When The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers was announced for Disney+, there was plenty of reason to suspect it would a cash-in on a brand name from a 30-year-old trilogy of movies that were never particularly good, but still managed to hold a place of affection in the hearts of those who grew up with them. At the risk of over-selling Game Changers, it deserves much better than that assumption. While Emilio Estevez does indeed return as Gordon Bombay, the new series—debuting March 26—takes a unique approach that proves surprisingly charming.
Bombay isn’t even the main character here. That honor goes to Alex Morrow (Gilmore Girls’ Lauren Graham), a single mom whose son, Evan (Brady Noon), is a youth hockey player on Minneapolis’ Mighty Ducks. Part of the twist here is that the Ducks are still the powerhouse team that Bombay built them into, grown arrogant now that they’re no longer the underdogs; imagine The Karate Kid’s Daniel LaRusso having turned into Cobra Kai. When 12-year-old Evan gets cut from the middle-school squad, Alex decides to put together a team for all the castoffs and outsiders who don’t feel like they belong in a sports climate dominated by parents who hire personal trainers and sports psychologists.
Naturally, the dynamic of shaping another rag-tag group of players into a real team becomes the arc of the series, and the kids are an appealing bunch. That’s particularly true of Maxwell Simkins as Nick, Evan’s next-door neighbor; the kid has natural comedic timing, and sells his unrequited crush on an older girl. While not all of the personalities have had a chance to emerge by the end of the third episode (the last one made available for preview), there’s a lot of potential there, and a welcome refusal to stoop to bodily-function humor.
Bombay’s role in all this is as the operator of a run-down ice rink where the new team—self-deprecating called the Don’t Bothers—sets up shop. Eventually, we do get a back-story to where life has taken him since D3, one that gives him another need for redemption. It’s not entirely clear yet whether Game Changers is setting up a romantic angle between Graham and Estevez, but both veteran actors provide an entertaining push-and-pull as the enthusiastic Alex tries to get Bombay out of his grumpy shell, and solid anchoring performances for this story.
What’s surprising about that story is that it’s actually kind of complex, in a good way. While the framework is largely about challenging the cutthroat ethos in contemporary youth sports, it’s interesting to watch the tension between Alex’s desire to create a team that has fun, and Evan’s competitive belief that losing—and losing badly—isn’t fun. There’s a playful bit of self-awareness when Evan says at one point about the Don’t Bothers that “the good guys always win—or we learn a lesson about ourselves.” It will be worth watching to see which of those approaches becomes dominant in later episodes of Game Changers.
A light-hearted, family-friendly sit-com like this doesn’t need to feel like high art, but it’s always satisfying when a premise that could have been phoned-in instead feels like the creators genuinely cared about creating something that works on its own, as more than a nostalgia act. In a world of perpetual revivals of familiar names on streaming services, that would be the most welcome kind of game-changer.
Let’s Hear From You
Ducks fans raise your hands. We know you’re out there! Who’s looking forward to the new Mighty Ducks series on Disney+?
