Yesterday, Time magazine put up a pretty wonderful oral history of the Mighty Ducks trilogy (or two movies, if you also didn’t care much for the third one), and as it always happens, talk of a new movie came up. I always thought the hypothetical fourth film would imagine Josh Jackson’s Charlie Conway as a coach of his own Mighty Ducks team, perhaps after a short stint in pro hockey. He could even be helped out by Philly-native Goldberg, who has retired after being booed out of the Flyers’ net. It could work, but like so many late-era sequels and remakes, your audience is not going to be the same. It’d be nice for the kids who grew up with the movies who have kids now, but just like the confused adults who are excited for Girl Meets World, those expecting to enjoy the movie through the eyes of an adult would be disappointed because it’s made for kids. Nevertheless, it could still happen. Jackson said “a fourth film should happen,” and producer Jorder Kerner said:

“There have been a number of times that we have discussed with the studio the idea of either bringing it back and bringing it back possibly with one or two of the guys who are now in their thirties as the coaches, and having a few more of them be their friends in their lives and having the kids come back. And I’ve been pitched a story two or three times. It hasn’t been the right story yet, but the idea of doing that is something Steve and I have talked about and actually Disney and I have talked about. So I’m not going to fuel the rumor mill that it’s going to happen, but I’m saying to you that the studio said to us, ‘We’d be interested if you come to us with the right story.'”

By the way, saying “I’m not going to fuel the rumor mill” in a major publication is basically the same thing as yelling “START THE RUMOR MILL.” Kerner also mentions another idea he had, which sounds more adult and serious and terrible and SAD:

I wanted to license this dark adult play, That Championship Season. It was going to be the death of Gordon Bombay as an older man, and Marty was going to play him. And Goldberg would be played by like Jim Belushi. You know, we were literally going to pair up everybody with a present-day actor, but it was going to be not unlike Chariots of Fire, the sort of look back at a moment in time when their coach came back to them and did something that changed their lives forever. So you cut from the present of the kids and they would have been all of 18 or 19, so they would have become the high school seniors. And we probably would have played the third movie that I wanted to make, which would have been that return to the Goodwill Games and losing to Iceland. But it would be set against this thing going on in a bar or restaurant where all the present-day guys grown up talking about what this coach meant to them. And we’d see that played out against them as 18-year-olds on the ice and Emilio playing in that and his father playing in a series of scenes where he was dying and they had to say their goodbyes. So I was looking for a really literate and emotional way for all of them to come back together again as men and to say goodbye to the man who meant so much to them. But it wasn’t meant to be.”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just imagined Gordon Bombay on his death bed and the feeling of a crushed and broken childhood and Jim Fucking Belushi and I think I’m going to be sick.

via Extra Mustard