What’s Aged the Worst?
Charlie Sheen’s later baggage is the named vote, with Jake Taylor’s stalking and Wesley Snipes’s running called honorable runners-up, before the hosts qualify the result as a nine-way tie for first. The almost entirely white setting, later Bob Uecker imitators, Snipes’s throwing and sequel distance, the Lynn-centered freeze-frame, the ‘off the reservation’ phrase, and Pedro Cerrano’s stereotyped characterization are also among the criticized elements.
In the discussion (11)
Approx. transcript time · 00:43:11Read transcript
- Charlie Sheen’s off-screen history changes how his performance and Wild Thing persona play now.
- The team and stadium crowd are overwhelmingly white apart from Willie Mays Hayes and Serrano.
- The future sports-movie imitators of Bob Euker never reproduce this unique success.
- The movie uses conspicuous slow motion and editing to sell Willie Mays Hayes as exceptionally fast.
- The writer-director says Wesley Snipes was such an unskilled baseball thrower that the movie omitted scenes of him throwing.
- Wesley Snipes’s later distance from the movie and refusal to return for the sequel complicate the affection for Hayes.
- Jake Taylor’s pursuit of Lynn repeatedly ignores her boundaries and reads as stalking.
- The final freeze-frame centers Lynn in the pennant celebration even though the team barely knows her.
- Serrano's shifting Haitian or Dominican identity, voodoo practice, tribal music, and speech pattern are criticized as a racial stereotype.
- The home-run phrase 'off the reservation' is separately criticized as poorly aged.
- The final call names Charlie Sheen, gives honorable-runner-up mentions to Jake’s stalking and Snipes’s running, then qualifies everything as a nine-way tie for first.