SAMMY’S SUPER T-SHIRT (1978)
aka Superkids
Article 3948 by Dave Sindelar
Date: 6-5-2012
Directed by Jeremy Summers
Featuring Reggie Winch, Lawrie Mark, David Young
Country: UK
What it is: Pseudo-shopping cart movie on a budget

When Sammy’s favorite T-shirt gets treated in a research lab, it develops the property of giving its wearer super powers. Can Sammy use it to win the big race, or will the two scientists trying to recover the shirt get it away from him?

In the John Stanley book I’m using, there is a listing for a movie called SUPERKIDS for which there is no entry on IMDB. However, as the listing clarifies, it consisted of two movies from the Children’s Film Foundation in Great Britain edited together, and both of these two movies had separate listings on IMDB, so I opted to watch the two movies separately. This was the first one, and though I could have watched it some time ago, out of respect for the entry in the book, I decided to get both movies before I watched them; it was a few years before I could find the other one.

Not that it was really worth the wait; the movie is really just a low-rent variation on the Disney shopping-cart movies of the period. Granted, I wasn’t expecting much of anything else, and on its own terms, the movie isn’t really awful; it’s just predictable and quite juvenile, and never really rises above its models. Other than its fantastic content, the biggest point of interest is a cameo from veteran Hammer character actor, Michael Ripper.