Chances are you’ve seen Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous, which follows the story of the fictional rock band Stillwater and their rise to fame during the 1970s. Well, the band’s tour bus is a bit of a celebrity itself, as it also appeared in the weirdest Disney movie ever.
The Country Bears, which came out two years later.
As noted by Screen Crush, a review of The Country Bears in The New York Times compared the Disney film to Almost Famous with “an excruciating dollop of Disney sentimentality mixed in for good measure.” Meanwhile, the films coincidentally both featured the same tour bus.
Almost Famous
YouTube – Movieclips Classic Trailers
The Country Bears
YouTube – Trailer World
The two movies have more than just a bus in common, though — they’re both about rock bands with a southern twang, though the latter’s musical group is literally (well, not really literally) made up of bears.
Oh, and they both have connections to Elton John, too. If you recall, one of the most wholesome scenes in Almost Famous is when Stillwater and their comrades sing the legendary “Tiny Dancer” in unison on the tour bus. Well, the Rocket Man himself actually appears in The Country Bears. In the scene, the bears mistake him for a fan fussing around in his garden rather than the musical icon that he truly is.
Almost Famous – ‘Tiny Dancer’ Scene
The Country Bears – Elton John Scene
Funny enough, one of the bear costumes experienced a technical glitch on set during the scene that John appeared in, and its face became distorted. “And Elton John said to me ‘That looks like me after I did too much coke back in the day,'” director Peter Hastings recalled to Screen Crush’s Matt Singer.
The more you know.
