By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
There are thousands of movies released every year, even the successful ones will make a splash and then start to fade from memory, but a handful are able to leave an impact and create a dedicated fanbase. There’s even less, maybe one or two each year, at most, that leaves such a lasting impression that they are endlessly quoted to the point where most people forget that the line came from a movie. Then there’s The Sandlot, the 1993 coming-of-age classic about a group of boys hanging out and playing baseball over one fateful Summer that came out of nowhere to become one of the greatest movies of the ’90s.
The Summer of ’62
What makes The Sandlot an amazing family film over 30 years later is the lack of any real conflict. It’s about a group of boys hanging out, and what’s of Earth-shattering importance to them, beating the Little League team, hanging out by the pool, and going to the Fair is delightfully low stakes when watched back as an adult. But that’s the point, and it’s impossible to watch the movie and not remember what it was like to be a kid.
The Sandlot takes place in 1962 and focuses on Scotty Smalls, the new kid in town who goes out to play with the neighborhood kids at the urging of his mother. Smalls is horrible at baseball but Benny, the oldest of the kids, is also an incredibly nice guy that helps Smalls improve and soon, he has a new group of friends. That’s only the start of the Summer that created lifelong memories for all the boys and for everyone who watches the movie.
“You’re killing me Smalls” is still quoted constantly to this day, and the way Squints intones “For-ev-ver” has made its way into pop culture, even if they don’t know it’s from The Sandlot. While it’s set in 1962, a later scene with Benny, proud of his brand new PF Flyers, will bring every 90s kid back to when Reebok released Pumps sneakers, and suddenly, every kid that had them thought they could pump them up and dunk a basketball. Sure, Benny is fast enough to pull off a third-act heist, but it’s another moment that’s the most important thing in the world to the boys, but delightfully low-stakes and inconsequential in the long run.
The Sandlot Is An All-Time Classic
Like most classic films, The Sandlot was praised upon release by critics, and today, it has a Rotten Tomatoes critical rating of 65 percent, proving that 35 percent of reviewers don’t have a heart. The audience rating of 89 percent proves there’s a divide between those who try to watch the film as a piece of art and those who understand it’s supposed to be nostalgia bait. At the box office, the film pulled in $32 million, but it was on VHS that the film truly took off, with home media estimates of $72 million, making it a runaway success.
That level of success explains why there were two sequels to The Sandlot; both went directly to DVD, in 2005 and 2007, and neither one had any of the kids returning, with only James Earl Jones reprising his role from the original. The magic of the original is nowhere to be found, and an attempt in 2019 by Disney to launch a revival series with the original cast was derailed by the Covid pandemic. As fun as it would be to see the movie get the Cobra Kai treatment, the original still holds up as a masterpiece, and three decades later, it’s being passed down from one generation to the next, keeping the magic and wonder of those lazy Summer days alive.
The Sandlot is streaming for free on Tubi.
