FLIPPER is a nice PG-rated movie about a teen named Sandy Ricks (Elijah Wood, NORTH) sent to spend the summer in the Florida Keys with his wildman uncle Porter (Paul Hogan a decade after CROCODILE DUNDEE, half a decade before CROCODILE DUNDEE IN LOS ANGELES). It’s a picturesque little island with nature and beauty and shit but this kid’s not into it. He shows up with round sunglassses, baggy jeans and a flannel tied around his waist, and his focus is on trying to arrange a boat to get him to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert in Orlando that he somehow has two all access passes for.

Porter is an eccentric goof who has his a beat i[ p;dfishing trawler, feeds beer to a pelican, makes his toast with the aid of two nails and a welding torch, and mostly lives off of Spaghetti-Os because he bought a pallet of them for cheap from enterprising cruise ship employees. In his house we see bongos, a framed ENDLESS SUMMER poster, and a bunch of surfing trophies, and we first see him waterskiing with two babes while smoking a cigar. He is maybe dating a neighbor named Cathy (Chelsea Field, flight attendant from COMMANDO, Teela from the original MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE), whose son Marvin (Jason Fuchs, who grew up to become the screenwriter of PAN and ARGYLLE) seems to be neuro-divergent, and thankfully Sandy is nice to him.

There is a villain: Dirk Moran (Jonathan Banks, BOILING POINT), a rich asshole big game fisherman whose yacht dwarfs Porter’s boat. One day they see the motherfucker shooting at a pod of bottlenose dolphins, killing at least one. A surviving dolphin hides behind Porter’s boat and Sandy lies to Dirk to help him escape. (We see Porter witness this and smile approvingly.)

Sandy starts seeing the dolphin hanging around. At one point he jumps up and slaps Sandy on the butt with his tail and knocks him in the water, which unfortunately does not dispel these animals’ reputation as sex pests. When Sandy sees nice local girl Kim Parker (Jessica Wesson, MILK MONEY, CASPER) with his harasser he says, “I see you’re talking to my dolphin” and, when she questions his ownership claim, improvises the name Flipper. She warns about Scar, a hammerhead shark in the area who we’ll meet later chomping on a seagull while Flipper hides.

Sandy’s new friendship with the handsy and cowardly dolphin causes him to start finally enjoying his summer vacation and participating in the community, for example by charging children money to get their pictures taken with Flipper. But Flipper gets sick and almost dies from toxic waste Dirk dumps in the water. Cathy comes up with a Navy-inspired scheme to attach a camera to Flipper and use him to locate the dump site (this isn’t your grandpa’s Flipper, this is Flipper for the ‘90s!) but the camera falls off and Sandy decides he has to go find him. Dirk’s boat runs over Sandy’s dinghy, Scar shows up and unfortunately does not eat Dirk, but we do get to see Flipper ramming a shark with his nose and Porter punching Dirk in the face. So there is PG rated peril.

Isaac Hayes has a small part as the sheriff, which may answer a question I had just last week: why the fuck wasn’t Isaac Hayes in ORIGINAL GANGSTAS? He was even in the Larry-Cohen-scripted UNCLE SAM that was filmed that year, so you’d think Truck Turner would be in the Blaxploitation Expendables. But it turns out he might’ve been in the Bahamas when the rest of them were in Gary. I think he won. And to be honest FLIPPER is a less boring movie.

I got a kick out of Sandy’s fixation on alternative rock concerts, pretty much the main focus of his characterization. His wardrobe is mostly a rotation of band shirts, mostly with art I didn’t recognize right away because they were from specific tours rather than albums, providing receipts that he really does go to alot of shows. Eventually we see Kim wearing band shirts too, which I assume was meant to show they have similar interests, not that they are swapping clothes.

There’s a point in the movie where Porter offers to take Sandy to the concert, and says the word “grunge”:

Usually when something like that is referenced in a movie like this you groan because it’s so behind the times, but in this instance it’s appropriate because 1996 is in fact the year when your uncle would’ve amused himself by talking to the kids about “grunge.”

