Baseball Trilogy Trilogy, Vol. 2
Bad New Bears Sequels and a TV spin-off
Welcome to Volume 2 of our Baseball Trilogy Trilogy. Volume 1 lays out the premise. Today we look at the expanded Bad News Bears cinematic universe.
Original recipe The Bad News Bears was the 7th highest grossing film of 1976, thanks in part to some creative marketing in teen magazines, jokey radio ads (with renowned baseball announcer Mel Allen!), and the evocative poster illustration by Mad Magazine’s Jack Davis. I love how the illustration spills over the border of the ad.
The Paramount Pictures studio machine immediately kicked into overdrive: sequels, merchandising, and paperbacks (which hit bookstores as the films premiered). Movie novelizations were commonly written from productions scripts and the Bad News Bears novels are no different, as they contain alternate character descriptions and plot details. Yes, I’ve read them all. Did I mention I was insane?
An utterly mind-boggling story of the Bad News Bears sequels is in Carl Reiner’s book, My Anecdotal Life. Reiner and his wife were invited to spend Christmas of 1978 at the Dominican Republic vacation home of Charles Bluhdorn, CEO of Gulf & Western, and therefore head of Paramount Pictures. If you watched The Offer TV series on Paramount+ (and I highly recommend you do), you’ll have good reference point to Bluhdorn’s gruff Austrian persona. He would famously demand that writers, producers, and actors “Shake my hand and we have a deal!” before explaining any details of what the deal actually was.
Reiner had never met Bluhdorn, but couldn’t turn down the invite. Halfway through the holiday, Bluhdorn started pitching Reiner his (terrible) film ideas. The first was “Buffalo Bill Meets Adolf Hitler,” a comedy. The next one came with this sales pitch, “The biggest star in the world has agreed to be in it!” After an hour-long guessing game, Bluhdorn pronounced the star was Fidel Castro, in “a comedy, a comedy with heart! The Bad New Bears Go to Cuba!”
Reiner’s reaction, “There was a big knot in my stomach. It seemed that, at a clandestine midnight meeting in Cuba, Fidel had agreed to play himself in three scenes: playing catch with the Cuban Little Leaguers, giving them a pep talk before the big game, and throwing out the first ball and sitting in the stands watching the World Championship game between Cuba and the United States.”
Bluhdorn got director Michael Ritchie to fall for the shake-my-hand deal and write a script with a required tear-jerker ending. Reiner felt so beholden to Bluhdorn for the hospitality that he agreed to meet with Ritchie. Reiner and Ritchie came up with this ending: a montage of players, fans, President Nixon, and Fidel Castro all crying their eyes out after the Bears and Cuban All-Stars play to a 30-inning tie ball-game.
Unfortunately/thankfully this film was never produced, but Reiner ends the story with this pronouncement, “I believe this is why, to this day, Fidel Castro is so pissed off at the United States!”
According to an LA Times article I found, up to six films were in development, with one taking place in Russia. As we all know, when you copy a copy of a copy, the quality of the original fades with each facsimile. And that’s exactly what happened to these Bears.
Paramount had the first sequel, Bad News Bears in Breaking Training (1977), in theaters just 14 months after the original film premiered.
Gone from Breaking Training are Walter Matthau, Tatum O’Neal, Director Michael Ritchie, and screenwriter Bill Lancaster. While their absence is felt, this is not the abject failure one would assume from a quickie cranked-out sequel. The rest of the Bears return, adding a new pitcher, Carmen (haha, the producers named a character after the opera that provided the score), and relegating Lupus to a hospital bed for the sole purpose of a final game pep-talk one-liner from Tanner, “We’ve got to win one for the Luper!” (AKA “win one for the Gipper”).
The plot of this revolves around the Bears road-tripping to Houston for a championship game and a chance to win a trip to Japan (spoiler: they go to Japan) without any adult supervision. Kelly Leak tracks down his estranged father (William Devane of Knots Landing fame) to be their coach and he turns out to be a good one. Kelly and absentee dad have the expected falling out, but make amends when Coach Dad puts himself on the line to enable the Bears a chance to play. There is a legitimately rousing scene of Devane and the Bears chanting “Let them play!” to a crowded Houston Astrodome. Our original theme has been preserved!
In Bad News Bears Go To Japan (1978), the story-telling wheels come completely off the vehicle, sending the franchise careening in all sorts of bizarre directions, mostly dead ends.
The Buttermaker role of unreliable, questionably motivated coach is now… Tony Curtis! He schemes to revive his TV producer career with the champion Bears playing a tournament in Japan. This was no low-budget shat-out production. The Bears (sadly now without Tanner, the cussing heart and ready-to-fight soul of the team) find themselves in Japan five minutes into the film. Every photogenic landmark is present, no travel expense spared.
The film is a travelogue train wreck of set pieces that seldom involve actual baseball. Watch for the bizarre Japanese game show, Tony Curtis in a luchador mask grappling with actual Japanese wrestling legend Antonio Inoki, and a non-sequitur baseball-Godzilla commercial!
