I must have been eight years old with nothing else to do one Saturday in 1974 when this screened at the local cinema. I went along knowing nothing about it but assumed it would involve a dad who is secretly a superhero. I can't remember at what point I resigned myself to Dad never getting into costume but I spent most of the film rather confused and alienated by what turned out to be a rather gentle generation-gap comedy about a father trying to manipulate his daughter's love life.
45 years later, having hardly thought about it in the meantime, I thought I'd see how it looks from this distance.
Well, it's not great. It's a mildly interesting glimpse at 70s culture seen through a Disney lens. For the first 20 minutes of rather forced humour I wondered if I should have bothered but I warmed to it a little as it went on. Probably the only reason it stuck in my mind was a mildly scary confrontation between the dad and an unhinged hippie artist called Klutch on his bizzarely decked-out houseboat/studio.
It's hard to guess who Disney was aiming at with this. Young kids would have been bored and confused, as I was. Adults would find it juvenile, and teenagers would probably rather just find it a bit lame.
The best you can say is that it's not that bad. You might relate to it if you have a teenage daughter, or if they will sit still long enough you could watch it with your kids (or grandkids) and tell them about the bad old days before Star Wars when, if there wasn't a Doug McClure film out that week, something like this was quite often the best a kid could hope for from a trip to the cinema.
Review of Superdad
