'Operation Dumbo Drop' on Disney+ is the strangest war movie ever
With Disney+'s launch earlier this month and the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, there's never been a better time to binge old favorites. This week, we're looking back at old Disney hits and catching up on movies we missed the first time. Join us for a walk down memory lane.
Chances are high that you've never heard of the 1995 film Operation Dumbo Drop. I want to change that.
I first heard about Operation Dumbo Drop just over a month ago when the Disney+ Twitter account included it in its thread of movies that would be available to stream on its impending service. Everything in the image was just too enticing to ignore: The movie's name, the portraits of the shockingly successful lead actors, and the distant, parachuting elephant hovering in front of a bright blue sky on the right side.
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The movie did not disappoint.
Operation Dumbo Drop takes place during the Vietnam War. Captain T.C. Doyle (Ray Liotta) and Captain Sam Cahill (Danny Glover) of the United States Army Special Forces are working with a village of indigenous Montagnard Vietnamese people that live in an area strategic to the U.S.'s anti-communist war efforts. While the two captains are patrolling at night, North Vietnamese Viet Cong troops round up everyone in the village, suspecting that they are helping the Americans, and execute the village's elephant, which carries huge significance to the Montagnard people. To repair their relations with their Vietnamese allies, Doyle and Cahill promise to get them a new elephant.
It's a wacky concept for a movie that's apparently based on a true story. It's also probably the only Vietnam War movie that is 100% meant to be a feel-good, family-friendly comedy, which makes it even more bizarre.
In a bubble, Operation Dumbo Drop is a pretty innocuous movie. A nice fish-out-of-water story about guys and an elephant with a hearty dose of slapstick comedy. But try as it might, it can't ignore the fact that it's a story tucked inside of a terrible, 19-years-long war.
Most Vietnam War movies at least partially deal with the awful violence, war crimes, and psychological trauma that the conflict was riddled with, while Operation Dumbo Drop portrayed the war as a low-stakes affair and when Americans met Viet Cong forces, they primarily used hand-to-hand combat. Guns are only used for intimidation.
The only casualty in the movie is an elephant, and even then, the soldier who killed it didn't really want to do it.
The scene where Viet Cong forces round up the village of Montagnard Vietnamese people is extremely unsettling in the context of the actual war, where civilians including women and children were killed in large numbers. For a moment it seems like they could be mowed down, or at least some of them executed. But this is Operation Dumbo Drop.
If you can get around whitewashing of the Vietnam War in this Disney movie made for children (which, I get, maybe kids don't need to see the full reality of war), Operation Dumbo Drop is a pretty wild and goofy experience, especially with Ray Liotta and Danny Glover playing the leads several years into their very successful careers and not far after some of their most iconic roles in Goodfellas and Lethal Weapon, respectively.
Why did they do this movie? Who knows. But I like that they did it. It's one of those movies that you can't take too seriously, and those are fun to watch every once in a while.
I also like that Disney threw the word "Dumbo" in the title despite this having nothing to do with the movie Dumbo aside from the fact that there are elephants. The rest of the title holds true though, as this is a military operation and there is in fact an elephant dropped out of a cargo plane — a fantastic moment in cinema history.
In the end, the American military looks like a bunch of nice people who, despite their involvement getting an elephant killed, did their best to make it up to the Vietnamese village.
And here's just a little reminder that this movie came out about 24 years after Daniel Ellsburg went to The New York Times and published an investigation on the Pentagon Papers, which detailed decades of lies kept by the executive branch of the U.S. about the war, the extent of the military's violent involvement in the region, and unconstitutional actions taken by the U.S. in regard to the Vietnam War. And then of course there are the heinous and horrific war crimes committed by the U.S. military during the long war.
But hey, the elephant is fun.
