User Reviews

Nanny (Juliet Mills) and Professor Everett (Richard Long) are debating the merits of a computer's influence on people's decisions. A colleague of his is letting a computer determine if he will ask his girlfriend to marry him. Nanny: "How do you feed a heartbeat into a machine?" The professor insists computers can do anything today, "in this day and age we couldn't do without them." This prompts Nanny to sagely offer, "Wouldn't it be dreadful if they decided they could do without us." Nanny takes the children to school in Arabella, her Model A car that the kids helped to fix up. It has a feminine look and is performing poorly, leading the kids at school to make fun of Hal (David Doremus) and Butch (Trent Lehman). They taunt them into agreeing to race Arabella against Franklin Poole's (Eric Shea) father's (character actor Jack Kruschen) Buckingham. Nanny says old cars are to be cared for and not raced, so the professor says they can enter all the statistics into a computer to project a race. They participants meet at the computer to feed the specifications of both vehicles. The computer declares Buckingham as the winner. The Everetts take a drive in Arabella and come across Mr. Poole and Franklin in Buckingham. They see each other's vehicles for the first time and won't let each other get the best of him, and soon the race is on in the mountainous countryside. In the middle of a race in which the Everetts are winning they come across a lost Boy Scout Pathfinder (comedian and game show personality Charles Nelson Reilly) and his troop. How will the human element affect the race? A nice episode with a meaning that means even more today than in 1970, and a touch of comedy from Reilly.