THE COMPUTER WORE TENNIS SHOES (1969)
Article 1953 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-20-2006
Posting Date: 12-17-2006
Directed by Robert Butler
Featuring Kurt Russell, Cesar Romero, Joe Flynn

After he’s zapped by a computer cable, a college student develops super intelligence.

With this, I complete the Dexter Reilly shopping-cart movies Disney put out in the late sixties and going into the seventies. None of these movies are particularly strong, but at least NOW YOU SEE HIM, NOW YOU DON’T had great special effects and a good dose of energy to it, and at the very least, THE STRONGEST MAN IN THE WORLD trotted out a dazzling display of well-known actors. This one is relatively listless. Not only that, whereas shopping-cart movies are more likely to suffer from an overabundance of silliness, this one almost forgets it’s a comedy for good stretches of the story. Given the fact that the story is utterly routine (the first half is Dexter-learns-a-valuable-life-lesson, the second half is Let’s-rescue-Dexter-from-the-kidnappers-so-we-can-win-the-big-college-quiz-game), it would have been better off going for big laughs. This one was remade as a TV-movie in the mid-nineties, a trend of Disney’s that has gotten far too common.