What’s so bad about feeling good?

Was there a movie that appealed to your adolescent tastes which now seems, well, pretty bad?

Mark Evanier is a writer (for TV, books and comics) whose blog I follow regularly. He recently blogged about an experience watching the movie “The Art Of Love,” starring James Garner and Dick Van Dyke. Evanier saw the movie as a 13-year-old when it first came out, in 1965. He loved it then, but was worried about whether it would live up to his rose-colored memories and his adult tastes.

It didn’t — and that’s even more amazing considering that Evanier is still, today, a big Dick Van Dyke fan. He didn’t dislike the movie, but it was nowhere near as good as he remembered it being.

This immediately reminded me of a movie that I saw at about that same age — not in a theater, but on TV, a few years after its original release. It was “What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?”, with George Peppard and Mary Tyler Moore. When the movie starts, the two leads are glum, cynical beatniks living in New York City. But a toucan arriving on a banana boat from South America brings with it a strange virus — a communicable virus which has no harmful effects but brings a sense of joy and contentment to everyone who becomes infected. Peppard gets bitten by the bug. His girlfriend, MTM, is actually immune to the…