Author Archives: Scott Dyson

ODD MAN OUT – Prologue

(I have three new stories ready to go; I’m just dragging my feet on publishing them because I want to get a few other things in place before I start running them out there. One is a long version of my short story “Odd Man Out,” which was published as a standalone (with another short story called “The House at the Bend in the Road”) and as part of the collection 14 DARK WINDOWS. What follows is the Prologue of that story, which is novella-length (about 33,000 words, if I recall correctly). Watch this space or sign up for my soon-to-come mailing list to find out when it is available on Amazon.

ODD MAN OUT

Prologue

Roger Sinclair checked the calendar that hung on the wall over his computer. October nineteenth. Only the nineteenth. It seemed that the thirty-first was taking forever to arrive this year. Time was dragging.

Anticipation had a way of making the passage of time seem very slow.

The Cabin Weekend was approaching, and Roger had big plans for the traditional yearly gathering of his friends.

Friends. That was a laugh. They didn’t like him any more than he liked them. They used him. They always had. Vinnie, Jack and Paul – they hung around with him – no, they let him hang around with them – because he was smart, dependable, and well-off. He made them feel superior – Look at rich, smart, loser Roger, who can’t get a girl and gets shunned by everyone…but us! We’ll take pity on the loser, and we’ll take advantage of his brains and his wealth.

Like the Cabin Weekend. They always went to Roger’s cabin. None of them had cabins. And why spend money on a real vacation when they could just sponge off Roger? Vinnie and Susan, Jack and Nancy, and Paul and whatever hot-looking hosebag he was dating at the moment.

Well, not this year. Paul wasn’t dating a hot-looking hosebag anymore. He was engaged. To Amy Wellington. Amy might be hot, but she was no hosebag. She was the epitome of class. She was the girl of Paul’s dreams, as Paul himself had pointed out.

She was also the girl of Roger’s dreams, but that was beside the point. Paul never cared about what Roger wanted, only what he wanted. He wanted Amy, so of course he ended up with her. That’s how it worked with Paul.

No matter that he had been Roger’s guest at a charity function when he met Amy. Paul had deigned to accompany Roger to the event when Roger’s own date fell through. ‘Fell through’ is sort of misleading. She dumped me on my ass, he remembered. Bitch.

Focus! Roger forced himself to get back on track with his thoughts. This wasn’t about Melissa, the stick-up-her-ass bitch that worked in the IT department of Roger’s family’s company. The point was Paul, and how he met Amy, and how he had practically run Roger over in his zeal to get to her first.

Paul knew that Roger saw her first, that Roger wanted to take a shot with her, but could Paul let him have a chance? No, of course he couldn’t. What Paul wants, Paul gets.

Roger’s fantasy was that Amy would see Paul for what he was and eventually they’d split up. It would be Paul’s fault, of course, and Roger would be there for Amy. He’d be the understanding friend she would need, the shoulder she could cry on, the guy who’d be there for her as she worked through the pain of their broken engagement. Of course it would end Paul’s friendship with Roger, but that was okay. It wasn’t a real friendship, and it had not been one for a long time. Ever since that day at the frat party back in college…

Focus! he told himself again. This isn’t about embarrassment that Paul caused him in college, this is about Amy Wellington. Paul’s fiancee. Roger’s one true love.

And the Cabin Weekend would be the time when things would turn in favor of Roger.

(To find out what happens at the Cabin Weekend, watch for ODD MAN OUT at Amazon or on these pages…)

What I’ve been reading…

Finished a couple of books recently. SLOW BURN 8: GRIND by Bobby Adair is still telling the story of Zed and Murphy as they kill zombies. I’m still reading, but I have to say I think this series is getting a little long in the tooth — there might be a lot more to tell, but I don’t think this book did a great job of conveying that… The two heroes of this story just seem to be moving between an old place and a new place, and along the way they find new ways to mow down (literally, in one instance) the infected “whites,” who are the zombies of this series. I’ll probably read SLOW BURN 9: SANCTUM sometime soon, but my brain isn’t clamoring for it at the moment.

Also finished THE LAST SURVIVORS by T.W. Piperbrook and Bobby Adair. This book is a free download, the first of a series. It’s a futuristic tale of a society that’s lost their technological ability, and when humans show signs of some sort of infection, they are put down immediately by sword or by fire. One woman finds signs of infection on her son, and she runs. It was a pretty interesting story, in the far future but with zombies of a sort, but ended on a complete and total cliffhanger without really resolving anything from this story. That sort of bothered me. Not sure I’ll read on in this series, but we’ll see.

