The 2 seed vs. the 3 seed
Brink! is out of the running, but you can still vote for or against Halloweentown in the semifinals.
Halloweentown
Saw, The Exorcist, The Ring, Halloween, Friday The 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street. The Halloween-time requests varied from year to year, but my prepubescent responses were far from it, instead describable as rote, rehearsed and canned.
“I’m just not into horror movies,” I would say, voice cracking on cue.
After tactfully tiptoeing my way around horror flick after horror flick as my trick-or-treat bags dwindled from Reese’s Cups and Kit Kats to Raisinets and DOTS (surprisingly more disgusting than this DOTS), one shining DCOM was there to fill my autumn Fridays with bliss: Halloweentown.
The plot is relatively straightforward, as far as a multi-universed, mythology-soaked, fantasy children’s movie can be.
Three siblings — ambitious, borderline-obnoxious teenage sister, Marnie; the prototypical nerdy younger brother with glasses, Dylan; and innocent, starry-eyed youngest sister, Sophie — find themselves stuck at home on Halloween.
Attempts to draw any justification out of their mother, Gwen, as to why the three have been isolated prove fruitless, until Grandma Aggie enters — mysteriously, in a flying bus scene only seen by the viewer — with stories, candy and trinkets about the faraway land of Halloweentown.
After it becomes apparent that Gwen has sworn off magic because of troubles it caused in her past, the mother-daughter duo begins to spar. After eavesdropping on the conversation, Marnie learns that each member of the family, the Cromwells, is either a witch or warlock. She sneaks out of the house with her siblings and gallivants off to Halloweentown: a magical land of low-budget, but charming, CGI and latex masks.
From there, a plot about a growing darkness begins, which ultimately leads to Marnie’s witch training, her mother and grandmother being locked in some fourth-dimensional, temporal, magical time-freezy spell and the largest, most mind-bending reveal to that point in my tiny cinematic experience.
The friendly mayor of Halloweentown turns out to be the source of the darkness; I kid you not — the very same one who is only seen wearing black, and who seems to enter the frame whenever there’s a perfectly innocent line, such as, “What bad thing?”
After narrowly escaping the mayor and repairing a magical talisman with a hodgepodge of silly ingredients, Marnie and company free their frozen mother and grandmother. Together, the three generations of Cromwells destroy the mayor and save Halloweentown, living happily ever after. That is, until Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge, Halloweentown High and Return to Halloweentown.
Halloweentown did everything a good Disney Channel Original Movie was designed to do: It gave middle schoolers a reprieve from social pressure and a faraway place to go on Friday nights; it provided characters for children to empathize with, from ambitious to awkward to innocent; it taught cinematic symbolism with vibrant colors and universal plot devices, even if they seem brick-to-the-face obvious now.
Halloweentown made kids feel solidarity, and it taught them a thing or two about film to boot. That’s a classic DCOM.
Here is but a small list of the many Dylan-isms that can help inform your vote — because there’s never been a more well-established character in modern film than Dylan Cromwell.
Aggie: “It’s a magic place, where many different types of creatures live together in peace.”
Dylan: “Like Cleveland?”
Dylan: “I think it proves insanity is hereditary. I just hope boys are immune.”
Dylan: “He’s probably animatronic — Disney Land’s full of stuff like that.”
–Dan Appenfeller
Brink!
Disney Channel Original Movies represent everything that was right with television in the 1990s. They weren’t made simply to entertain; they were made to teach. Kids need to know the value of friendship, and they need to know right from wrong. And why learn that from your parents when you can learn it from poorly acted characters on a made-for-TV movie?
And when it comes to learning right from wrong, no DCOM teaches it better than Brink!. It is a transcendent movie. There were totally rad high school kids, super-sweet in-line Rollerblades and heart-pounding downhill races. I honestly don’t know what the Disney Channel is thinking about with its new original programming; if they’re looking for the perfect formula to create a movie or TV show, this is it.
If you haven’t seen it, stop reading this right now and go watch it. And if you have seen it, here’s a quick refresher. Brink! tells the story of Andy “Brink” Brinker and his merry band of roller-blading friends — Peter, Jordy and Gabriella. The four best friends that anyone could have call themselves Soul-Skaters. They don’t skate for money. That’s not chill, bro. They skate for fun.
But as is always the case, a set of ridiculously unfortunate circumstances set in motion a cavalcade of deception and difficult life decisions. After racing Val — the leader of the soulless roller-blading empire Team X-Bladz — on school grounds, Brink is suspended from school. Then, if things weren’t already bad enough, he learns that his family is in financial trouble (gasp!) and joins the sponsored Team X-Bladz for $200 a week.
For a while, Brink keeps it a secret. But when his friends find out, they get so mad at him. Like so, so mad. They call him a sell-out — because he sold out — so they agree to race against him and his new team. Val, as all of Disney’s villains would, sabotages the race, and the Soul-Skaters suffer a crushing defeat.
This is when Brink begins to learn the lesson the DCOM gods have been trying to teach him all along. He quits Team X-Bladz and begs his friends for forgiveness. They take him back, and the newly formed Team Pup ‘N Suds — the name of several of my championship-winning fantasy football teams — defeats Val and his heartless brand of heathens in the big competition. Everybody whoops and hollers in celebration, Val is fired after the race for cheating and Brink is offered captaincy of the X-Bladz.
He refuses, of course. Brink isn’t about to re-sell his soul to the devil. He’s a Soul-Skater for life now. He skates for fun, and only for fun. It’s a beautiful lesson. It taught Disney Channel viewers all over the country to never betray their friends, the meaning of right and wrong and how cool inline skating is.
That’s why Brink! should be remembered. After all, we don’t go to this university, take classes and do homework because we want to get a job and make money someday. We do it for fun. Because we’re Soul-Students.
Thanks for teaching us that, Brink!.
–Josh Vitale