After 90 minutes of this nonsense, the coda of the film finds the Bears and the Japanese team playing a sandlot game away from the bright lights, cameras, and greedy adults. Once again, our original theme is restored! The movie finally lets the kids play, reminding us that the love of playing the game is all that really matters. When Tony Curtis says, “Next year... Cuba… I’ll get Castro to throw the first ball,” you know Charles Bluhdorn is behind it. And you kinda sorta hope that fourth (and fifth, and sixth) movie would have gotten made.
If the cliché “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery” has any truth to it, then American International Pictures flatters like no one else. AIP released their Bad New Bears knock-off Here Come the Tigers in 1978. This film reminds me of my favorite one-liner review (probably Anthony Lane in The New Yorker), “The only way this film could be worse was if it was longer.” Applicable. Two years later Tigers director Sean Cunningham helmed the original Friday The 13th, starting that legendary franchise. Hollywood is crazy-pants.
The Bad News Bears franchise did not make it to a fourth feature (box office disappointments and the kids were aging out), but it didn’t die either. It went… to television!
Despite the appearance of another desperate cash-grab, this was an A-Listers production. The series was developed by Bob Brunner (Happy Days, later Diff’rent Strokes and Webster) and Arthur Silver (Lavern & Shirley, later Married With Children). Also involved were Jeffery and Lowell Ganz, who later wrote A League of Their Own (1993), and produced the first short-lived TV series of the film in 1992.
Half of the episodes of The Bad News Bears series were directed by William Asher. Yes, the William Asher of Beach Party (1963), Muscle Beach Party (1964), Bikini Beach (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), How to Stuff of Wild Bikini (1965), and over 130 episodes of Bewitched!
This is where the real pains of research kick in: I watched all 26 episodes (1979-80). This reboot recycles the original film unabashedly. Buttermaker (now played by character actor Jack Warden) is forced to coach a misfit middle school team to avoid prison after driving a client’s car into his pool for non-payment. All the characters from the original are here, but recast with a younger actors. Tanner is now a kid with a heavy NEW YAWKER accents. The only kid actor you’d recognize is an 8-year-old Corey Feldman hamming it up, adorably.
The original plot is back, virtually verbatim, just stretched out over the 12 episodes of season one. Ogilvie is still the stat nerd. Tanner is still picking fights. Engelberg is still the overweight catcher, handing Buttermaker a ball covered in chocolate, but now he has a catch phrase, “Heyyyy… is that a fat joke?” Amanda is recruited to pitch in Episode 2. Kelly Leak joins the team in Episode 4, but the actor must have pissed somebody off because he’s “out of town” by season’s end.
Episode 8 is when Buttermaker sees the error of his ways— realizing that winning is not more important than letting the kids play— and the Bears turn it all around, beating their rivals on a game-ending, 3-error, 3-plays-at-the-plate, triple play. It’s all very silly, very baseball, and very fun.
By episode 12, booger-eating Lupus becomes our protagonist and is the ultimate hero, catching the last out of the season. Hooray! Bears Win! Season one is chock-full of groaner jokes, iffy sexual politics, and way too many 12-year-old locker room scenes, but it’s also exactly what you’d expect from 1979, the golden era of sit-coms.
Season two, however, suffered a painful demise: Death by Network Notes. According to veteran TV writer Ken Levine’s blog, CBS green-lit a 2nd season, but with the following note: cut the baseball. The reason being that the audience for the show’s time slot (Saturday night) was largely women (not true) who didn’t like baseball (super not true). CBS also pushed for more romance between Coach Buttermaker (Jack Warden, age 59) and the school principle (Catherine Hicks, age 28). The writers did as they were told. Season 2 has episodes revolving around a go-cart race, a tennis tournament, a disco dance contest, a battle of the sexes, and a season-finale camping trip where everyone gets lost. Appropriate.
Unsurprisingly, here’s where The Bad News Bears season 2 episodes finished in the weekly Nielsen ratings:
Ep. 2 “Buttermaker Rides Again” (Sept. 17-23, 1979) 58 out of 61
Ep. 3 “First Base” (Sept. 24-30, 1979) 62 out of 66
Ep. 4 “Wedding Bells, pt 1 (Oct. 1-7, 1979) 63 out of 67
The series was mercifully canceled. The remaining episodes were pushed to summer reruns. Three episodes went completely unaired until a Nick-At-Nite pick-up decades later.
Was this the wet fart that would end the Bad News Bears franchise?
No. There would be a much wetter, much fartier continuance, which we’ll cover in the next newsletter!
Jay all your work on this piece is the definition of rabbit hole! It's a fascinating and unblinking look at not only the history of the franchise but the entertainment biz as a whole.
Amazing you've watched all of them!
Great article! I didn't realize there was that much merchandise supporting the original BNB franchise.