5) Good Morning Vietnam
Good Morning Vietnam is many of the things Disney aspires to be: funny and musical with a vaguely exotic sense of adventure. Unfortunately for anyone hoping for a bit of U-rated fun, the film also happens to be about one of the biggest clusterfucks of 21st century foreign policy-making, albeit with a black comic edge, and Robin Williams doing his manic swear-y thing in the lead role.
Made by Touchstone (Disney) and released by Buena Vista (Disney), Good Morning Vietnam is one of the (numerous) great Vietnam War movies made in the 1980s. It features possibly Williams’ best turn ever and is about as feel-good as a film can get when the background is one of senseless bloodshed and terror.
4) Starship Troopers
You can see how on the surface this might seem like a good fit for Disney: Young high schoolers-turned-hotshot military recruits ship out to the planet Klendathu, in order to fight space bugs after the Earth is extraterrestrially attacked. There’s action, there’s adventure, there’s romance. Heck, it almost sounds like a modern YA movie.
No. Starship Troopers is actually a Paul Verhoeven movie, meaning plentiful gratuitous gore and nudity, as well as a satire of America circa 1997, with a genuinely serious underlying anti-war message that betrays the bloody sci-fi trappings. Plus, Neil Patrick Harris in Nazi-inspired uniform!
