Escape to Witch Mountain (1975). Directed by John Hough. Written by Robert Malcolm Young, based on the novel of the same name by Alexander H. Key. Starring Kim Richards, Ike Eisenmann, Eddie Albert, Ray Milland, and Donald Pleasence.
I am about the farthest it is possible to be from being a Disney adult. I’ve been to Disneyland once, when I was a teenager, and have never felt the urge to go back. I think the last Disney movie I saw in theaters was Big Hero 6 (2014). I never watched any Disney Channel shows and am not even sure I can confidently name any of them. I don’t have any particular antipathy toward anybody who loves Disney and its media empire. I just don’t get it, but that’s fine. We don’t all have to understand each other’s pop culture obsessions.
I am, however, interested in the role the Walt Disney Company has played in the entertainment industry since its founding in 1923. Like the other major studios that have survived since the early days of the movie business, Disney has been through its share of ups and downs over the past century.
One of the most prominent of the “downs” was the twenty or so years that followed the death of founder Walt Disney in 1966. The company had already slashed its animation staff from around 500 people down to just over a hundred, and while Disney continued making animated films, including some quite good ones, the animators and everybody else at the company knew the focus was shifting away from animation and toward live action. They didn’t want to be the kiddie studio anymore; they specifically wanted to appeal to older audiences. In the late 1970s, this would eventually lead to a large number of their remaining animators leaving in an exodus lead by Don Bluth, whose post-Disney work we will be watching next week.
The problem, of course, was that pivoting to focus on live action films really only works if the live action films are good and successful, but a lot of the movies Disney made in the ’70s and ’80s are perhaps generously described as interesting and more accurately described as weird.
Escape to Witch Mountain sits right at the cusp of that peculiar era in Disney filmmaking. It’s very much a children’s movie aimed at a young audience, and it would be another few years before Disney even ventured into its first PG-rated film with The Black Hole (1979). But it is also oddball live action sci fi that strays pretty far from the cute, classic animal-centric stories coming out of the animation studio, such as The Aristocats (1970), Robin Hood (1973), The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), The Rescuers (1977), and so on. Disney was out of its initial fairy tale era and not yet into its princess-obsessed revival era. Everything was filled with talking animals in those days.
It made sense to add some psychic aliens, I guess. Escape to Witch Mountain is based on the novel of the same name by American sci fi writer Alexander Key. I have not read the novel; I’m not sure I’ve read any of Key’s work. (Speak up in the comments if you have! I’m curious about it.) He wrote several books and stories, mostly for young readers. That includes the post-apocalyptic novel The Incredible Tide, which was published in 1970 and adapted into the anime Future Boy Conan by Hayao Miyazaki in 1978.
From what I can tell, the movie Escape to Witch Mountain follows the same rough plot points of the book, albeit with some changes that are, honestly, quite typical of Disneyfication. The film’s main characters are younger, the references to Cold War politics are removed, and the antagonists are presented as more bumbling and comical than truly dangerous.
The psychic and telekinetic powers are all there, however, although the movie does not treat them as a reason the children are ostracized. Also, I just want to take a moment for us to collectively remember the time, not so very long ago, when everybody just kind of assumed that scientific advancement would inevitably lead to psychic powers. That was pretty wild, right? I think that was pretty wild. These days people tend to group things like psychic powers under the supernatural or paranormal umbrella, but back in the ’60s and ’70s they were more often considered to be scientific in nature. We obviously still have remnants of it in the stories that have persisted—it’s part of the fabric of Star Trek and Star Wars, for example—but in general most sci fi seems to have shifted away from the psychic powers heyday of the ’60s and ’70s.
I took a brief field trip down a research rabbit hole trying to untangle why parapsychology was so popular in mid-century sci fi, and why it largely fell out of fashion, but I quickly came to the conclusion that while it’s fascinating, it’s also a much bigger topic than I can deal with here. I will just leave you with the fact that Princeton University didn’t shutter their parapsychology research program until 2007, and there are still a handful of universities in the US, UK, and elsewhere in the world that study parapsychology, in spite of the fact that nobody has ever produced replicable results about anything, so take that as you will.