I read SOFT TARGET by Iain Rob Wright. Wright’s a horror author, but this was a bit of an over-the-top thriller. Also a free download. I already bought the next book in the series, called HOT ZONE. Wright’s hero is a scarred female veteran of Afghanistan, and she is drawn into an organization that is fighting terrorism in the U.K. Seems ordinary Brits are acting as suicide bombers. Why? What’s the common thread between these folks, and why are they doing the bidding of Middle East terrorists? Wright presents a more balanced and nuanced picture of terrorists than we often see in thrillers in general, and SOFT TARGET is a fun story, if a bit fantastic at times.

Last, I read Chris Fox’s THE FIRST ARK, the novella that precedes his NO SUCH THING AS WEREWOLVES book. I’ve been meaning to read on in this series. The series sort of combines a lot of genres: shapeshifters, zombies, aliens, Egyptian gods, archeology, and in the third, vampires, I believe.

I also read a (free) PDF of Steven M. Moore’s novella, THE WHISTLEBLOWER. (He’s giving it away at his website.) This one reads really well. I felt like maybe the very end was rushed a bit. I could have seen this going novel-length. But it told a great story.

One more: JEDI SUMMER WITH THE MAGNETIC KID by John Boden. A fun read I found through Christian Larsen’s publisher’s site. It’s short, not quite a novella perhaps, but a little longer than a short story. Just a coming-of-age story about a couple of brothers back around the time that RETURN OF THE JEDI was a movie event that was worth waiting for. It kept me reading, though in the end I was sort of disappointed that more didn’t happen but I finished it and was interested all the way to the end.

I have another Steven M. Moore novella (PORTAL IN THE PINES) in my queue, and I have a stack of hardcover bargain books both at the office and at home that I need to get through. I’ve been carrying around Denise Swanson’s DYING FOR A CUPCAKE for a couple of weeks now; maybe that will be next. Or Kellerman’s Alex Delaware novel, MOTIVE. So many books, so little time.

Maybe I should write instead of reading…

*****

Cubs win the World Series!

I wanted to do a long and heartfelt piece about what the Cubs finally getting to, and winning, the World Series meant to me. But I just don’t have it in me right now.

So instead I’m just going to ramble a bit.

I became a Cubs fan as a young kid. The first season I remember vividly is 1969. Ron Santo clicking his heels as they left the field, jogging down the left field line to the clubhouse gate in the corner. Billy Williams taking practice swings at his own spit. Ernie Banks and his cocked elbow. The smooth double play combo of Kessinger and Beckert. And of course the Rebel, Randy Hundley behind the plate. I remember the winning, but for whatever reason, I don’t recall the downturn that became known in the future as the “September Swoon.” Maybe because we were back in school, and the games were all day games at Wrigley in 1969.

I’ve suffered through a lot of really bad teams. Oh, they always had a player or two that gave fans hope, but in hindsight…they were bad. Then the Tribune bought them, brought Dallas Green aboard, and he built a GOOD team: he brought in young players like Leon Durham, Ryne Sandberg, and Greg Maddux, and vets like Rick Sutcliffe, Dennis Eckersley, and others. 1984 brought us to the brink…needing one win to go to the series. Alas, it was not to be. They lost the final games of that league championship series to the Padres and were back down. Injuries took their toll on the team, and we next went to the playoffs in 1989, with Don Zimmer at the helm and Maddux and Sandberg the pillars of a good team. But we came up against a buzzsaw in Will Clark and the Giants, and I believe we were swept out of the playoffs.

In the late 90’s we got there again on Sammy Sosa’s back. But we had nothing in the playoffs, and we didn’t get anywhere. Finally, 2003 popped up, and we had a great team built around the dynamic young arms of Kerry Wood and Mark Prior. We took out the Braves to go to the LCS, and were 5 outs away from the World Series when Moises Alou threw a hissy-fit over what he perceived as fan interference, because a fan may have touched a foul ball. Ten people were reaching for it, but the unlucky fan who touched it became a pariah and had to deal with death threats from moronic fans who blamed him instead of the pitcher who served up some meatballs and the shortstop who blew a routine ground out. I threw up my hands. Could I subject my kids to this kind of torture?

