Recess: School's Out

So here’s what I’m left wondering. Was it ever common for kids to spend the entire summer away from home at camp? Because I don’t think I know anyone who went to one. I even called my mom—boy, the research I do for this site, huh?—and established that, when she went to camp in the 1950s, it was for a week at a time. Somehow, it’s a staple in fiction. Maybe it’s a rich people thing. Maybe it’s an East Coast thing. Online friends also suggest it’s a Jewish thing. But it’s not an experience anyone I knew ever had. When you didn’t see your friends all summer, it was probably because they were visiting their other parent.

It is the last day of the school year at Third Street School. T.J. Detweiler (Andrew Lawrence) manages one last prank, stealing the ice cream that Ms. Finster (April Winchell) has been hoarding all year and plans to steal back to the district and distributing it to the kids, faking the voice of Principal Prickly (Dabney Coleman) to say that the kids should eat it. This is all prelude to the real plot, which is a convoluted one in which Dr. Phillium Benedict (James Woods) is hiding a secret project inside the school to it doesn’t matter something something end summer vacation forever.

Let’s be clear. There are excellent reasons to end summer vacation. Some other countries don’t even have it in the sense we think of. Its tradition in American history is based on the need for children to work in the fields. Kids can go to school in winter because the fields don’t need the help. We don’t have that issue anymore. What’s more, kids’ academic abilities drop during the summer; there’s a reason the first month or so of every school year is spent in review. It’s what Twila Liggett was trying to combat by helping to create Reading Rainbow. It’s also true that families without a stay-at-home parent have real problems.

Recess, on the other hand, is absolutely essential. Kids need breaks during the day in order to keep going. They get restless, and they lose focus. Adults do, too, and it’s worse for kids. If kids don’t have fifteen or twenty minutes to run around like demons every few hours, they’re not going to learn anything. You can’t expect children to be miniature adults, much less automata. Even with planned removal of summer vacation, kids need time off.

The adults in this movie don’t listen to kids, and that’s a trope that’s always bothered me. It’s established that Principal Prickly and Ms. Finster both initially got into teaching because they wanted to help kids but have stopped thinking about that. I don’t know about the teachers—here’s where I admit I’ve never seen the show—but most of the administrators I’ve known over the years are still in it for the kids. Heck, I’d argue even the bad ones mostly are; they’re just bad at what they do for other reasons. T.J. and his friends are all smart kids, and a smart teacher, or administrator, would channel that intelligence in useful directions.

I actually have always believed that the most dangerous thing in the world is a class full of bored gifted kids, because they will find something to entertain themselves. I don’t know if T.J. is canonically gifted, but he fits that pattern. I suppose that’s what the adults in his life are worried about. He’s bored, so he has invented crazy possibly aliens taking over the school, and this wouldn’t have happened if he’d just been sent to camp like everyone else.

It’s also interesting to me that I don’t know what camp they’d send him to. Vince LaSalle (Rickey D’Shon Collins) goes to a baseball camp, because he is an athlete. Mikey Blumberg (Jason Davis) goes to a performing arts camp, because his singing voice is Robert Goulet’s final film role. Gretchen Gundler (Ashley Johnson) goes to space camp, because she’s a physics whiz and that means space to the industry. Ashley Spinelli (Pamela Adlon) goes to wrestling camp to channel her aggression—and Hustler Kid (Michael Shulman) because he’s going into management. And Gus Griswald (Courtland Mead) is sent to military camp by an unpleasant father’s need to make him into who he isn’t. Who is T.J.?

So okay, maybe I’d know more about it if I’d seen the show. This, I grant you. But if you can’t make your character developed in a sequel movie, you need to rewrite it. If you’re only making the movie for fans of the TV show, you’re missing an audience. And I don’t mean show us everything you need to understand him, because that’ll bore the original fans, but you need to show us something. What drives T.J. beyond hanging out with his friends?

I don’t know. I don’t really want to watch any more of this. The cast is weirdly packed—Charles Kimbrough, Tony Jay, Melissa Joan Hart, Clancy Brown, R. Lee Ermey, Peter MacNicol, Diedrich Bader—but none of them feel used well. The animation’s fine. The script is fine. There’s just not a lot to the movie overall, and I’m not particularly interested in seeing it again. Sorry if I’m stomping on anyone’s childhood.