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This movie’s so old the main character is a white boy who doesn’t take dicks up the ass
The Daily Mail wrote a novella-length article about this, so you know it’s a really big deal.
A 1997 Disney movie about a beloved basketball-playing dog has come under fire for a hidden gag that viewers are recognizing as Islamophobic 25 years later.
The discovery dates back to 2017, according to Mel Magazine, when former college roommates Lee Metzger and Josh Cranmer decided to revisit the film, which spawned a franchise of four sequels and nine spinoffs.
The story is part of the college friends’ new podcast, which celebrates the Air Bud franchise on the 25th anniversary of the original film.
Cranmer, now 29, and Metzger, now 31, said that they paused the original Air Bud – as they often would when dissecting movies – and noticed a newspaper clipping. The pair re-watched movies out of a love for finding Easter eggs, or hidden things in films that the average viewer might not pick up.
The newspaper clipping on the screen showed an obituary for the father of the movie’s main character, Josh Framm.
But their jaws dropped when they saw the clipping in the film, which appears at the eight-minute mark. The offending text reads: ‘His father, Luther Framm, was the daring pilot who during the Second World War flew in ham and bibles to Muslim prisoners in Berlin.’
Air Bud is a comedy sports film that tells the story of a real-life dog named Air Buddy, a golden retriever who shoots basketball hoops and plays Buddy in the movie. Buddy is taken in by 12-year-old Josh Framm, whose father Andrew died in a plane crash. The movie’s crux is that there are no rules that prevent a dog from playing on a school basketball team.
The newspaper clipping actually shows up again in the 1998 sequel Air Bud: Golden Retriever at the 16-minute mark of the film.
Cranmer and Metzger, film buffs and podcasters, have since used the moment of inspiration to start a podcast specifically on the Air Bud series of films.
The newspaper clipping reads: ‘NEW MEXICO — Another tragedy struck today, when test pilot Captain Andrew Framm crashed his experimental XW-NG jet. Captain Framm is best known for being the only man to break the sound barrier with a banana and a long sports sock. Framm was the youngest of eighteen in the now famous Flying Framm Family.
‘His father, Luther Framm, was the daring pilot who during the Second World War flew in ham and bibles to Muslim prisoners in Berlin. Luther then went on to start the first ever daredevil acrobatic team with stunts like Propeller Walking, Ignite the Framm and Wing Squash.’
While bringing Bibles to Muslims would be considered offensive, pork is forbidden by the religion. Cranmer and Metzger were stunned.
‘Air Bud is arguably one of the best basketball dog movies of all time, I loved it as a child,’ Metzger, 31, told Mel Magazine on Friday.
‘I didn’t know what to expect, but I could hear it in Josh’s voice, as he started reading it aloud, his volume and tone escalated line-by-line, like he was uncovering a hidden message, going, ‘Banana and a long sports sock? Flew in ham and bibles to Muslim prisoners in Berlin? What!?’
The duo took a look around the internet to see if anyone had ever revealed this Easter egg before, but found nothing.
‘It was Earth-shattering,’ Cranmer added. ‘It was the equivalent of finding an Easter egg in the Declaration of Independence, because to a lot of kids who grew up in the 1990s what is Air Bud if not their Declaration of Independence?’
There’s a history of some subversive moments, mainly sexual, in 1990s Disney films that have made their way around the internet. This moment had apparently never previously been found.
A view of Disney+ in 2022 shows that the offensive moment is still in the movie to this date, despite Disney’s many edits of older material.
The prop master and set dresser on the film, Ric Walkington and Troy Hansen, said that these sorts of on-air clippings are usually handled by the writers.
However, co-writer Aaron Mendelsohn believes the prop department came up with the gag.
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‘Now, thanks to internet and invasive technology,’ he’ll have to go back and ‘rewatch every film I ever did as a props guy and find what else ended up being seen when it probably shouldn’t have.’
The newspaper byline on the fake article is that of Raul Inglis, an actual person and assistant to the director on Air Bud.
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Inglis did have an anti-imperialist defense of the joke.
‘However,’ he continued, ‘that joke about the ham and bibles would have been an ironic blast at how the Western powers think they always know what’s right for the rest of the world and are completely insensitive to other cultures.’
Neither Disney nor producer Robert Vince responded to the magazine’s request for comment.
Because of the secretive racist joke, the film is being removed from Disney+. It has been picked up by Spotify.
Just joking.
I hate saying “just joking.” But both of those things sound like they could be true, so I need to say “just joking” so that people don’t accuse us of spreading fake news.
It’s hard to know the line. Sometimes we make jokes that seem so obvious that it doesn’t need to be noted as a joke, but there is always some autist like “that tweet is fake, actually – Donald Trump did not say that LeBron James is a gorilla nigger who should be shipped back to Apefrica.”
