[Note: Every Friday on First Thoughts we host a discussion about some aspect of pop culture. Today’s theme is father in television and movies. Have a suggestion for a topic? Send them to me at jcarter@firstthings.com.]
Father’s Day was last Sunday, but it’s never too late to appreciate good ol’ dad. Here are several categories and candidates for best fathers in film and television:
Best Protector: Bryan Mills (Taken) – Chances are you won’t recognize the name even if you’ve seen the good-but-forgettable 2008 action flick Taken. So why does Mills make the list? Because when faced with every father’s worst nightmare (his his 17-year-old daughter is kidnapped in Paris and forced in the sexual slave trade), Mills uses all his skills and knowledge (he’s a former CIA agent) to find her and bring her home. While the action is pure Hollywood, the message is universal: We dads will do anything in our power to protect our children.
Honorable Mention: The Father (The Road)
Best Cartoon Dad: Marlin (Finding Nemo)
Honorable Mention: Bob Parr (The Incredibles)
Best Father Figure: Colonel Adama – A case could be made that Adama was a father figure for all the remaining survivors of the thirteen colonies. But it was to Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, the fiancé of his dead son, that he best exemplified the role of daddy substitute. Their relationship was one of the best father-daughter roles on television.
Honorable Mention: Alfredo (Cinema Paradiso)
Best Liberal Dad: Steven Keaton, Family Ties
Best Conservative Dad: Hank Hill (King of the Hill)
Best Tough Father: Jacob McCandles (Big Jake) – When his estranged adult son James calls Big Jake “Daddy,” the Duke knocks his son on his can and announces: “You can call Dad, you can call me Father, you can call me Jacob and you can call me Jake. You can call me a dirty old [SOB], but if you EVER call me Daddy again, I’ll finish this fight.” Lesson learned.
Honorable Mention: Red Forman That ’70s Show
Best Father to an Alien: Jonathan Kent (Smallville) – Most people wouldn’t know what to do if an alien landed in their field. But Jonathan Kent not only took in the strange child but raised him to be both a good Kansas Methodist and the World’s Greatest Superhero.
Honorable Mention: Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm (Hellboy)
Best Dead Dad: Mufasa (The Lion King) – Not since the Ghost of Hamlet’s father has a dead dad had such a direct impact on a young prince.
Honorable Mention: Frank Sullivan (Frequency)
Best Widower Father: Andy Taylor (The Andy Griffith Show)
Honorable Mention: Ben Cartwright (Bonanza)
Best Stepfather: Mike Brady (The Brady Bunch)
Honorable Mention: Frank Beardsley (Yours, Mine and Ours)
Best Listener: Ward Cleaver (Leave it to Beaver) – Has there ever been a dad who listened to their children as much as Ward?
Honorable Mention: Charles Ingalls (Little House on the Prairie)
Overall Best Movie Dad: Atticus Finch (To Kill a Mockingbird): I thought the book was overrated and the movie a bit bland. But Atticus sets the gold standard for dads in film.
Overall Best TV Dad: Cliff Huxtable (The Cosby Show) – Possibly the only thing better than having Bill Cosby for a father would be to have Cliff Huxtable as your dad.
Add your own category and nominees in the comments section.
June 25th, 2010 | 9:32 am
Toughest dad? You leave off the Great Santini himself, Col. Bull Meechum?
June 25th, 2010 | 9:44 am
Now how does Mr. Incredible not make this list? Robert Parr (aka Mr. Incredible) is one of the best portrayals of genuine fatherhood that I have ever seen.
Surly he can get a nod, yes?
June 25th, 2010 | 9:45 am
I missed the Honorable Mention…mea culpa.
June 25th, 2010 | 10:22 am
Best Complicated Dad: George Bailey, it’s a wonderful life.
This movie has a reputation for being extremely sentimental and Christmasy, but watch it with fresh eyes.
This is a picture of a dad who will do anything for the people he loves, even if he doesn’t always know what it is that they need most of all. If theres a better portrait of the angst and dissapointments of the American suburban man I haven’t seen it.
June 25th, 2010 | 10:28 am
Best Movie Dad: Ray Stoller in Breaking Away, some quotes c/o IMDB,
Dave(the son): You mean we might be a father?
Dad: No. I might be a father. And your mom might be a mother. And YOU might be a brother. See, that way I keep it all in the family.
Moocher: Wow! Hey, I didn’t think people your age…
Dad: The next word may be your last, kid!
The dad is a used car dealer who, in a really funny sequence, suffers a heart attack as the result of his son offering a refund to a complaining customer. Here’s the scene at youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGMoalQ9A18&feature=related
The local kids are called cutters by the students at IU because their fathers were the stonecutters for the construction of the university. In my favorite scene the son tells his dad we’re just cutters. The dad says you’re not a cutter, I’m a cutter and then explains how proud they were to be building the beautiful university and then says: I was proud of my work. And the buildings went up. When they were finished the damnedest thing happened. It was like the buildings were too good for us. Nobody told us that. It just felt uncomfortable, that’s all.
