This is a modified transcription of an episode of Dyer’s Daily podcast. Between 2018 and 2023, the podcast series featured Jamie Dyer speaking for three minutes about a chosen subject, completely off the cuff. For a list of episodes on the official podcast page, see here.
This was part of the Disney100 series of Dyer’s Daily podcasts, where Jamie picked an element of Disney to discuss in their 100th anniversary year. This time, the millennial broadcaster and writer discussed the 2021 sequel Home Sweet Home Alone. This episode was originally released in 2022.
Please note: This transcript has been cleaned up to make it easier to read, but still maintains the same thoughts and ideas.
There are so many Christmas films associated with Disney that I could talk about, but instead, I want to discuss something they acquired and then remade. In 2019, Disney purchased 20th Century Fox, who made Home Alone back in 1990, and then proceeded to create a new version. They seemed to make a million sequels after the original. And then came the Disney-branded Home Sweet Home Alone last year. I thought Disney couldn’t do too badly with it, considering that some of the films 20th Century Fox made, like Mrs. Doubtfire, feel like they could have originated with Disney in the first place. So, maybe it could be decent.
Yeah, it wasn’t really, was it? It was a bit disappointing. The thing about the first movie is the bad guys are just bad. That’s it. There’s nothing else to distinguish them from good guys—they’re just bad. In this new one, they gave the bad guys a backstory, a reason to want to retrieve whatever was in the kid’s house. So when the kid is attacking them, it makes the kid look like a D.I.C.K., and not in a smart way. I think we’ve moved on a bit from how it was in 1990, but they gave those characters so much backstory that I ended up feeling sorry for them. That’s really disappointing, especially since the lady is Kimmy Schmidt. She deserves so much better, Aisling Bea deserves so much better. All those actors deserved better.
I’m in no rush to see it again a year later. It’s not going to become part of my family’s Christmas traditions. And now that Home Alone is officially part of the Disney Christmas pantheon, part of their canon, it’s going to be a few years before I watch it with my son.
It’s weird, isn’t it? They really shouldn’t remake or reboot these things. Where were they going after that? Were they going to make another one? Were they just going to keep making Home Alones with really relatable bad guys that you just feel sorry for? Hmm. Let me know.
