TV REVIEWS : Reliving the Chowchilla Kidnaping

The kidnaping lasted only a couple of days, but when a busload of rural California school kids vanished from the face of the Earth one hot summer day in 1976, the story grabbed the attention of the world.

“They’ve Taken Our Children: The Chowchilla Kidnapping” (at 9 tonight on ABC, Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42) re-creates one of the country’s worst cases of mass kidnaping--a children’s and parents’ nightmare in which hordes of 7-, 8- and 9-year-olds, along with their heroic bus driver Ed Ray (Karl Malden), were buried alive and held for ransom in a stuffy underground vault.

Malden’s presence as the Chowchilla farmer and volunteer bus driver who struggles to help the kids out of their tomb in a remote rock quarry helps divert attention from an otherwise routine script by David Eyre Jr. (based on the book “Why Have They Taken Our Children?” by Jack W. Baugh and Jefferson Morgan).

The production’s crucial shortcoming is the skimpy characterizations and unsatisfactory motives of the young kidnapers under wayward ringleader Fred Woods IV (an unrepentant Tim Ransom). What’s so baffling is why the much nicer, decent-appearing kidnaping cohorts (brothers Rick and Jim Schoenfeld, effectively played by Travis Fine and Tom Hodges) go along on the heist.