Eschewing bad taste, adult jokes and pop culture references, the animated fable "Everyone's Hero" concentrates on the notion that even the least popular children might triumph if dedicated to doing good.
Yankee Irving (voiced by Jake T. Austin), 10, is a baseball fan who lives in the shadow of Yankee Stadium where his dad, Stanley (Mandy Patinkin), is a janitor.
The boy is always the last selected for neighborhood baseball games, and is a mortified blight to his teams.
As his beloved Yankees leave New York to play the final World Series games in Chicago against the Cubs, Cubs owner Mr. McCross (an unbilled Robin Williams) coerces pitcher Lefty Maginnis (William H. Macy) to steal Babe Ruth's (Brian Dennehy's) prized bat, here a living entity called Darlin' and voiced by Whoopi Goldberg.
The boy resolves to steal back the bat and hand it to Ruth in time for the latter to win the series. The boy does so with the help of Screwie (Rob Reiner), a one-time foul ball who talks only to Yankee and Darlin'.
Howard Jones' story was scripted by Robert Kurtz and Jeff Hand in a way that suggests Yankee was a lovable loser some 17 years before Charlie Brown in "Peanuts" become a counterpart of sorts.
The climactic series game lapses into an unnecessary level of wish-fulfillment beyond fantasy, but the picture's consistently moderate tone and positive message make it one of the more appealing and family-friendly cartoon features in ages.
You'll have to figure out for yourself what is intended by the line, "Wolves are too scared to come to Pittsburgh." There's no other allusion to Pittsburgh or to wolves that would explain whether this refers to the city's sooty reputation in the 1930s.
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'Everyone's Hero'Rated G;
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