Like many stoners before him, Kevin Smith wants to remake Bedknobs And Broomsticks
For many children, watching the Disney film Bedknobs And Broomsticks serves as one of the first times you realize that the line between cleverness and absolute madness is blurrier than first imagined. The 1971 fantasy film stars Angela Lansbury as an apprentice witch who takes on the care of three young children while attempting to learn the final spell from a magic correspondence school run by a charlatan, only to learn they have to travel to a 2-D animated realm so as to steal back a magical medallion which teaches her a spell to bring a museum of artifacts to life in order to fight the Nazis. The above sentence, while seemingly providing all the evidence needed to prove the clever/insane theorem, actually doesn’t begin to do justice to all the randomness contained in the film, such as the fact that it repurposed a song written for Mary Poppins, a movie with a similar conceit but roughly 12 times the coherence.
Naturally, Bedknobs And Broomsticks has become a favorite among the segment of the population whose demographic can be defined as “extremely high,” so it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that Kevin Smith is very into the idea of a remake. As first reported by Comic Book, during a recent episode of his Fatman On Batman podcast, the writer-director held court on the virtues of the Disney musical spectacle while in the middle of talking about actors on Supergirl, much as you would if you were either very easily distracted or Kevin Smith. “Bedknobs And Broomsticks, that movie can be remade today, that movie can so fucking work today,” Smith said, echoing the 2 a.m. thoughts of college sophomores everywhere. “In a world where Disney’s like, ‘Pete’s Dragon!’ and shit like that…Hey! I will fucking suck dick Disney to make the remake of Bedknobs And Broomsticks.”
After he establishes the oral-genital terms of his contract, Smith spends a little time expounding on his love. “That fuckin’ movie has it all, dude. Fuckin’ witches, battlin’ Nazis with fuckin’ ghosts in armor, kids, and a cartoon under the sea where they play fuckin’ soccer,” he effuses, losing the thread of logic right around the same place the filmmakers did, demonstrating the surfeit of kismet in his plan to assume directing duties for the presumably big-budget 3-D remake. Indeed, any Disney executive listening to the podcast almost certainly sprang to their feet, stumbled through the piles of money littering the floor of the Disney management offices, and placed an excited phone call to John Lassiter, informing him that a podcast had just given him a really great idea: Thursday afternoon edibles and screenings of Bedknobs And Broomsticks in the executive rec room.