This film was requested by Jordan Sowards, a longtime friend and mentor of mine who is bold and confident but also sensitive, and also generally very handsome. Want to request a film for a future issue? Subscribe to the paid version!
Note: This piece contains spoilers about The Rocketeer, but so does the description on Disney+, and you can probably figure out the plot twist yourself. But they’re spoilers nonetheless.
The early 90s were a terrific time to be named Bill.
Bill Paxton. Bill Pullman. Bill Clinton. Bill Gates. The Buffalo Bills. (There’s another prominent Bill here, but we won’t speak his name.) And then there’s Billy Campbell, who played the Rocketeer in The Rocketeer. His career never really, ahem, took off, and I can only assume it’s because he didn’t go by “Bill.”
But Billy Campbell left us with this treasure of a film, which I had not seen since I was...well, I have a vague memory of seeing it in theaters, which means I would’ve been five years old. If that is indeed the case, I was arguably too young to see this film, because there are lots of machine guns and men throwing punches and an extremely uncomfortable close-up of Jennifer Connolly’s breasts and also Terry O’Quinn says the word “bitch.”
And then there’s the Nazi stuff. But while all of that other content feels questionable, I don’t think we’re ever too young to learn about Nazis.
Now, don’t get me wrong: I am not suggesting that you take your toddlers to the Holocaust Museum or show your kindergartener Schindler’s List. The world is a dark and scary place, and I think it’s well and good to protect the innocence of our children as long as we can (within reason).
But we start our kids young with storytelling, don’t we? It’s one of the purest ways for them to learn about the world and all of the things in it. Like animals and foreign countries and people who look a little bit different from them. And it’s a good way to teach them about good and evil—or, at least, diluted versions of what makes someone a “bad guy” or a “good guy.”
The “bad guys” are always a bit vague, are they not? In children’s stories, we usually don’t delve into what makes the bad people bad, we just show them trying to hurt the heroes, and that’s enough. We get bad guys like monsters and witches and kings and, I don’t know, corrupt business tycoons. But rarely do our children encounter monsters or witches in their everyday life.
Our children don’t need to know what Nazis represent, exactly. But there’s no better way of illustrating pure real-world evil that they can eventually learn more about.
That’s what I love about The Rocketeer. The villain—an incredible performance from Timothy Dalton, playing against type as the reigning James Bond—is a Nazi living in Los Angeles in 1938. We don’t know his motives or his backstory, we just know that he wants Howard Hughes’ jetpack so that he can replicate it and turn Germany’s troops into airborne soldiers. Along the way, we see the flags, we hear the accents*, and we understand the violence (these Nazis happen to have machine guns).
And that’s enough to get the point across. For now.
When I saw this movie as a child, I can’t say that it firmly imprinted a “Nazis are bad” message onto my brain—at least not one that I extrapolated into the real world. Then again, my parents were raising me in a time where Nazis (at least the full-saluting, swastika-brandishing kind) were not exactly an everyday threat. Now, things are...different!
Which is why I think you should have the children in your life watch The Rocketeer (or Raiders of the Lost Ark, which follows a similar bad guy template). And then you should tell them afterward that Nazis are real and they are, indeed, extremely bad. Once they see how cool Billy Campbell looks in that costume, they’ll take his side—our side—for life.
*Please also point out, if you tell your children that this is the German language they’re hearing, that Germans are not Nazis. I don’t wanna hear about anyone’s kids bullying a foreign exchange student.
The Rocketeer is now streaming on Disney+, and it’s available to rent elsewhere.
I watched it sometime in the past year, and it had been probably 20 years since I last saw it. I was surprised at how well it aged! They did such a good job capturing the 30's aesthetic.