“Oh, no. The baboon is key!”

Drake’s rating: It’s 1978 and you’re not forming a punk band?

Drake’s review: George Smalley is having a pretty crappy senior year of high school. Desperate to make some sort of impression, he tries to join the football team. But, as he’s being played by Charles Martin Smith (American Graffiti), that plan goes south pretty quickly and he’s left to be just another face in the crowd. But then his buddy Corky (Clint Howard, The Wraith) comes up with a brilliant plan! Local band Rapid Fire is in need of a guitarist, and surely they’d accept a short, nerdy fellow like George into their fluffy-haired ranks, right?

Well, no. In fact, it’s pretty much the opposite, as lead singer Torbin Bequette opts to openly ridicule George instead, much to the delight of the front man’s giggling entourage.

Still, George is determined to put his own band together and swiftly does, with nary a tryout as the first four people to answer his ad coincidentally play the exact instruments needed to form a late ‘70s power pop quintet. Even if one of them is a *GASP* girl! Who’s all girly and stuff, but can still bang out a solid drum beat even though she wears makeup and has lady parts.

And so is born Cotton Candy, a band determined to take the fight to those Rapid Fire jerks at the Battle of the Bands and prove that they’ve got what it takes to make it in the world of rock & roll.

Which shouldn’t be that hard to do, honestly, as Rapid Fire pretty much only plays one song, Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff,” and they perform it so badly that one wonders how they can even get off the stage without being pelted by tomatoes.

Still, George knows that he has a fight on his hands and works hard to keep the band focused and practicing. He also falls for Brenda the drummer because, like I said before, she’s a girl, darn it, and what’s the sense of having a girl in the band if it doesn’t lead to awkward romance? But they all soldier on and get to the Battle of the Bands, playing original songs that George has written even as Rapid Fire trots out their torturous cover once again and of course Cotton Candy wins it all and ends the film taking in the adoration of the crowd.

Just kidding. Cotton Candy loses, Rapid Fire wins again and we’re only halfway through the movie.

Cotton Candy was an NBC Movie of the Week directed by Ron Howard the year after his debut behind the camera for Roger Corman’s Grand Theft Auto. Only 24 at the time, Howard was still experimenting with his directing style and makes some interesting choices here, the foremost of which is making the decision to not only have the big showdown between the bands come at the midway point of the film instead of the end, but to also have Cotton Candy lose. And this isn’t even a Bad News Bears-style loss, where it’s a close game and Tanner tells the other team to stick it and then they pop open the beer and celebrate anyway. No, the audience likes Cotton Candy but they love Rapid Fire, a shallow talent-free band that nevertheless pops the crowd with cheap pyro and shiny costumes.

And it might be that Howard was trying to say something here about style over substance, or maybe he was trying to subvert expectations, or maybe a production assistant just dropped the script and put the pages back in the wrong order. But any way you slice it, Cotton Candy just loses a bit of steam after that mid-movie thrashing, and it never quite recovers the energy it had leading up to the Battle of the Bands.

That doesn’t make it a bad movie, though. In fact, it’s a pretty perky little affair with a likable cast, including Ron’s dad Rance Howard as a school official and another American Graffiti alum, Manuel Padilla, Jr. as Julio the bass player. And the “scrappy underdogs” story is always a good one. But there’s a definite shift after Cotton Candy loses the contest, as if the movie is not quite sure where it’s going to go now. George and Brenda have the expected problems and the other characters, lacking stories of their own, just kind of remain in orbit until the band finally gets a chance to get back together at the end.

That loss of momentum doesn’t totally derail Cotton Candy, but it does throw the movie off-kilter. It wants us to invest our interest in the band at first, and then shifts gears and focuses on George and Brenda’s high school relationship drama, which is about as interesting as it sounds. Sure, George, Brenda should totally skip out on a free ride to MIT and play drums in Cotton Candy instead. Heck, you guys couldn’t even beat Rapid Fire at the Battle of the Bands!

Still, it’s hard to beat up on a little TV movie made by Richie Cunningham.* Like its namesake, Cotton Candy is a fairly harmless little confection that can be enjoyed for what it is while you watch it, and then forgotten about by the next day. Bigger things were certainly in Ron Howard’s future, but this wasn’t a bad sophomore effort behind the camera.

Just be prepared to never want to hear “I Shot the Sheriff” ever again.

*Or Opie Taylor, if you prefer.

Intermission!

• The band practices at Corky’s workplace after hours, which just so happens to be a garage. Eight years later a Clint Howard character named “Rughead” is working in a garage in that cult classic The Wraith. I’m not saying Corky and Rughead are the same character, but they’re totally the same character.
• Did you know that The Andy Griffith Show lost an Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series to The Monkees? That’s just weird, man.
• These are some really old high schoolers. Charles Martin Smith was 25 here and looks it, while rival Torbin Bequette was played by a 30-year-old Mark Wheeler!
• Speaking of Wheeler, he kept on acting into the ‘90s and appeared in three Ron Howard-directed flicks during that time. The moral of the story being, if you want to have a long career in Hollywood, make friends with Ron Howard.