Since it’s the January movie doldrums, I decided to have a look at Disney before the wokeness descended.
I'd remembered “Krippendorf’s Tribe” (1998) as being rather harmless fun for kids–a surprisingly enjoyable piece of old-school Disney silliness with a preposterous plot and fun performances. Thinking back, it also occurred to me that it contains, for comedic purposes, all kinds of things (like blackface) that would walk all over many different groups of people’s feelings in 2024.
I checked Rotten Tomatoes, and it’s got a critic score of 18 percent—no surprise there—but audiences also seem to hate it with 24 percent. What did I miss in ‘98? I’ve done this before; I thought something was wonderful 20 years ago only to discover that I can’t stand it now.
Krippendorf’s Tribe
James Krippendorf (Richard Dreyfuss) is an anthropology professor with two young sons and a teenage daughter. A few year before, they’d all traveled to New Guinea in search of a lost tribe but returned empty-handed.
They’re also now bordering on dysfunctional since his wife died there. His daughter (Natasha Lyonne) treats dad with sarcastic disdain, the older son (Gregory Smith) is acting out in disturbing ways, and the youngest son (Carl Michael Lindner) appears to have gone completely mute.
Prof. Krippendorf, having descended into despondence and wandering aimlessly around the house, is roused out of his slothful state by Veronica, an enthusiastic young colleague he’s not met yet (a very fun Jenna Elfman). Veronica pounds on his door with a reminder that he’s supposed to give a lecture, detailing his New Guinea findings that very night.
Well! He’d very much like to avoid all that. Why? Because he accepted the grant money but instead of doing research he used it to pay bills. When his department head informs him that any colleagues caught misappropriating grant funds will do jail time, Krippendorf suddenly feels the weight of the world upon his schlubby shoulders.
Sweating bullets (but thoroughly devoid of shame), Prof. Krippendorf, at the podium, shuffles papers, fumbles about, and then wings it (which is a particular type of acting business that’s very much in Richard Dreyfuss’s wheelhouse of hilarity). He deftly pulls a lecture about that lost New Guinea tribe out of thin air in such a manner that nobody—except his kids and his rival colleague—can see that emperor Krippendorf is not wearing any clothes.
Getting a huge laugh, Krippendorf loudly invites his highly suspicious, rival colleague, Prof. Ruth Allen (Lily Tomlin) to feel free to take aforementioned Neolithic artifact home for the weekend (accompanied by derisive snickering—she’s not well-liked).
The upshot is that Prof. Krippendorf eventually vaults to prominence as an anthropological superstar, to the great chagrin and jealousy of Prof. Allen.
Could Have Been a Contender
Jenna Elfman physically towers over Dreyfuss, which is funny, since a romance starts up between them, and her character eventually becomes an accomplice in the deception, but the movie can’t quite nail the requisite zaniness that a top-shelf screwball comedy requires.
The Sacred Shelmikedmu Ritual of Circumcision
First up, Krippendorf’s Backyard Tribe pulls a fake circumcision ritual out of the hat. The professor claims that his 4-year-old’s foreskin will now be removed by the elder brother, swinging a stone tomahawk. This is a bonding experience—sort of like a trust-fall! The boy must not flinch. The level of whacking precision that’s called for! It’s all very, er, gripping.The Sacred Shelmikedmu Ritual of the Menses
The deception deepens in scope, widens in notoriety, and Krippendorf’s kids start internalizing daddy’s deception: Middle son Mike makes a rather dysfunctionally clueless show-and-tell presentation to his school. He claims that his dad’s lost tribe performs a ritual whereby they anoint a newly menstruating girl, who is locked in a thatched hut—with, um, porcine, er, urine.
He’s built the hut onstage, and locked one of his pre-teen classmates (a young Mila Kunis) inside; she’s eager to participate. Okay, this part is a little gross. But the fact that the outraged parents try to drag their daughter offstage, but she refuses because she believes in the ritual and “wants to be purified” first, is a little bit funny. Especially because Mila Kunis is funny.
The Sacred Shelmikedmu Ritual of the Sex-tape
Next up, Krippendorf is under pressure due to the imminent foreclosure of his house. What to do? He agrees to sell fake sex footage of his fake tribe to the Discovery Channel. He doesn’t have any sex footage, of course. So what does he do? He gets Veronica drunk, dresses her in native garb, and films them doing sexual things—without her knowledge—and airs the footage on national TV.It’s inconceivable, post-MeToo, that Veronica is only mildly perturbed at Krippendorf’s adorable shenanigans (her tall, ravishing self has a big crush on the short, fuzzy homunculus of a professor, after all). No ramifications!
And later, she helps him continue the Shelmikedmu deception when he impersonates a tribal chief at a gala dinner. And later, in full tribal regalia, displays a tribal activity, using a male faculty member’s leg, that looks very much like what un-neutered male dogs tend to do to anything that moves.
The Shelmikedmu Happy Ending
Through a series of contrivances, the university faculty (due to all the excellent publicity) decides to embrace Krippendorf. They write off all his faked footage as a prolonged practical joke.Does it do anything for the uplifting of society? Does it do anything good for kids? Does humor automatically leaven low-morality content? Is Krippendorf even worth talking about? Well, yeah, because this was an examination of whether wokeness was present in Disney content in ‘98.
And the answer is: you couldn’t make this movie today, so it was definitely pre-woke. However, kids gleefully participating in dad’s big lie, as a message, is a little bit bad for kids.
The main problem with “Krippendorf” is that so much of this is sexual in nature, which is not old Disney, and not for kids. Nothing wrong with ethnographical research—cooking, passing on knowledge, wisdom of elders, the concept of the sacred, nature’s importance—all that good stuff. But here, sex, lies, and videotape are the focus, and that’s because the cultural pressure on kids by late ‘90s was that they were supposed to sophisticated rather than innocent. Which would therefore sell tickets. And so in that sense Disney was already woke before the great wokeness.
One thing’s highly likely—ol’ Walt Disney was spinning in his grave when “Krippendorf’s Tribe” hit the theaters.