In any case, the distinction between scientific and supernatural is irrelevant in Escape to Witch Mountain, because this is a movie where hijinks are more important than any such fiddly details. Which is, I think, exactly as it should be in a movie about a couple of kids having a fun time outsmarting adults and finding their way home.
We meet siblings Tony (Ike Eisenmann) and Tia (Kim Richards) as they are brought to a children’s home after the death of their foster parents. They don’t remember their birth parents or much of anything from their early childhood, and they don’t think they have any other family around. While at the home, Tia and Tony use their psychic, telekinetic, and prognostication powers to deter a bully (Dermott Downs), befriend a black cat (played by a black cat), and save a wealthy lawyer named Mr. Deranian (a pre-Halloween Donald Pleasance) from a car accident.
Because talking about children’s movies always makes me curious what happened to the child actors, here is a quick summary: After a long career in television and film, Richards is recently better known for being a troubled cast member on The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, but I have never watched that show, will never watch that show, and honestly only know about it against my will. Eisenmann also kept working in show business, mostly in production and voice acting. Both of them had small parts in the 2009 Escape to Witch Mountain remake. Downs, the kid who plays the red-haired bully, is an active television director; among other things, he recently directed the musical “Subspace Rhapsody” episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. But, much more importantly (to me), he was the cinematographer of the coolest music video of all time: OK Go’s Rube Goldberg machine variation of “This Too Shall Pass.”
I’ll pause for four minutes while we all stop to rewatch that video, as is natural and necessary every time somebody links to it.
Done? Okay, back to the movie.
The mild-mannered Mr. Deranian works for a rich man named Aristotle Bolt (Ray Milland). Bolt is the sort of rich man who brings psychics and seers to his Carmel mansion in order to expand his fortune, so when Deranian tells him about Tia and Tony, he immediately hatches a plan to get the kids under his control. It’s not entirely clear what he expects them to do—Tony’s skill of moving things telekinesis with harmonica music does not seem like an obvious boon to a businessman—but I suppose he intends to figure that out later.
That plan works for about a day before the kids realize that two adult men conspiring to imprison them in a seaside mansion is actually really creepy, and they escape with the help of a horse named Thunderhead (played by movie star horse Ott, who had a respectable resume).
Tia and Tony sneak into the Winnebago of grumpy curmudgeon Jason O’Day (Eddie Albert), who reluctantly agrees to help them and their cat evade capture. What follows is a series of shenanigans, hijinks, and near misses as O’Day and the kids try to make their way to where they hope they will find Tia and Tony’s people. There are incompetent bodyguards, bumbling cops, small-town rednecks, and a bear (played by movie star bear Bruno, who also had a respectable resume). (The cat actor who plays Winky is not credited, but I am not surprised. Cats are not known for their willingness to join labor unions, work with managers, or sign contracts.)
Cats and bears and horses aside, the casting of the adult characters in Escape to Witch Mountain is clearly aimed at impressing parents. Milland was one of those classic studio-era actors with one million credits to his name. He started acting in the ’20s and didn’t stop until his death in the ’80s, and his long career included just about every type of project and role, as well as an Academy Award (for Billy Wilder’s noir film The Lost Weekend [1944]) and a directing credit on the atomic-era sci fi film Panic in Year Zero! (1962), which we will probably watch in the future. Similarly, Albert had a long, long career that included parts in the films Roman Holiday (1953) and Oklahoma! (1955), starring roles in numerous Broadway productions, and playing the lead opposite Eva Gabor in the television show Green Acres. This has always been part of Disney’s approach to getting parents to bring their kids to the movies: cast actors the adults will recognize from their favorite movies and shows.
It’s a bit hard to dig into things too deeply, because most interviews about the film are filtered through the Disney brand, but according to director John Hough, he was brought on to the project after the producers saw his film The Legend of Hell House (1973). Which is, as you can guess, a very different kind of movie. It’s Gothic, supernatural horror, with a screenplay by Richard Matheson based on his horror novel Hell House. That’s the sort of film Hough was known for when Disney approached him; this was a guy used to working on Hammer horror films like Twins of Evil (1971), not Disney movies.
