Freaky Friday (1976)

After watching Freaky last fall, I was trying to think of a good body-swapping movie with which to combine it. I finally decided to use all of them!

Let’s start with the grandaddy of them all. Or the grandmommy, since it’s about women. Then again, it doesn’t deal with a grandparent at all; only 18 Again does. Okay I’ll stop with the dad jokes. Wait, I’m not a dad…

Disney’s dark ages for animation (after Sleeping Beauty but before The Little Mermaid) were also its golden era for live-action, with movies like Old Yeller, The Parent Trap, The Love Bug, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Superdad.

Actually, scratch the last one.

Add this one though!

The plot is very simple and lighthearted; I would have thought it was a made-for-Disney-Channel movie but for the fact that the Disney Channel (or cable at all really) didn’t exist yet. A mom (Barbara Harris) and her middle-school-aged daughter (Jodie Foster) get into a lot of arguments, as moms and adolescent daughters are wont to do, and simultaneously say they wish the other one could know how she feels for a day.

It works, they switch bodies, and all sorts of comedic hijinks ensue. When they eventually switch back, more hijinks ensue – a lot, lot more!

I wouldn’t say the characters experience any major growth, other than learning to tell each other, “Sorry, I was dumb thinking you had it easier.” Their journey is fun though.

This is unique among Freaky Friday versions in that the mom is not a widow, a divorcee, or even a career woman. She’s a married housewife, and both she (and her daughter while bodies are swapped) get annoyed at how the husband doesn’t help around the house. He’s not depicted as a bad guy, just a typical man of the house who shows his kids and wife affection but thinks his only responsibilities are at the office. We talked about what a pivotal time the 70s were for women in America, and here screenwriter Mary Rodgers (adapting her own novel) got to vent on behalf of her sex.

It’s a small part of the very lighthearted family comedy though, and future versions of the film just took the dad out of the picture. While there are serious scenes in the last two versions about the dad being deceased and the daughter’s unhappiness with her mom’s new fiancé, that’s stuff that can be resolved within the movie, unlike the greater societal issues of men not being expected to pull equal weight at home.

Something else that dates the movie is the mom (in her daughter’s body) telling an obnoxious classmate of the daughter’s that he needs a good old-fashioned spanking. That was funny, but you wouldn’t see the joke nowadays. Although we live in a country where 19 of the 50 states are conservative enough to allow PUBLIC SCHOOLS to spank children, the entertainment industry is based out of liberal CA and hasn’t been condoning spanking since the 1980s.

On that note, there was a missed opportunity though. All four Freaky Friday adaptations featured the daughter, in her mom’s body, learning how much her little brother liked her and thus wanting to be nicer to him. Yet in none of them did the daughter in her mom’s body initially abuse the position of power by threatening to spank her kid brother. That would have made for a great joke which obliquely exposed the hypocrisy of parents who spank children.

Moving on, another fun fact: this was the biggest role in the career of Marc McClure, who played Boris, the neighbor kid on whom Foster’s character has a crush. Boris has such a big role in the story (more than that of any character outside the family) that I’m surprised McClure’s billing was so low. He was just an unknown teenager though. While he certainly didn’t go on to become a household name, he did gain notoriety playing Jimmy Olsen in the Christopher Reeve Superman movies (not to mention being the only actor from those movies to also appear in the movie Supergirl) and playing Marty McFly’s older brother Dave in the Back to the Future movies.

Plus he got to meet me at San Diego Comic-Con in 2005!