Bad News Bears 20 pages

Bad News Bears Wiki — Index

A wiki on Michael Ritchie's The Bad News Bears (1976), the original Walter Matthau / Tatum O'Neal version. The film is a sports comedy that refuses the championship arc its genre would later demand: an alcoholic ex-minor-league pitcher is paid to coach an expansion Little League team of misfits in the San Fernando Valley, drifts toward the win-at-all-costs ethos of the league he was supposed to embarrass, and pulls his ringer off the field one play before the title is decided. The team that exists because the league was sued into accepting them refuses, in the end, to be the inclusion-narrative the league wanted.

"The Bad News Bears is the only American picture I've seen this year — and one of the few I have ever seen — that fully entertains the possibility that, although the United States may have got off the ground because of the Puritan work ethic, it is now finished off by it." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (1976)

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Film & Story

Cast & Performances

Production & Reception

Analysis & Themes

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