But maybe Disney was thinking ahead, because after Escape to Witch Mountain, they kept Hough on to direct The Watcher in the Woods (1980), a Gothic horror film that was the second of the studio’s attempted swings toward weird and dark, following The Black Hole (1979). Neither movie did well at all, and it seems like that’s mostly because both were produced and rushed to release to capitalize on other films. The Black Hole was supposed to be Disney’s Star Wars—probably because they were kicking themselves for passing on George Lucas’ actual Star Wars pitch—while The Watcher in the Woods was supposed to be Disney’s The Exorcist (1973).
I can’t quite figure out why I remember this moving being scary to me as a child. It’s not scary or dark. Everything simply looks and feels too Sunny California for that. It does tug at the heartstrings, however, because Tia and Tony are nice kids who just want to find a new home after losing their old one, and greedy adults keep getting in their way. The idea of young people being pursued for their psychic powers by somebody who wants to use them for nefarious purposes could go the scary route, but it doesn’t play out that way here. Tia and Tony are never in real danger. They are always quick enough, clever enough, and powerful enough to get out of the many binds they get into, although sometimes they require animals to help them. They escape from a jail by making the sheriff fight a broomstick in a hat. The climactic scenes involve a flying Winnebago (which brings our total flying Winnebago film tally to two so far, for those keeping count). It’s all very fun and charming.
Escape to Witch Mountain remains a curious oddball in the Disney canon. In the mid-’70s Disney was struggling, trying to find a new identity, veering away from animation full of talking animals but not quite sure what they were veering toward instead. In tone and style, Escape to Witch Mountain doesn’t stray too far from what had come before, but it’s based on unique source material and just weird enough to stand out. I think that’s probably why many people remember it so fondly, including people who don’t think of themselves as Disney lovers.
What do you think of Escape to Witch Mountain? Has anybody read the book it’s based on? I haven’t seen the 2009 remake with Dwayne Johnson (retitled Race to Witch Mountain) and so I shall not venture to form an opinion on that.
Next week: Is this a good time to admit that while other people were developing crushes on an animated fox in Robin Hood, I was developing a crush on an animated rat? Is there ever a good time to admit that? Watch The Secret of NIMH on Amazon, Apple, Roku, and more.
I know I read the book in probably 3rd or 4th grade because I remembered having read it when I saw the movie on TV, probably a Disney Movie of the Week or whatever they called it, but the only thing I remember is the Flying Winnebago. Of course it’s been half a century since I’ve seen it…
“why parapsychology was so popular in mid-century sci fi, and why it largely fell out of fashion,”
A. John W Campbell
B. He died.
I was totally the target age/audience for this movie (although I saw it on TV after it was in theaters). As a young, literal viewer, I was totally enamored and surprised by the reveal that the kids were not supernatural in origin but rather other-worldly. The whole, “UFOs hide in fog and the spacemen create scary legends so humans will leave them alone” idea was an invigorating bolt to my developing creative mind. I also haven’t read the book so I can’t speak to that.
I remember seeing this movie in the theater when I was 6 or 7, and its sequel Return from Witch Mountain in 1978. (Apparently there was a 1982 TV movie sequel, Beyond Witch Mountain, which recast the kids but brought back Eddie Albert. But I don’t remember that one.) I think I was rather fond of the movies at the time, probably because I always felt like an outsider and identified with alien characters like Spock, so I probably identified with alien kids trying to find where they belonged. I’ve forgotten the details, though.
Ike Eisenmann is probably best known for his role as the ill-fated Cadet Preston in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, actually Scotty’s nephew according to deleted scenes restored in the novelization and director’s cut. He was also a series lead in the 1977 series The Fantastic Journey with Jared Martin and Roddy McDowall, a show about a group of travelers lost in parallel realms within the Bermuda Triangle (another one of those ’70s pseudoscience fads). That was another case where he played a character trying to find his way home, so I wonder if he was cast because of his Witch Mountain role, although he was playing a normal human kid there.
A large part of why psychic research fell out of favor is that magicians like James Randi exposed the tricks that fraudulent psychics used to fool scientists into thinking there was merit to their claims. Science is based on observational evidence, so it can be weak against tricks that fool the senses, which is why it took magicians to expose what scientists couldn’t. The failure of psychic research to produce any meaningful, repeatable results, or to offer any inkling of an actual theory of how psionic abilities worked, was probably also a factor.
