pick a little.

I'm going to save you two hours and thirteen minutes. That's how long you might be inclined to invest in watching the 2003 made-for-TV version of The Music Man. I'm telling you to skip it. Just a warning - this is going to be a terribly uninformed review. My knowledge of The Music Man comes entirely from the 1962 movie. I've never read the script, and I've seen the play done once by a community theatre group. I did see the writer, Meredith Willson once on a rerun of an old panel game show and was surprised to learn that he was a man. Also, if you aren't pretty familiar with the first movie, you're not going to know what I'm talking about here. So go watch it real quick and then come back.

This movie was like an uninspired cover song. To be a successful cover song, you either have to do the same thing better or you have to do something different, but as good as the original interpretation. I watched this movie and kept thinking, Man, I wish I was watching the 1962 version. In fact, I probably would have pulled out my copy of the other version and watched it had I not packed it up last week.

This movie claims to be updated for the early 21st century. As far as I could tell, the update consisted of raising the prices of the band instruments, added a few black cast members, and that was it. It's possible that they meant the costumes, too. The movie is set in 1912 in small town Iowa. The costumes didn't look like what people wore in 1912 Iowa, but more like clothes that were inspired by 1912 Iowa and made today. And okay, that's fine, they're trying to appeal to a newer generation. But the script is laden with references to the time - Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang, Dan Patch, Sen-Sen. So keeping the script as-is while modernizing the costumes just makes the clothing seem anachronistic.

The casting was also a bit off. I confess that my idea of what the characters should be is based on seeing the 1962 movie, and you could argue that I was just thrown by seeing a different interpretation of a part. I missed Buddy Hackett. The dude who played Marcellus in this movie was completely forgettable. Hackett turned that character into a larger than life figure. You remembered who he was. But this guy? If he appeared in a scene after being gone for a few minutes, you'd have to remind yourself who he was. Also, Widow Paroo was in dire need of an accent coach.

I'll call the difference in Mayor Shinn a mistake in direction rather than in casting. In the first movie, Mayor Shinn is bumbling. He's a harmless idiot. He never is really a cause for worry to Harold Hill, though he constantly threatens to arrest him. This movie tries to make him an actual nemesis, always serious and foreboding. However, it doesn't really work, because the script has using malapropisms all the time. I suppose the director was attempting to add a little drama. It didn't work.

And now we come to the most glaring difference, the character of Professor Harold Hill. I like Matthew Broderick. I had a childhood crush on him after seeing The Faerie Tale Theatre version of Cinderella. He's so cutely unassuming and charming. But the main problem I had with this movie was that Matthew Broderick was not Robert Preston. He was not charming at all. In fact, he was sort of flat. He couldn't have sold a diamond-studded piano to Liberace, much less a boy's band to a bunch of stubborn Hawkeyes.

The movie was not bad. The dancing and singing were very professional. Winthrop was cute and had a proper lisp, rather than the spitting mess that little Ronnie Howard did in the first movie. One addition I did enjoy, and I can't tell you if it's an addition to the regular script or if it was just left out of the first movie. There's a reprise of "Pick a Little" where the ladies of the town claim to have read Chaucer, Rabelais, and Balzac, and that they totally loved it. There was a general subplot of Marian being accepted into the society as a result of Hill which I liked very much. Maybe that was the update for the early 21st century - housewives who read literature!

And there were a lot of little things that I decided to let slide. They were obviously trying hard to be racially diverse, which isn't very accurate to 1912. Also, the members of the school board looked to be about 22, while the punk kid, Tommy Djilas, looked about 30. Those things bugged me at the beginning of the movie, before I started yelling at Matthew Broderick to buck up and sell me something.

I'll leave you with a comparison.

Broderick (skip to 4:50 or thereabouts):


Preston:


Really, there is no comparison.