The Ghosts of Buxley Hall, on NBC
Disney Wiki; IMDb; Wikipedia
streaming sites: Amazon; Disney+; Google Play; Movies Anywhere; Vudu; YouTube

This film aired in two parts in 1980, on "The Wonderful World of Disney". I have no memory of watching it at the time, but then I only would have been five at the time, so who knows? I watched it on Disney+ in 2023, which may be the first time I ever saw it. I'm filing this under "genre TV movies" instead of "supernatural" just because there's nothing remotely scary about it. Though I suppose I could have called it a "limited series", as I did with The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, but... despite having two installments, this just feels more like a TV movie than a series. And I'm only rating it one smiley, which actually feels a little bit generous, to me. I didn't dislike the movie, and I suppose there were some bits I actually liked, but on the whole I feel fairly neutral about it.

Buxley Military Academy for boys is in financial trouble as its enrollment has sharply declined. So it's forced to merge with a girls' school. The head of the academy, Colonel Joe Buxley is supposed to share administrative duties equally with Emily Wakefield, who brings her group of girls to board at the academy, but the colonel isn't happy about it. Meanwhile, a new student has just enrolled, an orphan named Jeremy Ross, who is supposed to inherit a lot of money when he turns 21 (which is 8 years away). He quickly befriends a girl named Posie Taylor. Jeremy's uncle George has custody of Jeremy, but George's sister Ernestine and her eighth husband, Count Sergio Luchesi Di Gonzini, want to gain custody of the boy so they can get their hands on his inheritance. There's also a trio of ghosts, including the academy's founder, General Eulace Buxley, his wife Bettina, and Sergeant Major Chester Sweet (Victor French, whom I vaguely know from Little House on the Prairie and Highway to Heaven). The general hates the idea of the school becoming co-ed, and wants to scare off the girls, but also assigns Sweet to look after Jeremy, since his happiness is essential to the school's survival. But when Jeremy declares that if Posie goes, he'll go, Sweet and Bettina must work to ensure the girls don't go, no matter what General Buxley thinks.

Well, various other stuff happens that I don't feel the need to go into. I couldn't manage to care too much about any of this, but it was okay, I guess. I think Posie and Sergeant Sweet were the best characters. And I don't know what else to say, except that it was nice that the sexism of a couple of characters was treated derisively by the movie. Because, you know, fuck sexism. (Also the look on the general's face when he saw a Black lieutenant was as close as the movie got to racism, but he didn't actually say anything, you could just sort of tell what he was thinking.)