It’s funny, even though I watched Return from Witch Mountain dozens of times on TV, I’ve never seen this nor read the book. Personally, I consider 1978’s The Cat from Outer Space to be the height of 70s Disney weirdness.
The Cat From Outer Space was my 70’s Disney touchstone. Great fun. And ripe for a remake.
cat from outer space is top notch
I love the weird 70s Disney movies, they’re bonkers and kind of frightening for kids, which is why I give Disney a lot of credit for my interest in all things spooky. It’s interesting that both this and Watcher in the Woods seem like they’ll be more supernatural, but veer in sci-fi at the end (at least in Watcher’s original ending). Though I guess Black Hole swapped that, starting sci-fi and veering into more supernatural at the end. Disney never seemed to want to go full-blown horror in those days, they just chose to make science as scary as possible.
On the other hand, in 1983 they made a movie of Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, which is definitely fantasy/horror. Like The Black Hole, it was part of their push to broaden into older-skewing material, which couldn’t overcome the “kid stuff” expectations attached to the Disney name, so they later invented the Touchstone Pictures imprint for their PG and higher-rated material.
I read the book and its sequel as a teen (the sequel is Return from Witch Mountain, which was also made into a movie and starred Bette Davis and Christopher Lee as well as the two children). The books didn’t grab me like the movie did. I also recall that in the first book, Tia is mute and can only communicate telepathically with Tony. Alexander Key wrote the novelization of Return from Witch Mountain, clearly understood that a mute kid isn’t going to work in a film, and gave Tia a voice in that book.
Talk about a flashback. I read the book years ago (from Scholastic, I think), and recalled enjoying it. I’ve also seen the sequel and both of the remakes, which are OK (even if the second suffers from The Rock Syndrome).
I am mildly amused to note that all three of the major adult actors in the film also played murderers on Columbo during the show’s original run…
I was a few years too old for this when it was released but probably wouldn’t have caught it even if I’d been younger because we were never a Disney family to begin with. My parents took us to one of the rereleases of “Flubber” and “The Love Bug” then pretty much declared, “We’re good,” and just took us to whatever they wanted to see, which fortunately included “2001: a Space Odyssey,” “Westworld,” “Soylent Green” and “Silent Running.”
I remember the television spots with the crudely matted flying Winnebago and the animated hounds that looked like they could have been the pets of the Krellish Id monster from “Forbidden Planet.” That and a still of the amateurish looking flying saucer miniature in an issue of Starlog magazine have been the extent of my exposure.
Eddie Albert, of course, was best known for “Green Acres” at this point and, like Bob Crane and Don Knotts, was another fading TV star stooping to do a live action Disney film. Ike Eisenmann was essentially the male Pamelyn Ferdin, one of a handful of child actors seemingly in everything at the time while Kim Richards was still recognizable from “Nanny and the Professor ” and had also been in Dan Curtis’s videotape adaptation of “The Turn of the Screw” a few years before. Poor Ray Milland had just slightly crawled his way reputation back from “Frogs” and “The Thing with Two Heads” before throwing it all to the dogs by then appearing in some of the worst TV shows and telemovies of the seventies. Donald Pleasance had already been in “Fantastic Voyage,” “The Great Escape” and “You Only Live Twice” along with memorable stints on “The Twilight Zone” and ” The Outer Limits” and an almost exhausting list of other feature and television projects. So, a real mixed bag of a cast coupled with the director of “Hell House” because the studio famously but inexplicably was trying to milk “The Exorcist” audience, a quest they dragged out into the eighties with the even more troubled but almost weirdly appealing “Watcher in the Woods.”
During Walt’s day this might have been one of his competent, reasonably budgeted “Wonderful World of Color” episodes but by the seventies it was just one of the many unclutched straws the studio was desperately grasping at. It certainly wasn’t the expensive fiasco that “The Island at the Top of the World” and ” The Black Hole” were and apparently made enough money to warrant a sequel and eventual remake (because by the nineties, Disney was remaking everything).
Maybe it has its charms. If I’d come across it in the days before I cut the cord I’d probably have given it a look but I’m not giving Disney so much as a penny these days.
“Ike Eisenmann was essentially the male Pamelyn Ferdin, one of a handful of child actors seemingly in everything at the time”
Hmm. I would’ve said “the successor to Billy Mumy.” Although he was never quite as good as Mumy.
