Here's a post-pandemic fantasy for you: It's the summer of 2022. Friday morning. Disney+ just debuted the season finale of BUDDY, its quasi-sequel-reboot of its long-dormant Air Bud franchise of the late '90s, which saw a golden retriever take up nearly every sport you could imagine—pummeling fussy 12-year-old boys in basketball, football, and baseball, using his big dog nose and chompers at max capacity.
You've been waiting for this day for quite a bit now. BUDDY is Disney+'s greatest hit this side of a Marvel beat-em-up. The show follows Buddy Jr., the forgotten pup of OG Air Bud's litter—who was lost far before the events of Disney's Air Buddies spinoffs, where the doggo fathered several English-speaking puppies. (We don't talk about Air Buddies.) It's the grand finale. Josh Framm Jr., son of the original series's boy wonder, Josh Framm, is on the court. The team's down by 20, because Norman Snively Jr., son of Norman Snively, the evil clown from the 1997 original, stole Buddy Jr. away in a mad plot to revive his father's long-dead man-and-dog circus.
Suddenly? The opening bars of "Sicko Mode" play. Buddy Jr. storms the court, still wearing clown makeup. Framm Jr. and Framm Sr. cry. You cry, too. Buddy Jr. scores 50 points, hits another poor kid in the nuts, and the good guys win.
Sounds like (pardon) a slam dunk, right? Well, this Friday, Disney will bring a different '90s cult favorite to TV with The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers. The show will bring back Emilio Estevez, who starred in the original film series, which saw three entries from 1992 to 1996. Now, if Game Changers sees even the slightest bit of success, you'd have to hope/think/pray that Disney would at least consider rebooting its other major family-friendly sports franchise: Air Bud. The films, which starred a dog who actually could shoot hoops in real life, admittedly saw diminishing returns after the 1997 original—going the direct-to-video route after 1998's Air Bud: Golden Receiver. But the legend of Buddy holds up today. Look no further than the Internet bugging out when the UMBC Retrievers made a Cinderella run in the 2018 NCAA men's basketball tournament, saying that Air Bud was the real hero of the story. The world, quite frankly, needs Air Bud back in it. So consider this an open letter to Disney. Call up the original cast. Find a basketball-playing dog. Bring back the Air Bud franchise.
As a television-enjoying society, we can probably all agree that—after over a year of intense collective misery—we need a good ol' dog story to follow. You know the one. The purely feel-good romp with an excitable doggo at its center, the kind we'd see every other month in the '90s. Beethoven. Balto. Homeward Bound! The world has been devoid of good canine-centered-or-adjacent content, probably because of its incessant temptation to go full CGI. To be clear, this Air Bud reboot must, at all costs, feature a living, breathing, animal, without even the slightest assist from an Adobe app. (Still haunted by CGI Scooby-Doo, who disrespected the name of the Great Dane.) What's the last dog movie you saw? The Call of the Wild?! Sheesh. Dogs aside, if the success of Disney+'s Safety taught us anything, it's that there's an audience for the Disney Sports Movie Formula of the '90s: Someone special starts playing sports, that person loses at sports, then, at long last, that person wins at sports. Easy.
As for Air Bud itself, the concept probably lends itself even better to TV than it ever did to film. Each season is a different sport, of course: Basketball, football, baseball, volleyball, and curling, maybe. Like we said before, Air Bud's forgotten spawn would somehow show up at the door of the Framm residence, lookin' all sad. Little Framm would nurse him back to health as Big Framm warns his son about the dangers of adopting a generational athlete who's also a dog. Then, the reboot could go the way of Cobra Kai and piecemeal the OG franchise's villains throughout a sequel series, making Norman Snively Sr. the Kreese of the story. A modern-day Air Bud take would have a blast with social media, too, having Framm Jr. set up a TikTok to show off Buddy's stunts, leading to million-dollar spon-con opportunities. Buddy Jr. would stare at old posters of his father, a la Creed, drooling at the thought of upholding the family legacy. Is this a show you would watch? This is a show you would watch.
Before we go: One more addition to our BUDDY fantasy. Since this is a Disney jam, there has to be an end-credits tease, right? We're back at château Framm. Little Framm is wiping the clown makeup off Buddy, both reveling in the dub and Buddy hitting that dumb kid in the nuts. Knock on the door. It's Tom Brady. He stares at the boy. And the dog. Takes a swig from a purple yam and dandelion shake.
"Wanna know which ring is my favorite?" he asks, inspecting the newest ring on his finger. "THE NEXT ONE."
Framm Jr. looks dumbfounded. Buddy sneezes.
"Come to Tampa Bay, Buddy."
Curtains. Your move, Disney.
