Great Fathers, #1: Captain von Trapp

How is this guy not the best father EVER? He's a former Commander in the Austrian Navy (lots of lake-based War Games, I suppose) who has of late become a widower raising seven kids, alone, in his beloved homeland, now post-Anschluss and overrun with brown-shirted thugs, including an 18-year-old Hitler Youth poster boy named Rolf who's been hitting on his super-hormonal 16-going-on-17-year-old daughter (redundant, I know.)

Completely overwhelmed by circumstances and with no-one to confide in but Max, his cliche-spouting music producer friend with the flamboyance of Michael Jackson and the judgment of Michael Flynn, he winds up making some questionable lifestyle decisions, like dumping his money-honey sexpot Baroness GF in favor of a bedroom-untested Salzburg nun with nothing but a guitar, an Ipana smile, and an eerie pre-hip-hop ability to rhyme on the fly. In English. Meanwhile, the Nazis are pressuring him with some not-so-subtle threats against his family to accept a high-level commission with the Reich he despises.

Escaping from an occupied mountain-encircled homeland with seven kids and a guitar-lugging wife in tow would seem an iffy long-shot at best even if you just watched the hapless Bengals beat the venerable Steelers. And yet in the face of these daunting challenges, this dad manages to keep his eye on the prize, even pushing his kids to learn a half-dozen or so great Rodgers and Hammerstein tunes, tricky harmonies and all, as he leads them across miles of treacherous, heavily guarded terrain against a backdrop of weird family dynamics that would embarrass the Kardashians.

You, sir, are a Great Father for the ages.