I watched after that, but not with nearly the intensity that I did before that. I watched those teams from 2007/2008 go to the playoffs, carried partly on the back of Alfonso Soriano, but stop hitting and go nowhere. Then the ownership change. A FAN (!!!) was buying the team! Tom Ricketts took over, putting Theo Epstein, who had worked a miracle in Boston, in charge of baseball operations. Theo brought in his guys and went to work making the Cubs the worst team in baseball. They tore it down.

Then they built it back up from the ground floor. Astute drafting and trades brought new good young players like Anthony Rizzo (trade), Kris Bryant (draft), Javier Baez (drafted by previous regime), Kyle Schwarber (draft), Addison Russell (trade), Jake Arrietta (trade), Kyle Hendricks (trade), and Dexter Fowler (trade). Then came the free agents: Jon Lester, Jason Hayward, Jason Hammel, John Lackey, Dexter Fowler (their own free agent), and Ben Zobrist, the MVP of the World Series.

In 2015, they were surprisingly good. Great, at times! Lost to the Mets, whose pitching mowed them down, in the LCS. 2016, they set records. They were determined to get to the end. They kept winning. And finally, they did it!

Cleveland played really well. But in the end, the Cubs were the better team, and after 108 years, they have brought the World Championship back to the north side of Chicago. No goats, no black cats, just great play and teamwork and a focus that was enviable.

I didn’t get to watch as much as I wanted to. But I feel like I was a part of this, as much as the people who watched every single inning. Because they’ve been a part of me since I was a little kid pretending to be Ron Santo, and finally, they haven’t broken my heart! They no longer play the blues in Chicago when baseball season rolls around. Wrigley is no longer an “ivy covered burial ground.” And no one will ever call them the “doormat of the National League” again!

We’ll always have Paris? No, Cubs fans, we’ll always have 2016!

*****

PS Not bad for off-the-cuff, huh?

***

Christian Larsen’s THE BLACKENING OF FLESH

Once in a while I read something really interesting and unexpected. I’ve been getting a bit of reading done recently, having plowed through Stephen King’s END OF WATCH (thumbs up), Harlan Coben’s HOME (also thumbs up), Jim Butcher’s SIDE JOBS (very good), Steve Richer’s THE PRESIDENT KILLED HIS WIFE (good), V.J. Chambers’ THE GIRL ON THE STAIRS (title copying of all of those “Girl on the…” books aside, a really great psychological thriller), and MP McDonald’s MARCH INTO HELL (good and interesting!).

Then I read THE BLACKENING OF FLESH by Christian A. Larsen.

I met the author at a Printers Row festival in Chicago a couple of years ago at the Post Mortem Press booth, and his new book (at that time) called LOSING TOUCH intrigued me enough that I bought it at the booth. That was an odd, almost-superhero-but-not story about a guy who develops the ability to pass through solid surfaces. But really well done, and very fun to read.

This latest one is a ghost story that takes place in a little town somewhere in Illinois. This kid is an outsider who doesn’t even want to attend his own graduation. He works delivering prescriptions for an old-time pharmacy, and meets a college girl on one of his deliveries. She knows him, though, because she researched the house he lives in and she’s seen him around. The reason she researched the house is because she says that an entire Chicago mob family was wiped out in the house, but there were no bodies and no evidence, so no charges were filed and everything about their disappearance is speculation. Turns out, the ghosts are still around…

Great horror story, very tense and original. Chris isn’t afraid to not pull his punches, in a storytelling sense. He gets a little unfocused in places with the story in places, as there were sections where I just wanted to get past the meandering narrative and get back to the meat of the story. But there weren’t a ton of those places, and the payoff of the story works at a high level, much like LOSING TOUCH did.

Here’s me and Chris at the Printer’s Row book fest a couple of years ago. I’m the taller one.

PS: I see that LOSING TOUCH currently costs only $0.99! Such a deal!

Hugh Howey post-debate

Hugh Howey posted a blog today titled “The Greatest Threat” which echoes some of what I’ve been thinking.

I don’t generally post much political stuff here, but I really don’t think this is political. It’s just common-sense. Give it a read, if you believe (or if you don’t believe) that income inequality in our country is a serious problem.

The Greatest Threat

What can you expect to find here?

