Dondi

I have looked for this movie for years. Seeing it as a youth was a special experience. I have never seen it in video stores. It is a warm and tender movie with some laughs about a war orphan and an army unit. I strongly recommend the movie to anyone with kids.

The summary line is, of course, intended to parody David Kory's very strange use of language in this film, but I can't shake myself of the idea that the pinhead who first proposed this as a project spoke of it in like glowing words.

The comic strip was okay for what it was. But trying to make a movie out of it? Watching this is a stomach-turner to be sure. The whole syrupy lovableness bit is nauseating, and I've heard stories of kids who watched this when it first came out having squirmed with embarrassment at it, which is pretty painful when you consider how undemanding kids usually are when it comes to kid-friendly movies. Even worse are the stale, unfunny jokes.

A sequel was planned, but thankfully it went nowhere. David Kory couldn't act, but even worse is the fact that his director couldn't, evidently, do his own job either.

Undoubtedly one of the worst little films ever made. The well-known "shlock" movies have no pretensions, don't take themselves too seriously and at least give the viewer a few laughs. "Dondi" is a true BOMB with no redeeming features which, when originally released, probably went long way to undermine US/Korean relations. As Leonard Maltin suggests, "Watch this film and you will understand why David Janssen became a fugitive!"

The audio on this film was terrible and/or the producers simply just picked the wrong child actor in the seven (7) year old David Kory to play Dondi. We the audience are expected to have sympathy for the war orphan seven (7) year old Dondi as the sailors led by David Janssen are suckers for his sad face and really poor language but sadly, the little Dondi just irritated me every time he opened his mouth and mumbled something incoherent.

Dondi stows away on the ship that is taking the sailors back to the USA and what is supposed to be a comedy of errors as little Dondi wanders the streets of New York city alone I for one failed to see nay entertainment value in this farce.

I gave it a rather higher 4 out of 10 IMDB rating simply for the fact the female leads of Susan Kelly, Joan Staley and Patti Page were easy on the eyes and were the only thing that helped me get through the entire film only to see a disappointing and commonly written happy ending.

I was about about 9 years old when the movie Dondi came to the Fernrock Theater in North Philly, the neighborhood I grew up in. I had been an avid reader of the comic strip (published in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer) since it was first introduced and I suppose because of my age at the time, I related to the title character. All I remember today is that I loved it as a kid and cried like a baby at all the sappy parts.

I am sure if I were to revisit this movie today as a jaded 50-something year old guy, I too might rain harsh words about this movie which has accumulated a whopping 3.3 stars by the reviewers. But I choose to rate it based on the way it made me feel when I was nine, and too naive to know old folks in the year 2004 would consider it a piece of crap. Today our kids grow up much too fast. A movie like Dondi might be just what the doctor ordered for your kids as opposed to say - a prescription for Ritalin.

Dondi gets a 7.5 from me.