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It's TV Anniversary Week at The Wire, and we're taking a special look at the inordinately prestigious crop of shows celebrating milestone anniversaries this fall. Today, we're looking at Disney's Annie, which premiered on ABC November 7, 1999.
How many movie versions of Annie have there been? Is your answer two, including this December's version? Wrong. So wrong. Because you're forgetting the magic and wonder that is the 1999 TV movie version, celebrating its 15th anniversary this fall.
What stands out about this version? Put frankly: the cast! At the time, seeing Audra McDonald, Kathy Bates, Alan Cumming, Kristin Chenoweth, and Victor Garber all in the same film would have been for theater nerds and drama queens only. Nowadays, when we can all have feelings together about McDonald winning her sixth Tony, it's clear this kind of theater cred-infused cast can work. But how does it stack up to the original 1982 film cast? Or this year's updated version cast? That's what we're here to figure out – it's the Annlympics!
Unlike our traditional forms of Power Rankings, we're not comparing the casts in fame level then and now. Nor are we talking about their performances in the films – we don't know how the 2014 cast will do yet, after all. This is based on a mixture of career, reputation, talent, and fitness for the role. It is also wholly based on personal opinion, so please feel free to disagree wildly, Dorian Missick stans.