Disney continues to go through their back catalog and release some of the live action films that they have made.  I grew up watching a lot of these movies on the Wonderful World of Disney (broken into two parts of course,) and I'm very happy to share these films with my children.  One of their latest releases in the 1976 comedy No Deposit No Return, featuring Darin McGavin (later of Night Stalker fame) and the hilarious Don Knotts.  This light comedy if great fare for the whole family.
 
Tracy and Jay Osborne (Kim Richards and Brad Savage) are expecting their mother to pick them up from boarding school for Easter Vacation.  Their mother (Barbara Feldon) is a magazine editor who is very busy, and has been detained in Hong Kong for a couple of weeks.  She sends her maid to take Tracy and Jay to the airport and put them on a plane to Los Angeles, where their grandfather, J. W. Osborne (David Niven) will watch them.  Not looking forward to spending a week with they grandfather, Tracy hatches a plan: if their mother can't come to them, they'll fly to her in Hong Kong.  All they have to do is evade their grandfather at the airport and come up with $1200 for airfare.

The first part is easy, but the second might be difficult.  When the kids get into the same cab as a pair of would be safe crackers ( Darin McGavin and Don Knotts) who are in debt to a local gangster (Vic Trayback) Tracy comes up with a plan.  She mails a ransom note to her grandfather saying that she and her brother have been kidnaped.  Her grandfather has trailed them from the airport though, and knows that Tracy wrote the note, so he ignores it.  The crooks meanwhile end up with two kids that are much more dangerous than robbing banks.  If the gangsters don't kill them, these kids certainly will.
 
This was an enjoyable film, even though it wasn't one of Disney's best.  The plot is very amusing, and gave the actors a lot of room to ham it up, with equal amounts of verbal humor and slapstick.  My children thought loved the physical scenes.  The part where Jay's pet skunk wanders out on the room and Don Knotts goes after him, and the police chase where the squad car keeps getting into accidents and losing body panels until it is nothing more than a shell, had them both rolling with laughter.  I preferred the verbal humor more, and especially liked the way the ransom amount would decrease every time another note was sent the poor crooks getting more and more desperate as time goes on.

The acting was pretty good overall.  Don Knotts, who made a career out of playing nervous jittery people does his usual excellent job.  He definitely got the most laughs in my house.  David Niven did a good job, but his part was rather small, and he didn't have a lot to do besides act like a rich man, something he is usually able to do with flair.  He doesn't put  too much flair in this role, but he does an adequate job, and is able to make his character seem very human and vulnerable with some small touches.  The children, Kim Richards and Brad Savage, are cute and precocious but only did an average job in their roles.   Luckily the film didn't require them to do much more than look like a pair of adorable kids who miss their mother.

While I enjoyed this movie a lot, it wasn't perfect.  Many scenes felt like filler, adding nothing to the plot.  The skunk-on-the-roof scene mentioned above is a good example.  It was funny, but there really wasn't any reason for it to be included in the movie.  The plot, as with most Disney plots, was very predicable and cliched.  But this is normal for live action Disney movies, and it really isn't a big point, since most of the fun in is the journey, not the destination.

Audio:

This DVD sports an English soundtrack as well as a French dub, both in two channel mono.  The soundtrack wasn't as vibrant as I was expecting, even for a mid 70's movie.  It sounded flat and not very dynamic.  The dialog was a little muddled in some areas and the music was not as crisp sounding as it should have been.  There were optional subtitles in English, Spanish and French.

Video:

The video quality was disappointing on several levels.  First of all, the movie is a pan and scan hack job.  Disney has been getting much better about preserving a films original aspect ratio, but they still release some movies in an edited format.  It is unfortunate that Disney didn't see fit to release this the way it was intended to be seen.

As for the picture quality, it was not as good as the other 70's films that Disney has released recently.  The image was a little faded and washed out.  There were several instances of dirt and scratches marring the film, but these were infrequent.  While this film is very watchable, this DVD doesn't look nearly as good as it should.

Extras:

This is a bare bones DVD.  The only extra is a trailer, and it isn't even the theatrical trailer.  It is really just a 30 second TV spot that played when the movie was aired on the Disney TV show.

Final Thoughts:

This was another solid Disney film.  Many of their live action movies are like this one, not outstanding, but a good amount of family friendly entertainment.  It is too bad that Disney didn't present this film with its proper ratio, and I wish they had looked a little harder for a better print.  These defects are significant, and though my family enjoyed the film, I can't recommend buying this DVD because of them.  It would still make a good rental for a family movie night.  Rent it.