Lately, I’ve noticed a shift in how I approach my work—maybe in response to the tidal wave of AI-generated content flooding our screens. I’m not anti-AI. In fact, I use it throughout my own production process and will keep experimenting with new tools as they arrive. AI helps me tell better stories, trim down production time, and create professional-looking images, videos, and music in ways that would have been impossible just a few years ago.
But there’s something missing—something I can’t quite put my finger on. That’s what’s been driving me back to older shows and films: The Monkees, The Munsters, Peanuts, old Speed Racer and Jonny Quest cartoons… and, most recently, the original 1976 film The Bad News Bears.
I hadn’t seen it in nearly 50 years. As a kid, I loved it. It was one of those movies I caught at the Winnetka Community House when they showed second-run films on weekends. This time around, I watched it with my family (my children are teenagers), curious how it would hold up—and what I might learn from it now.
To be clear: I’m not recommending this film for young kids. But what I found surprised me. Walter Matthau is pitch-perfect—not just in what he says, but in the silent beats where he’s simply taking things in. The kids aren’t just “being themselves”; the acting is at times a bit forced, but it works. It’s fine. And then there’s the scene near the beginning when the team meets for the first time: Buttermaker calls out names and asks what positions they want to play as two, three, four kids start talking at once. Suddenly it becomes like an Altman film—layered, overlapping dialogue that feels chaotic, hilarious, and utterly alive. Totally cracked me up.
That moment reminded me that in storytelling, maybe you don’t always need perfect clarity. Sometimes letting a scene get messy—letting characters talk over one another, letting the audience work a little to keep up—makes it feel more real. It’s something I try to sneak into my own work from time to time, because life with kids is messy and noisy and chaotic.
What really struck me about The Bad News Bears wasn’t just the Altman-style moments. It was the looseness of the whole story. The film refuses to tie up every loose end. In modern kids’ movies, every flaw turns into a hidden strength, every setup has a payoff, and the climax flips expectations in some neatly cathartic way. This movie doesn’t do that. Some weaknesses stay weaknesses. Some relationships don’t heal. The “bad guys” don’t all learn their lesson. Sometimes luck is more important than discipline. And yet, the team finds a way to get along (mostly), improve a little at baseball, and share one of those imperfect bonding experiences that real childhood is made of.
It feels more true to life. Messy. Imperfect. Maybe that’s what’s missing from so much of today’s kids’ media? Everything now is so slick, polished, and “just so.” Life isn’t. Maybe it’s okay to occasionally give kids a peek behind the curtain of life, a little hint that not everything is going to be magical and sparkly. Sometimes it’s going to suck, and that’s okay. You’ll figure it out.
One of my goals with my work is to preserve a little of that “beautiful mess” in kids’ storytelling—moments that aren’t perfectly polished, where characters talk over each other, make mistakes, and don’t always get the perfect ending. Those are the moments that feel most like real life to me.
Again—some of its language and situations are wildly inappropriate by today’s standards—but for me, The Bad News Bears is a valuable reminder, a way to reconnect with a kind of messy realism that seems harder to find now. Maybe not everything has to be precious and magical, you know?