Silver Screenings—The Black Pantheon: Cool Ruinings (1993)

After watching a series of “serious” movies, my wife picked the light-hearted Cool Runnings so we could relax and enjoy a film as a family without experiencing all the trauma porn. I debated whether to include it because I have little to say about a feel-good “based upon a true story” movie with the seemingly preposterous premise of a Jamaican team qualifying to compete in bobsleigh at the Winter Olympics. Whether it’s my first-born tendency or some other character flaw, I aspire for comprehensiveness. The challenge here, then, will be succinctness. Get my point across and dip. Treat this like a real blog entry.

Once The Blind Side popped the “based upon a true story” trope bubble, I now look upon all works of fiction deploying that phrase with a skeptical eye. Thanks to the wealth of information the internet provides that was inaccessible in 1993, I now know that the only factual element in Cool Runnings is this: Jamaica fielded a bobsleigh team to the 1988 Winter Olympics.

That’s it.

Others have already written articles cataloging all the things the movie changed, but in the most egregious betrayal of the audience’s trust, Cool Runnings depicts racially motivated tension between the Jamaican team and the conspicuously Nordic teams. Given all that members of the Black Diaspora have had to endure, screenwriters Lynn Siefert and Michael Ritchie contriving a script depicting members of said Diaspora effectively lying about racial oppression is gross. I imagine that some Disney executive—probably then-chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg—found Caribbeans participating in the Winter Olympics amusing, so a comedy we got. 

In 1993, I imagine Leon, Doug E. Doug, Rawle D. Lewis, and Malik Yoba trusted Disney’s interpretation of Jamaica’s bobsleigh team, just infused with extra humor. I am certain that they could relate to the racial tension in the script, though contrived. I imagine they assumed Siefert and Ritchie would write a plot in good faith. There are plenty of other stories that Disney could have rolled with without deception.