Screen Adaptation of The Fantastics with Joel Grey Streams Free

Amos Babcock Bellamy (Joel Grey) and Ben Hucklebee (Brad Sullivan) scheme to get their respective children, Luisa (Jean Louisa Kelly) and Matt (Joey McIntyre), to fall in love. Knowing they will resist their interference, the two men use reverse psychology and fabricate a feud, building a wall between their houses and forbidding their children to speak to each other. 

The screenplay for the film is based on the record-breaking off-Broadway production, which ran for more than 17,000 performances and was also revived from 2006 to 2017. The musical has played throughout the US and in at least 70 countries since its first production in 1960.

TUBI TV will be streaming the film adaptation of The Fantastics all month long - now available to watch in the US and Canada for free. 

The movie adaptation was originally completed in 1995 but was only released to theaters five years later. MGM, who signed up to produce the film, abandoned the project after preview audiences did not find the film appealing. Years later, the film was edited a second time and released as an 86-minute film that ran in multiple theaters nationwide in September 2020. 

In a review for the Austin Chronicle, Robert Faires said: "There are times in this 1995 film version of the enormously popular Tom Jones-Harvey Schmidt stage musical when you get the feeling you're in a time warp, that what you're watching is really a lost movie musical from the 1960s. It has that bygone style, in which impossibly innocent ingenues suddenly break into blissfully tuneful song before widescreen, Technicolor vistas, when throngs of townsfolk twirl in perfect unison down the avenue of some picturesque ideal of an American town. Some of that is obviously due to the material, which goes back 40 years and was not updated appreciably for the film. But much more of it has to do with the treatment of the material by director Michael Ritchie."