Where Have All The Great Sports Movies For Kids Gone?

Family movie night in our house looks a whole lot like it looked for my husband and me when we were our daughters' ages. A bowl of popcorn, the sofa bed pulled out, and a movie that premiered somewhere between 1990 and 1999. And because of that specific chunk of time, it's almost always a sports movie.

From 1992 through the early aughts, this specific genre of sports movies ruled entertainment for kids. And I don't mean box office smashes — although The Sandlot writer and director David Mickey Evans tells me over the phone that his movie made between $40 and $45 million during its theatrical release. (He says he doesn't think he spent more than $8 million making it). Regardless, these movies were huge for the VHS era. The Blockbuster era. The "Hey, there's a rain delay in this baseball game, let's see what movie TBS is playing instead" era.

And they were huge for us.

Everyone I know has a favorite. If you ask any millennial about the "sports movies of the '90s," they know exactly what you mean: Angels in the Outfield, The Mighty Ducks, The Big Green, Space Jam, Little Giants, The Sandlot. Grown men say, "You're killing me, Smalls," and people flap their arms like angel wings at MLB games.

But what happened? Where did they all go? Despite my love of showing my kids movies from my own childhood, the truth is I can't show them a recent sports movie. Unless it's a remake (Space Jam with LeBron) or a series on Disney+ inspired by a beloved reboot (Mighty Ducks with Emilio Estevez reprising his role as Coach Gordon Bombay), the sports movies for kids' era is long gone.

The beauty of these movies — always a ragtag group of kids, underdogs who have been told they'll never make it — kind of mirrors what it took to actually create them. You had to ~believe.~

Gregory K. Pincus, writer of Little Big League — you know, the one where the kid inherits the Twins through his grandfather's will and becomes an MLB manager — tells me over Zoom that the thing about this genre of movies is that it was a story. It wasn't meant to be a masterpiece or a huge, splashy movie with effects; it was based in some part on real life. "Baseball was my particular love, and that's where Little Big League came from," he tells me. "I came up with this idea about what would happen if a kid were a manager. I wouldn't have come up with Rookie of the Year. I would've said, 'Oh, that's too ridiculous. No kid would ever be…' as opposed to a kid managing, which is just as ridiculous, and owning a team! Just as ridiculous. But not to me."

David Mickey Evans, writer and director of The Sandlot, agrees. Like Pincus and Little Big League, it started with an idea — a "spec script," something they both mention doesn't really happen anymore. But it wasn't autobiographical. Evans is not subtle when he tells me, "The Sandlot was not my life. It's the way I wish my life had been, should have been, because I had a really bad stepfather. I wrote The Sandlot because I needed to purge some stuff from my childhood that I was hanging onto about a bunch of bullies. So, I turned them all into heroes."

And that's exactly what we all love about these great sports movies. It's what we miss in the new, big, splashy animated features and cheesy television shows: the authenticity, the truth, the way it felt like you could slip right into the cast of characters in the show, and nobody would ever know you didn't belong.

"It's this little movie that I put my heart and soul into as a much younger guy, and I made it for me," Evans tells me. "It was me and my little actors and my crew, and we just went out there in Salt Lake City, Utah, and tried to have as much fun as we could. And if we were laughing, we thought, well, maybe it's got a chance. And then it hit. And I think that's a massive check in the W column for authenticity and honesty. I mean, you see a giant blockbuster; nobody identifies with Iron Man. Everybody wants to be Iron Man, but you can't identify with him."

Angels in the Outfield is a '90s kid classic — I still say a crescent moon looks like "God's thumbnail" because of this movie. Even though it was a remake back then, writer Holly Goldberg Sloan tells me over Zoom that she changed nearly everything. She liked writing about kids (she also wrote and directed The Big Green, that soccer movie you love), and she liked mixing in big issues kids were dealing with, like foster care, immigration, and inclusion.

When I ask her why they don't make sports movies for kids anymore, she's honest. "I don't know. I'm sad that they don't. They perform. Kids love them." She says that movies like the ones we remember from the '90s are a way to translate values, and Goldberg Sloan doesn't think entertainment really looks to the appropriate values anymore.

"I tried, in The Big Green, to have a message," she says. "I have an immigration issue in that movie, and I have an inclusion issue that the boys and girls play on the same team because they're so small. Back then, girls were shut out of playing a lot of sports. So, in my first draft, the lead character was a girl, and the studio asked me to change it to a boy. And I did because I wanted to do the movie. But I think now — what if I had said, 'No, no, I want it to be that girl'? But you have to balance."

(It's worth noting here that Goldberg Sloan was the first woman to direct a live-action film for Disney with The Big Green. In 1995.)

