The original Bad News Bears holds up

The original Bad News Bears from 1976 holds up. I have not seen this in years and I re-watched it because I was thinking of watching the 2005 remake and wanted to be able to compare it with the original. 

Walter Mathau starts as a former minor league baseball player, Buttermaker, who becomes the manager of a little baseball team. This is a team of misfits and the team was added to the league after a lawsuit and there are comments about how those type of lawsuits will ruin America. Buttermaker drinks too much. 

Things don’t start well for the team. The first game ends in a forfeit. Buttermaker recruits a female pitcher named Amanda (a young Tatum O’Neil) and a delinquent to the team. The team starts to play better but competition brings out the worse in Buttermaker and the manager of another team.

This is good. It was fun to see the team get better. Maybe a few of the players aren’t given a lot of  screen time, you get a sense of the team. The movie does not romanticize baseball and even if Buttermaker does start to take his job more seriously, he does not become warm and fuzzy. Amanda cheats, she throws spitballs. 

This is good. I am not sure if I want to see the remake for a while. 

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