I wondered about the possibility of this actually ending with shots of Paul Hogan and Elijah Wood at a big music festival singing along to, I guess, some song from One Hot Minute. Instead they miss the concert. It’s a character moment that Sandy doesn’t hesitate to prioritize Flipper over the Chilis. Okay, yeah, not surprising, I probly would’ve heard about it if the Red Hot Chili Peppers had a cameo in the FLIPPER movie. But can you picture if, after they were alluded to so many times in the movie, the end credits had been them playing an original song about Flipper, or a cover of the TV theme song? That would be beautiful. Doesn’t happen, though. Don’t get your hopes up.

Other ‘90s shit: he plays a Gameboy.

I grew up knowing of Flipper from general pop culture, Nick at Nite, etc. I’m pretty sure I’ve never watched an episode, and I’m not sure if I even knew it continued from the feature films FLIPPER (1963) and FLIPPER’S NEW ADVENTURE (1964). I actually assumed this was not based on the same story or characters, but just the premise “what if there was a dolphin?” It turns out the original movie was in fact about Porter and Sandy Ricks, but Porter was a dolphin-skeptical park ranger and Sandy was his son. Kim Parker and Pelican Pete were also characters from the movie and the show. Weirdly, the ’96 movie came out during the four season run of Flipper: The New Adventures, a show most notable as the first starring role for Jessica Alba. It centered on a grown up version of Sandy’s younger brother Bud, a character from the tv show that does not exist in any of the movies. But maybe some day we will enter the Flipperverse.

This was the first movie from The Bubble Factory, whose later films include THE PEST, McHALE’S NAVY and SLAPPY AND THE STINKERS. They were an independent production company founded by Sid Sheinberg, who I knew as the villain of Terry Gilliam’s battle over releasing BRAZIL, but notably he was also the Universal executive who recruited Spielberg for JAWS and advocated for him during the troubled production, perhaps partly because he’d cast his own wife Lorraine Gary in it. I bring this up because FLIPPER writer/director Alan Shapiro apparently referred to this movie as “JAWS-lite.” He was working with JAWS’ cinematographer Bill Butler, and they even used the tagline, “It’s finally safe to go back in the water.” (Which sounds more like the anti-JAWS, now that I think about it.)

Reportedly Shapiro had been hired by Universal to do an Archie movie, whatever that would’ve been. When they moved him over to FLIPPER he was not enthused but needed a job. This is to date his last credit. Most of his career was in television, but in 1993 he wrote and directed the young-Alicia-Silverstone erotic thriller THE CRUSH. According to Variety at the time, “Shapiro says in the production notes that the idea was inspired by an incident in his own life, where ‘a brilliant young woman’ developed a crush on him and refused to take ‘no’ for an answer.” So, you know… I feel there are implications there. He was later sued for using the real girl’s name in the movie, and they redubbed it for video. Thankfully Flipper did not sue and they didn’t have to change him to Kipper or whatever.

FLIPPER got poor reviews, but opened at #2 at the box office below the similarly named TWISTER (surely a huge chunk of those tickets were sold by accident and they actually meant to see FLIPPER) and seems to have been reasonably profitable. Flipper was nominated for “Favorite Animal Star” in the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards, but lost to motherfucking Pongo from the live action remake of 101 DALMATIANS. Fuck you live action Pongo, you are a fraud and a liar.

I must note that there were actual great family movies about animals that came out in the ‘90s. One from the year before this was even deservingly nominated for best picture. FLIPPER is not in the same category at all – it’s much closer to the disposable kiddy crap you expect when you hear that they made a Flipper movie. But Hogan and Wood’s version of the bonding-between-a-crusty-uncle-and-a-cynical-teen tropes is appealing enough, and the combination of real and animatronic dolphins is well done, so I didn’t hate watching this and I’m sure there were worse things that parents had to sit through with their kids.

tie-ins: On eBay I found evidence of trading cards, Pizza Hut toys, PVC trinkets, a little stuffed Flipper, and a calendar.

APPENDIX: A catalog of alternative rock t-shirts worn in FLIPPER (1996)