Well, according to most of the spam I get, you can expect to find “excellently reliable information that I will return often to be able to read and interact.”

(EMPTY SPAM – CLICK)

Okay, that’s enough of that.

So what do I actually blog about? I don’t exactly have a theme. I’m a writer, but I rarely blog about the writing process. I’ve never really taken courses in fiction writing. What I know is what I know from my own reading. I’ve read a lot, and fairly broadly. I read cozy mysteries, hard-boiled mysteries, suspense thrillers, science fiction, fantasy, horror, young adult, middle grade, comedy, biography, political analysis (though not much), economic analysis (also not that much), and even a bit of romance now and then. (I confess that I’ve read Nora Roberts and Diane Gabaldon among others.)

I like movies,but these days I see so few that I rarely blog about them. I tend to like most everything, so I’m a terrible reviewer. I doubt that people can form too many opinions from reading about my reactions to films. Maybe some, but as I said, I am mostly positive about stuff I watch.

I read a lot, so I tend to put up book reports/reviews on here. When I find a new author, or read something that I enjoy (which is a lot of stuff) I like to share it. Whether anyone’s reading it is another story.

I love music, have played music most of my life, and have listened to a wide variety of music pre-2K. (Some of the stuff I hear these days doesn’t much sound like music, and there is so much stuff out there now that I’ve never heard of…) I don’t often blog about music, but I will bet that for every new artist that I haven’t heard of, I can name one that hardly anyone else has heard of.

So, in answer to that title question, it’s not really about any of those things…but it could be about any of those things on a given day, in a specific post.

Mostly I want to make people aware about what I’m publishing, and since I haven’t put anything new out since last spring (2015), I haven’t posted too much. (But look for something coming up…including the addition of a newsletter, as soon as I can take enough time to figure out how to do it.)

But every so often I’ll get on a roll and post a bunch of stuff about something that interests me. Hopefully it interests someone else as well!

*****

PS: A post-apocalyptic novel from author M.P. McDonald, INFECTION, is free today! If you like that sort of thing, she’s a very good author and it promises to be an interesting story! I just downloaded it myself…

Books, books and more books…

Whoa, it’s been almost a month since I posted anything here.

I’ve been writing a little, trying to get my ducks in a row for some sort of concerted effort to release four novellas/novels within a short time. Working on my post-apocalyptic novel, which is part The Stand and part Wool. (There are three ways to survive this apocalypse. 1. Build a shelter. 2. Be immune to this virus. 3. Be invited.) Reworking blurbs for those three novellas and one novel.

But I’ve been reading.

A short time ago, I posted that I’d read, and was impressed with, Ernest Cline’s debut novel, Ready Player One. I finished his second novel, a mashup of alien movie themes and stories, titled Armada. I enjoyed it, not quite as much as the debut, but it was still a lot of fun. Aliens are coming to destroy us, but we’ve known about it for the last forty years and have been preparing for the invasion. And guess what? We train our drone pilots by having them play video games. Does that sound familiar? Maybe something like The Last Starfighter? It borrows, or pays homage, to that film along with 2001: A Space Odyssey and Contact and others. It kept me (and my son) reading once we got into it.

I also picked up another book, one I’ve had sitting on the bookshelves since before Borders closed its doors (it still had the Borders sticker on it) called WWW: Wake by Robert J. Sawyer. I’ve always enjoyed Sawyer’s works, and this one ended up being really good. A blind girl with a very specific and rare type of blindness gets an implant which allows the visual signals to be altered and transmitted through the optic nerve, and it also allows her to “see” the World Wide Web. Through her enhanced awareness of the Web, she becomes aware of something – some entity – lurking in the background of that network, and whatever it is, it’s learning and becoming more aware of itself. Interesting premise, well-executed, with good characters and a setup for future books. I may read in in the three book series at some point.

My ebook reading included Fatally Bound by Roger Stelljes, a thriller featuring a couple of too-good-to-be-true sleuths/agents. I liked it, and it worked on a number of levels as they work the investigation alongside an FBI task force to locate a serial killer who is targeting various women who seem to have no common features or connections between them. Also I read another installment in Boyd Craven’s The World Burns serial, this the seventh story, titled The World Cowers. I have come to know and care about his characters and I want to find out where he’s ultimately going with the tale. Also finished Sleep Tight by Anne Frasier, another serial killer thriller, and also a pretty good read. And I read Edward W. Robertson’s third Rebel Stars book, titled Ronin. Enjoyed it quite a bit. Good space opera.

