Portrait of a Badass: Casey

Character: Casey Brown
Actor: Jodie Foster
Film: Candleshoe (1977)
Badass Moment: In her first five minutes onscreen Casey Brown goes on an unstoppable rampage, stealing a basketball, throwing a banana peel into a mailbox AND deliberately knocking over a 50-gallon barrel of machine oil.

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Back in the days before I started viewing The Walt Disney Company as a threat to humanity, my sister and I really used to like this Disney movie called Candleshoe. It's a cookie cutter family film about a juvenile delinquent (Jodie Foster) who is recruited by a con man to infiltrate the estate of Lady St. Edmund ("What a shack!") in order to discover the location of a buried treasure. And then she comes to love the patsies she's meant to be defrauding, becomes a "real member of the family," blah blah blah, The End. It would be a very unmemorable film, if not for the fact that I watched it something like 75 times as a child.

Candleshoe does, however, deserve credit for giving Jodie Foster the skills (or skillz, if I may) she would later need to track down Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, scare Forrest Whitacre out of her house in Panic Room and complain endlessly to stewardesses in Flight Plan. It should also be noted that, like so many other live-action Disney films of the era, Candleshoe culminates in a final battle royale of slapstick chaos. See also Babes In Toyland and Swiss Family Robinson, two more mediocre movies that rest on the strength of their climactic goodguy-vs-badguy showdowns.

Casey Brown, you are a badass. Quid pro quo, Casey Brown.