I wanted to watch this movie because I had read that Walt Disney had said it reminded him of his childhood. One of my favorite parts of the the Disney World Resort is Main Street U.S.A., and I also read that this movie had some connection to what they tried to create in the park. The story is about a widower who moves from Boston to a small rural town with her three children. They fix up a big yellow house and adapt to country life. My family enjoys Little House on the Prarie and Pollyana, and we thought this would be along those lines. As we watched Summer Magic, we became increasingly mystified. Rather than progressing through a linear narrative, this movie piles on things that make no sense into a larger and larger pile, like a misshapen heap of gunney sacks. Most of the songs were terrible and poorly placed. None of them added to the story. There were moments when it felt like the movie might work, and some sequences were enjoyable as separate vignettes, but we ended up turning it off before it was finished. I watched the rest of it myself later and didn't care about any of it. I would have liked a better story and characters I could care about.

Summer Magic is one of the few films I can think of where the remake actually improved on the original. Maybe it's the cast here, maybe it's the musical score by Disney house composers the Sherman Brothers.Whatever it is, Summer Magic is nice recreation of times at the turn of the last century when widow Carey, played by Dorothy McGuire moves in to this old house with her three children, Hayley Mills, Eddie Hodges, and Jimmy Mathers. They've had to get used to genteel poverty since Mrs. Carey's husband was killed in the Spanish American War.This remake of Mother Carey's Chickens is so laid back in style and spirit it makes The Music Man which covers the same era look like its on steroids. The score by the Brothers Sherman doesn't contain anything as memorable as what comes out of Mary Poppins, but those two guys suffered their entire careers from the rest of their work being compared to Mary Poppins.This was Hayley Mills's height as a Disney star and she certainly was lovely and winsome as the oldest of the Carey brood who gets a little romance from not one, but two sources in that first summer in Maine.Presiding over the whole film avuncularly is Burl Ives, playing a role Walter Brennan originated in Mother Carey's Chickens. Ives and Una Merkel and their son Michael J. Pollard make a trio of wise down home rustics. Well with Pollard you can skip the wise part.Summer Magic is one of the Magic Kingdom's best films and who knows, maybe it will get yet another remake. I can see Ashley Tisdale being the Hayley Mills of the 21st century.

this movie is so cute! i've always been a big fan of haylie mills so when i saw this movie i had to get it. it's always been one of my favorites because it's just so fun and you don't have to think when you watch it. it totally takes me out of my world and pulls me into nancy carrey's (mills). the songs are catchy, the cast play their parts extremely well, and this movie easily finds a place in your top favorites. this is definitely one of haylie's best films and i'm sure you'll enjoy it. i've watched it so many times and i can quote it all the way through, but i never get bored with it. you can tell that the actors and actresses had great chemistry together.

Summer Magic is Disney's somewhat dated 1963 semi-musical, semi-melodramatic fantasy. It is a showcase for two talents: the iconic British water sprite, Hayley Mills (Nancy Carey) and the kindly folk singer with a heart, Burl Ives (Mr. Poppem). Nancy's family moves from Boston to New England after their much beloved patriarch dies. Precocious and determined, Nancy manages to convince Mr. Poppem to rent her family a modest but stately home for $60 a year – where can I get one of those? But the family's idyllic existence is soon threatened when an absentee landlord discovers this rental agreement. Tension also mounts after Nancy's cousin, the priggish Julia (Deborah Walley) arrives with preconceived notions of her own. These culminate in an inadvertently painful little scene where Julia and Nancy discuss how to accentuate femininity for the benefit of making a man happy, while concealing and/or sacrificing one's own feelings for 'his' ultimate soul of happiness – oh please! Eventually Nancy learns to live with Julia's prattling and Julia gets a clue to become Nancy's best friend.Resident Disney song writers, Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman penned the charming "Summer Magic", "Lavender Blue, Dilly-Dilly" and the corny "The Ugly Bug Ball," with incomparable rag time nostalgia brimming from every note. The direction by James Neilson is adroit and easy on the mind. But on this occasion, the poignancy one is likely to derive comes entirely from seeing the young Haley Mills and elderly Burl Ives, emphatically and musically sparing off of one another's formidable talents, and leaving us all a little bit better for their joust. Summer Magic has been remastered on DVD with considerably good results. The image is very clean, crisp and smartly rendered. Colors are rich, vibrant and bold. Blacks are deep and solid. Whites are generally white. Only occasionally does film grain hint around the edges. Certain matte shots belie their faux reality on larger monitors. Overall, the picture will surely not disappoint. The audio is another consideration all together. Apart from the songs, which have been lovingly remastered, dialogue on the whole sounds more than strident and completely unnatural. The songs thus appear almost independent in their spread and sonic resonance – offering one a sort of stereo concern buried under a mono melodrama.