There are others, but that’s a good summary of some of the books I’ve been reading.

*****

Steven M. Moore titles on sale

Under “Books I Enjoyed that won’t set you back much…”

Steven M. Moore has two of his books (the Mary Jo Melendez books) on sale through this weekend, only via Smashwords. From his website:

Last weekend! The “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” are on sale. Mary Jo is inviting you to celebrate with her for leaving Amazon exclusivity and appearing on Smashwords too. She’s an ex-USN Master-at-Arms who manages to get into a lot of trouble as a civilian; she also manages to beat the odds and survive, though. Muddlin’ Through (Smashwords coupon code KY27A) is an international thriller where she works to clear her name and pay back the group that framed her. In the process, she discovers the MECHs, Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans, and romance as she runs around the U.S., South American, and Europe. Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By (Smashwords coupon code VT64E) takes place almost exclusively in the Silicon Valley where she has two government groups pursuing her, one U.S., the other Russian. She also has a stalker on a revenge mission. Both books, normally $2.99, are $0.99 on Smashwords, using the coupon codes, until August 1—lots of entertaining summer reading for $2!

I’ve read them and I enjoyed both. If you’re looking for a couple of good reads for $1.98, give them a look-see.

****

READY PLAYER ONE by Ernest Cline

This book was, for me, one of those special reads. I could barely put it down. Bought it at a little indie bookstore on Mackinac Island (The Island Bookstore) with the intention of getting to it someday. Well, my son read the description and started it, and he could barely put it down.

I finished what I was reading and picked it up a couple of days ago. And that was it. Every spare minute I had I grabbed the book and read. Finished it this morning between patients, and I have to say that it kept me sucked into the story the whole time.

Anyone read it?

It’s dystopian, in that the real world has devolved into a dirty, poverty-stricken dump. Wade, the first-person hero of the book, lives in something called “the Stacks” which are vertical trailer parks. Made me think of the way they park cars in NYC (we don’t do ’em like that in Chicago) where you pull into an elevator of sorts and they hoist your car to the top, then put one under you, and another, and finally, the one on the ground. They stack up the trailers (even some VW minibuses) in metal frameworks, and people live in them. Cheap and efficient, but not very desirable.

Wade’s truly happy in the OASIS, a massive virtual world where humanity more or less conducts their lives in this depressing world. It was designed by a computer nerd named James Halliday, who recently died (at the beginning of the book) and has set into motion a huge on-line quest, the winner of which will get his vast fortune and control of his company. An evil corporate entity, IOI, wants to win, and is hiring the best people they can hire to find this Easter egg, and they will literally stop at nothing, including murder, to get there first. But the true “best” egg hunters, known as ‘gunters,’ are guys like Wade and others who by some combination of luck and brains, find the first key after 5 years of no one having a bit of success in locating it.

I loved the 80’s references (and 70’s references; a lot of the movies and songs and even video games seem to be from the later 1970s as well as the 80’s) and I loved the characters, and I loved the suspense of seeing how Wade and his compatriots would defeat the evil corporation and find the final key and win the game. Plus, there was the added suspense about just who some of these gunters are. I mean, all Wade ever sees is their on-line personas, and he clearly believes that it is enough to know whether he can trust them and be friends with them.

I liked the message at the end. It felt right.

I don’t know if it’s a great book, but for me, it WAS a great book, one I’ll probably read again someday.

*****

WALL-E thoughts and comments from a while back…

I’ve been thinking about dystopian and post-apocalyptic storytelling recently, and it dovetailed with some thoughts about Disney from a while ago. So I started thinking about the movie WALL-E. I wrote some stuff to a file a while back, and thought I’d put it up here.

It’s been a while since we saw the Disney/Pixar offering WALL-E. I recall that when we saw it, I was expecting to be as charmed by it as I have been by most of the previous Pixar films, including such offerings as CARS, FINDING NEMO, TOY STORY (1 and 2), and RATATOUILLE.

And I think WALL-E was as good as those movies (and maybe better in a lot of ways), but not nearly as charming. I don’t know how to explain it…I think those other stories all take the Disney formula (if you don’t know that formula, no sense in trying to explain it) and used it with their own unique twists. And they’ve worked, so much so that they are really the class of Disney animation currently, and have been for a long time, since the days of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and ALADDIN.