I’ve just remembered that another reason I probably liked this movie when I was a kid was that Eisenmann kind of looked like I did then (though he’s six years my senior), so maybe I identified with him.
I don’t remember reading this book, but I loved another of Key’s sf books back in the day. The Forgotten Door was about an amnesiac (alien?) kid with psychic powers who had fallen through some kind of space-time portal into modern-day Earth.
Read that one a couple of times at least.
Yeah, I remember “The Forgotten Door” – read it in the car when my uncle was driving me and a gang of other kids (in the back of a station wagon – no seatbelts) to the beach. I assume it belonged to one of his kids – but for the duration of the trip, it was mine.
Looking at Ike Eisenmann’s IMDB page, I see he was in “The Sky’s the Limit” – I remember that one
I am sure that I saw the movie, although I don’t remember it well; I definitely read the book that it was based on. The main thing that I recall from the book was that, unlike in the movie, Tony and Tia’s silent communication was not telepathic, but ultrasonic: they could hear and speak to each other at frequencies too high for normal humans to hear, and do so while hardly moving their lips. For story purposes, the effect was essentially the same as telepathy, but I remember being struck that the author had made a different choice.
Watching the clips also reminded me that, as noted, Disney aged down the kids for the movie; in the book, they are adolescents, rather than young children.
Reading this I’m realizing I don’t remember this movie at all except I thought I did. I do remember the sequel, Return From Witch Mountain and was definitely confusing them. I never saw the remake and didn’t know the girl in it had grown up to be a capital h Housewife.
and somewhat relatedly, I have a hard time not confusing the prepositions in these movie titles. ‘escape from’ is so much more common a phrase, and ‘return to’.
anyway, I think this is probably the disney phase I am most nostalgic for. when they invented disney streaming I didn’t look to see if they had this one but I did look for something wicked this way comes (which they didn’t have but apparently just added) and watcher in the woods which they also didn’t and still don’t have.
I also read the book when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. I don’t remember much about it but I think it was a favorite of mine, at least for a time. Now I’m curious to read it again!
Alexander Key wrote a number of science fiction books for children that I loved as a child. He was one of the earliest I read.
This didn’t really feel like an outlier to me in that era of children’s films. There were all kinds of movies with superpowered or supernatural elements and this fit right in. I don’t know how many were Disney, but The Cat from Outer Space, The Incredible Mr Limpet, Flubber etc, The Shaggy Dog, Blackbeard’s Ghost, The Computer who wore Tennis Shoes, Herbie the Love Bug, and wasn’t there one about a talking mule or something? I mean, they were not your average realistic stories. So a movie about couple of kids with mental powers wasn’t really that strange.
I was obsessed with the remake they made in the 90s for about a month, when I was about 9 or 10. Haven’t watched the newer remake.
I read and loved Alexander Keys as a kid and remember being horrified by the movie. It was silly where the book was frightening. Toni, Tia and their family reminded me a lot of Zenna Henderson’s The People.
Escape to Witch Mountain and Return From Witch Mountain (ahh, Christopher Lee)! I watched these a lot as a kid — we had them recorded off the Disney Channel. When I was a little older I found the book of Escape to Witch Mountain in the school library and I was pretty transfixed by it. The movie is more on the fun-shenanigans side than the book. I’m trying to remember if I have it on my shelf… I would definitely read it again. It was formative in a weird way (maybe mostly a childhood fascination with psychic/mental powers kids way) for me. It seems like there were a lot of those books floating around my periphery, even in the 80s/90s. The Girl with the Silver Eyes, Firestarter, that one with the Reno hotel and dreams thing (can’t recall the title)…
I read the book, though I’m not sure exactly when. It was probably in the early to mid ’70’s when I was in my early to mid teens. I saw the movie on TV later on, so probably in the late ’70’s.
I don’t remember much of the specifics of the book or the movie, but I liked the book and thought (as per standard for me) that the it was better than the movie. Less usually, I also thought the movie was OK.
I quite enjoy this era of Disney, perhaps because I am a child of the 1970s. This, The Cat From Outerspace, the Herbie movie and so on are a lot of fun when you are close to ten years old.