Goldy, the Last of the Golden Bears Reviews

Despite the note of finality in the title this extremely low-budgeted family film spawned a litter of sequels. In 1910 California, nice-guy prospector Ned Rivers (Jeff Richards) stumbles across a tawny-furred golden bear, a species thought to be extinct in the territory. Rivers's ward Jesse (Jessica Black), a little girl disguised as a boy, wants to adopt Goldy, as the animal is called, but Rivers finds the notion unbearable, at least until Goldy is captured by Boss Cooperman (Dan Dalton), an evil circus owner, who wants to make a fortune exhibiting the critter. With the help of a family of circus acrobats, who also happen to be animal-rights sympathizers, Ned liberates Goldy and turns Cooperman over to the law. Jessie now understands why Goldy should be allowed to roam free and unmolested. To judge from the specimen on view here, a possible reason the golden bear population perished was fatal lack of charisma. Goldy's act largely consists of ambling along beside the good guys; it would be hard to get excited over this beast no matter what color its coat. At least Goldy convincingly portrays a bear. The human co-stars are so generally awful or anachronistic that the viewer never once believes the situations or the historical milieu. Dan Dalton's black-caped villainy would better suit an amateur children's-theater pageant of "Babes in Toyland." Rock-bottom production values get very little help from location shooting in the Sequoia National Forest. Yet somehow this all led to GOLDY 2: THE SAGA OF THE GOLDEN BEAR. GOLDY 3: THE MAGIC OF THE GOLDEN BEAR, came along 10 years later.