But – WALL-E presents a much more complicated story than any of those. It’s FAR less happy than any of them, far less funny, and more touching in a lot of ways. It’s also more of a dystopian SF adventure than anything I’ve seen previously done by Disney. (I wonder what that will mean to repeat business for this film – while I liked it, I can’t see going back to the theater to see it with the kids like we have done for other Pixar films…)

(THIS SYNOPSIS LIKELY CONTAINS SPOILERS – READ AT YOUR OWN RISK…)

In case you don’t know, Wall-E is a little robot whose name is an acronym (exactly for what, I can’t remember-waste allocation something something – Earth). He’s the last one of his kind to still be operational, to still be functioning in his task to clean up the waste and garbage left on the planet by humans as they’ve abandoned their planet for a life in space. He’s a fairly low-tech looking thing, yet he has intelligence and self-awareness. He is lonely, as you might expect, with only a cockroach as company for who knows how many of the last 700 years. Yet he goes about his tasks diligently, compacting and stacking trash into skyscraper sized piles all around the city.

Into this world comes EVE, a sleek “female” robot whose “directive” is classified. Fortunately for Wall-E, she doesn’t vaporize him immediately (I wondered about her defensive responses – was she programmed to find monsters on Earth? Why is she so quick to shoot first at anything that moves?) and after he follows her around for a long time, the pair of robots fall in “love”, or something like love at least.

When Wall-E is showing her his treasures, artifacts from humanity’s past that he’s collected in his day to day toils, he presents her with something different – something he hasn’t come across in a long time. A small living plant. EVE’s response is dramatic. She seizes the small plant, places it inside of her metallic body, and goes into a sort of catatonia. On her body a green leaf flashes over and over. And sure enough, soon the ship that left her comes to collect her, and she is being delivered to wherever she came from originally. And of course, Wall-E can’t let her go like that; he chases her down and ends up going on a trip through outer space to her final destination: the star cruiser Axiom with its cargo of humanity.

And herein lies more dystopian elements. Humanity has changed – low gravity and a life of leisure has turned them into a bunch of lazy blobs who are content to be waited on hand and foot by their robot tenders and don’t even think about life or interaction with each other. Their captain is a pleasant but seemingly not too “bright” blob voiced by John Goodman. (John Ratzenberger makes his usual appearance as a passenger who is forced to interact with others by Wall-E’s intrusion into their daily existence.) The Buy-N-Large Corporation is the benefactor in all of this – the corporation is the entity that built the robots, that sent humans into space to live while Earth is supposedly being cleaned up, and that promoted this lifestyle in the first place – a sort of bad guy who isn’t really even there anymore.

Of course, Wall-E and EVE save the day, getting the plant to the proper place which results in the ship returning to Earth, against heavy resistance from the robots who now seem to embody the Corporation. It’s a touching conclusion at times, watching the humans get back on their feet, literally and figuratively, and relearn the joys of living, as the captain watches Wall-E and EVE dance through the space around the ship, and as the passengers are forced to interact with each other and simply act to save themselves. The captain outwits his robot overseer in the end, and humans return to Earth, which is not really “ready” to receive them but which needs their attention to be reborn. All very optimistic, at the end, and positive.

It’s a cautionary tale, however, warning against a lot of things – not the least of which is excessive consumption, corporate greed and a trend toward indoor (computers, video games, big screen tvs, etc.) entertainment vs outdoor activity. It seems to warn against technological achievement just for the sake of achievement, with no attention to the good or bad results of such achievement. Maybe most of all it warns against the current trend of not looking beyond tomorrow. I think there are some heavy social and political themes buried in the cartoon medium within which director Andrew Stanton and Pixar work best. Probably a lot more of them than I’m getting to here…I think someone could expand on a lot of these things and dig far deeper into this story than I’ve done.

And that, by itself, was very unusual for a Disney or a Pixar type story. So, while WALL-E was not nearly as charming or uplifting as other Disney fare, it was certainly deeper and more socially aware than almost anything they had done in this medium to that point in time.

We never did see it again in the theater, but we did buy it on DVD, and we’ve enjoyed it more than once on our own home screen. I’ve grown even fonder of the film as time has passed.

Maybe it’s time to watch it again…

******