June 25th, 2010 | 11:13 am
Gomez Addams. Come on — who wouldn’t want a dad who made room in the family abode for both Grandmama and Uncle Fester and who so wisely invested his family fortune in Amalgamated Lint?
June 25th, 2010 | 12:14 pm
“Taken” was not a great movie, but to me, it’s anything but “forgettable.” The intensity, implacability, the unrelenting character of Mills’ quest in Neeson’s performance was engrossing.
When I was kid, I liked Carl Betz as Dr. Stone in “The Donna Reed Show” much more than Ward Cleaver, or Ozzie Nelson in the misnamed “The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet Show” (though I thought SHE was pretty cool as a mom).
And I think I under-appreciated William Bendix as Chester Riley in the second “The Life of Riley” series.
“Taken” reminded me of vaguely similar movie, “Target” 1985, directed by Arthur Penn. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090130/ I really liked Gene Hackman’s character — an ex-CIA undercover op running a lumber business, whose son thinks he’s boring, cautious, conventional etc. And who is, sort of, until his wife (the boy’s mother) disappears on a trip to Europe.
There’s also Noah Beery Jr.’s “Rocky” Rockford, the father of James Garner’s private detective character in “The Rockford Files.” I’m not sure why, exactly: it has his ordinariness, his orneriness, the fact that he was himself with his son, and obviously loved his son.
June 25th, 2010 | 12:32 pm
“Bigfish” (Albert Finney) That is all.
June 25th, 2010 | 1:00 pm
I second George Bailey for Most Complicated. Good man; good dad. Despite the movie’s saccharine reputation, there are moments that I find to be poignantly realistic…
“You call this a happy family? Why do we have to have all these kids? “
June 25th, 2010 | 3:54 pm
My vote for best Father figure goes to Leroy Jethro Gibbs of NCIS.
June 25th, 2010 | 6:21 pm
Best Dad is Jed Clampett from “The Beverly Hillbillies”. The man is Lincolnesque in his honesty and integrity. There is much more to this show than meets the eye.
June 25th, 2010 | 8:19 pm
Great call in Breaking Away. Forgot how much I love that movie.
June 25th, 2010 | 9:54 pm
Best Father in Film nomination: Guido (Roberto Benigni) in Life Is Beautiful. Guido is loving, funny, brave, kind and makes the ultimate sacrifice for his son. He’s hard to beat.
June 26th, 2010 | 11:09 am
What, no love for Russell Crowe’s Jim Braddock from “Cinderella Man”? Best Blue-Collar Father?
June 26th, 2010 | 3:24 pm
Best fictional dad: Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mocking Bird. I was once asked if I could be any fictional character, who would it be, and I chose Atticus.
Best comic strip dad, the father in ,i>Lio: Lio is a monster crazed boy in a comic strip in which there is no dialogue. We don’t know his father’s name. We know he is a widower. And he clearly loves his son and fully supports him in all his eccentricity. In other words, Lio’s dad let’s Lio be Lio.
June 27th, 2010 | 9:09 am
Best portrayal of the father of daughters: Twilight Samurai. An incredibly moving portrait of a father who abandons worldly ambition to be a father to his motherless girls. All the more remarkable for being set in late Edo-period Japan. A must see.
July 16th, 2010 | 12:40 pm
Adama was not a Colonel, he was first a commander and by the end of the series an Admiral. The first officer of the Galactica was a colonel.
Good list anyway.
July 16th, 2010 | 4:20 pm
Some more history about movies and actors:
Preceding film by thousands of years, plays and dances had elements common to film: scripts, sets, costumes, production, direction, actors, audiences, storyboards, and scores. Much terminology later used in film theory and criticism applied, such as mise en
scene (roughly, the entire visual picture at any one time). Moving visual and aural images were not recorded for replaying as in film.
Anthemius of Tralles used an early type of camera obscura in the 6th century] The camera obscura was further described by Alhazen in his Book of Optics (1021),]]] and later near the year 1600, it was perfected by Giambattista della Porta. Light is inverted through a small hole or lens from outside, and projected onto a surface or screen, creating a moving image, but it is not preserved in a recording.
In the 1860s, mechanisms for producing two-dimensional drawings in motion were demonstrated with devices such as the zoetrope, mutoscope and praxinoscope. These machines were outgrowths of simple optical devices (such as magic lanterns) and would display sequences of still pictures at sufficient speed for the images on the pictures to appear to be moving, a phenomenon called persistence of vision. Naturally the images needed to be carefully designed to achieve the desired effect, and the underlying principle became the basis for the development of film animation.
With the development of celluloid film for still photography, it became possible to directly capture objects in motion in real time. An 1878 experiment by Eadweard Muybridge in the United States using 24 cameras produced a series of stereoscopic images of a galloping horse, arguably the first “motion picture,” though it was not called by this name. This technology required a person to look into a viewing machine to see the pictures which were separate paper prints attached to a drum turned by a handcrank. The pictures were shown at a variable speed of about 5 to 10 pictures per second,
depending on how rapidly the crank was turned. Commercial versions of these machines were coin operated.
Historian man
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