"Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar" was one of the first signs things were starting to not go well for the Disney company a few years after Walt Disney's death. Though movies similar to this one were made while Walt was alive, they weren't this juvenile in nature. It's a movie that really spoon-feeds entertainment to its audience instead of letting the audience find their own way to be entertained. There's extremely juvenile slapstick, not much in the way of plot, and a narrator who not only WILL NOT SHUT UP, speaks in a condescending manner to the audience. And the movie's idea of a cougar being sympathetic is kind of silly; I don't know about you, but I find cougars to be grumpy and kind of vicious.To be fair to the movie, it's not completely bad. There are some impressive visuals here and there. Also, the movie does ultimately make the (correct) argument that cougars are WILD animals and deserve to be left alone in the wilderness instead of being domesticated. Apart from that, there's very little to entertain adults or today's modern children. Unless you want to hear a 1960s rap song (!) about a cougar.

Excellent film. I don't know how they contained a cougar, domesticated or not, as he ran through a town, a lumberyard, etc. How did a cougar run around in the open forest without just taking off? I wouldn't trust my cats or dogs to do this. Must have been a very well-trained cougar. I never knew that log flumes stretched for over ten miles! How did they get the cougar to ride a log? It was obviously happening, since there was no computer generated imagery back then. The part where he chased a raccoon up a tree and they both fell in the river....I don't know if that borders on animal cruelty - what did they do - release a raccoon and let the cougar chase it? How many raccoons did they go through until they got it right?? I actually watched this movie on the big screen TV with my two cats in the room. They were riveted - I think it's their favorite movie. My black cat, Shaft, jumped up on the table in front of the screen and stayed there - watching Charlie's every move. Too funny!

This is one of those movies you just watch for the pictures. There isn't much of a story and there isn't much acting, aside from the animals, but the scenery is great and it's amazing they can train animals like that.It's worth watching just to see actual footage of one of the last log drives on the Clearwater river. Not long after the movie was made, the Clearwater was dammed up, and that whole beautiful valley was killed by the muck and slack-water behind Dworshak dam. If they tried to make a movie like this these days, they'd have to do it with CGI, because you just can't pile up 600,000 feet of old-growth logs and dump them in a river any more, even if you could find one that wasn't dammed up. The animal rights people would probably have something to say about having a cougar jump into a pen full of sheep and run over top of a bunch of piglets, too. There are some hokey parts of the production such as the "moonlight" cougar romp under a bright sunny sky, and the dynamiting of a small pile of driftwood that is supposed to be a "log jam" (after lighting the "wick", no less), but in the genre of "animal pictures" this is one of the best.

It isn't billed as one of his true-life series, but it could be. It ranks with Bear Country and Living Desert, two of his True Life Adventure episodes. Charlie is the name loggers of the Northwest give to a cougar who has the habit of visiting their camp at mealtime. Soon, he's as tame as Disney's imagination can make all wild animals. He does revert a couple of times to the wild instinct in him, but nothing too violent for children of all ages. It could be used in the schoolroom, if there weren't so many other good media choices already.