proud Boys melee in Portland, Oregon in August 2020. Jake, who works in advertising and asked that his real name not be used, reached out after seeing that I was back in the city, writing about the ramp-up in homelessness and how Oregon Ballot Measure 110, which made "

Let it not be said that Sam Altman doesn’t have his admirers. At least two proxies have gone after Helen Toner, one (by a pair of prominent authors, both on OpenAI’s board) in The Economist, highbrow, one low (a post on X that got around 200,000 views). Both read to me as deeply misleading, verging on defamatory. The lowbrow attack comes from an anonymous poster; in my view it is wrong on every point but not worth wasting a lot of time on.

Today’s LAST CALL Dive Bar Jukebox is free to all readers thanks to the generous support of See the Elephant Amaro. Produced in Agropoli near Salerno, See the Elephant Amaro di Rucola is made using local herbs and botanicals—including wild rucola (“arugula”)—and is considered a “zero kilometer,” farm-to-bottle amaro with all the key ingredients sourced from the Cilento Coast region of southern Italy. It’s an ideal “gateway” amaro for those just starting to explore the amari category—flavorful, sweet, bold, and complex, with just a touch of bitterness.