Crapshoot Cinema: A Connecticut Yankee At King Arthur's Court (1989)
Do movies I haven’t seen in a few decades still count as Crapshoot Cinema? A Connecticut Yankee At King Arthur’s Court is streaming on the Roku Channel, and the last time I saw it was in 1989 when it was on NBC. Oh golly, this one’s a doozy. Twain purists might want to abandon all hope of seeing anything distinctly Twain. For the most part, anyway.
It all starts with eighties kid Karen Johnson falling off a horse and waking up in Camelot, where she of course meets Launcelot, Guinevere, and King Arthur. Oh, and Merlin and Mordred, who regard her Polaroid camera with scorn until she takes a few photos of them and threatens to rip them up. Unless they want to lose a leg, they’ll back off.
After Arthur dubs Karen “Sir Boss,” and she demotes Merlin to giving the weekly weather report, she gets busy. Arthur presents her with a blacksmith shop for she and best friend Clarence, a page who resembles a young Gordon Ramsey, and they set about cobbling together modcons like bicycles and hot air balloons. Karen also has Guinevere and her ladies-in-waiting working out, learning karate, and sewing shiny pillows that sport helpful reminders such as “Save the Elephants.”
They do not, however, invent soap or matches, which were the first things Twain’s original Boss, Hank, went for when he had his chance, but everyone looks pretty squeaky clean and well-lit anyway. Plus, as kids we’re taught not to play with matches so it’s probably the last thing Karen would think of.
Just as in the novel, things go south, but since Yankee is a family movie, nothing is ever as low as it could be or too depressing. Karen definitely won’t be stumbling into anyone’s living room muttering about transmutation of souls and bodies while the mysterious unnamed audience character reads her journal.
So. Overall, this Yankee is a pretty cute family movie. It’s very much ensconced in the eighties, with working out, Polaroid cameras, and saving the elephants, although no one mentions hairspray. Oh, and Karen wears Nike Force shoes. Who remembers those?
The movie was also pretty timely, as came out when Family Ties was winding down and The Cosby Show was still going strong, so it was an interesting crossover between these two very popular shows. I remember TV Guide playing up the fact that Michael Gross would play King Arthur, as if to say there was more to him than Steven Keaton.
Unfortunately, and this could merely be my jaded adult self talking, there could have been more to the movie as well, as the story is pretty dumbed-down and the characters throw away what little Twain humor there is. When Clarence first introduces himself to Karen as a page, she says he isn’t more than a paragraph, which is straight out of Twain’s novel. While it sounds funny coming from grown man (and presumably taller) Hank, it’s a bit ludicrous to hear Karen saying it as she stares up at Clarence. If anything, he should be saying it to her.
It also doesn’t lean in to Yankee’s cautionary aspects, namely why the present and the past shouldn’t cross over in any real sense, and essentially blaming Hank’s meddling with modern tech bringing about the downfall of Camelot. In this version, Camelot really hasn’t gotten started because Arthur doesn’t regard himself as a man of the people, which is pretty ludicrous given his reputation in Arthurian legend. This probably would have been a wee bit deep for a family movie, especially one from the 1980s, but we could have handled it. Anyone who looks at kids’ programming from back then knows that kids’ shows often had a little bit of darkness somewhere.
Either way, Michael Gross and Keisha Knight Pulliam playing opposite each other is a major nostalgia hit and a lot of fun. I can’t believe I got to see it again after almost forty years.
A Connecticut Yankee At King Arthur’s Court is currently streaming on Roku. Not rated.
My grade: B-
Principal Cast: Keisha Knight Pulliam, Jean Marsh, Rene Auberjonois, Emma Samms, Whip Hubley, Hugo Blick, Bryce Hamnet, Michael Gross, Berlinda Tolbert, Marissa Lindsay, William Nunn, William Brand, Cardew Robinson, Natasha Williams, Bernard McKenna, Camilla Dempster, Jeremy Todd Bohannon
Directed by Mel Damski.
Written by Mark Twain (novel) and Paul Zindel.
Yes, obviously, they had to make some edits to Twain's text. But in the process they missed a lot of the point of Twain's satire- that idealizing Arthurian mythology (which his contemporaries were fond of, it should be said) was a bad idea because it was an ideal and not a reality connected to the real setting in which it originated. Even Thomas Malory's "Le Morte D'Arthur", the leading Arthurian almanac for so many years, which Twain used as the starting point for his story, knew that.