Follow Me, Boys! (1966) was the last feature film that Walt Disney himself had a hand in. The Norman Rockwell small town location, the Boy Scouts of America propaganda as well as the addiction and poverty shaming of Follow Me, Boys! make it the perfect manifestation of Walt Disney’s sense of morality. The wholesomeness of Follow Me, Boys! is little more than a veneer to disguise the frightening incongruities of the film.
Setting aside the issues of Fred MacMurray’s age and his diabolical schemes to win Vera Miles there’s the more frightening issue of Whitey’s (Kurt Russell) father Mr. White (Sean McClory). Mr. White is an alcoholic and therefore, within the moral complex of the film, a disgrace. All Mr. White does is humiliate his son in front of his fellow Scouts and their leader Lem (MacMurray). Mr. White dies off-screen and almost instantly MacMurray and Miles adopt the orphaned Russell.
Mr. White isn’t just an alcoholic, he’s an alcoholic because he is poor. Poverty and addiction are things that Whitey has to escape primarily by denying his father’s existence and, before he’s even close to dead, replacing his father with the “superior” MacMurray. When compared to Mr. White the Fred MacMurray character of Lem appears just as villainous. Lem is more subtle though; he manipulates, he exploits emotional weakness and he masks it all with the do-gooder rhetoric of the Boy Scouts.
Yet Follow Me, Boys! with its bombastic Sherman Brothers theme song and picturesque settings is eerily affective. It’s as if we American viewers have been conditioned to accept these fantasies of America’s past (the early 1900s in this case) as some kind of profundity. It’s an illusion propagated by artists like Norman Rockwell, Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg to, on some level, insist upon a self serving status quo that is hardly different in its machinations than Lem’s power plays with Whitey.
Follow Me, Boys! isn’t one of the Disney Corporation’s hot properties. It’s a forgotten film today that is probably best remembered as a footnote in the career of Kurt Russell. Disney hasn’t even released Follow Me, Boys! in its correct aspect ratio, instead opting to let the film flounder on DVD. Follow Me, Boys! may not be The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes (1969) or Bon Voyage! (1962), but at least it has MacMurray being thrown in military prison.