The writers of these movies have many things in common, but one thing that stands out for me is how much they all just loved a good story. Each mentions "luck" in some way when talking about making their movies, and that energy seems to work its way into the great sports movies of the '90s. A lot of perseverance, a lot of love, a lot of hope — that's what it took to make a movie, and that's what it took inside the movie.

All three writers are also pretty open about what they think has happened to the sports movies: They simply stopped being a "thing." It's common in the entertainment industry (and everywhere, really); trends are trends. In the '90s, sports movies were fully in the zeitgeist. When I ask Evans if he thinks movies like Field of Dreams and Bull Durham — movies meant for adults — inspired writers of kids' movies, he agrees. "God dang, if you don't cry at that movie, you have no soul. Yeah, they definitely had something to do with it. Those are very popular, and Major League as well, hugely popular."

How do things fall out of that zeitgeist? Evans, Pincus, and Goldberg Sloan agree that something more exciting comes along. "That was, geez, at least 25 years, maybe, before the onslaught of comic book movies and such. There were still those in those days. But technology had not yet even been invented to do it the way it's done today and stuff," Evans says. Pincus and Goldberg Sloan point out that so many movies and franchises these days are either based on old stories or built on already-created fandoms, like book series and video games.

Now, studios don't want to waste time or energy with a single — they want everything going out to be a home run. And family movies starring real, genuine kids don't get the home run kind of quality that a superhero movie or a new installment in a big action movie franchise does.

The reason the '90s sports movies live so large in our minds could obviously be that they are a part of our childhood and, thus, woven deep into our memories. But it's also worth noting that almost all these movies were big at home. Pincus, Goldberg Sloan, and Evans all reference how pivotal the world of VHS tapes and VCRs in the '90s was to their movies' successes.

"It was another incredibly lucky, sort of in-the-right-place-at-the-right-time thing because it hit VHS when VHS was at its peak," Evans says. "And if memory serves, you can fact-check me on this, I think Fox sent something like 600,000 or 700,000 VHS tapes into the rental market. Remember Hollywood Video, Blockbuster Video, every little neighborhood video store? It went crazy. They couldn't keep it on the shelves. And back then, those VHS tapes were $99 a piece."

Goldberg Sloan brings up the beauty of the VHS tape, too. Disney tapped her to write and direct The Big Green after writing Angels in the Outfield because the studio had seen the sports movie work. She remembers the movie costing $10 million, making $18 million at the box office, "which is fine; that's good." But out on VHS tapes? The movie sold a whopping four million units.

Pincus says the reason Little Big League has lived on so long — despite a blip at the box office — is because of cable TV.

"Because of cable, because of VHS, because of rentals, we would see them and would see them frequently. People would watch them a lot. And so they become sticky, and that model is largely gone," he says. "They're all probably still available somewhere online, but there's so much available online. Do we get Netflix? Do we get Amazon? Do we get Hulu? Do we get Paramount Plus? It's harder to find things, and so you watch what you can. Then, if you have Netflix, Little Big League might be there among 10,000 other movies, and who's going to pick it? All those things factor in, too. I don't think it has anything really to do with sports."

Franchises are the box office hits now: Despicable Me 4, Inside Out 2. We eagerly wait for Beetlejuice 2, for a new installment of the Ghostbusters reboot, for Laura Dern to play Dr. Ellie Sattler for one more movie. We feast on the nostalgia and the pre-built fandoms, like Deadpool and Wolverine, or Tony Stark becoming Dr. Doom in some alternate Marvel reality.

Goldberg Sloan tells me that, back in the '90s, movies could be a "single, a double, a triple, or a home run." Now, studios don't want to waste time or energy with a single — they want everything going out to be a home run. And family movies starring real, genuine kids don't get the home run kind of quality that a superhero movie or a new installment in a big action movie franchise does.

But as Evans says, we don't really identify with those characters or those stories. They entertain us, and we like the splashiness, the special effects, the tie-in to a comic book that's been around for 60 years. But you don't feel like you're one of them, not like you do when you watch Angels in the Outfield or The Sandlot or Little Big League. Not like watching The Mighty Ducks and feeling like Coach Bombay was your coach, too.

You remember those characters. You can quote their lines and still see their faces in your mind whenever you want. They are the mismatched group of friends, the ones who always feel a little less than or a little out of place, but not when they're together. Everyone is equal: the nerds, the babes, the tomboys. They all have their own stories — some filled with tragedy, others with uncertainty — and they are all, overwhelmingly, full of hope.

They were just like you and your friends. And they made up the children's sports movies of the '90s.