Greetings. The Cap'n is going to be a little busy today working on applications for money paying jobs (no disrespect to the Blogorium, but as it pays nothing, I cannot survive on blogging alone), so enjoy a flashback from the vaults.
My parents can’t quite seem to remember what the first movie they ever took me to was, but they narrowed it down to two possibilities: The Muppet Movie or The Empire Strikes Back.
Either one of them goes a long way in explaining why I’m the type of geek I am. The Empire Strikes Back, if that’s the case, is coupled with the first movie I remember going to see, a midnight showing of Return of the Jedi (mom won tickets through some radio promotion), which was the first time I ever saw a true fanboy (in this case, a woman dressed like Princess Leia).
The potential subliminal impact of seeing The Muppet Movie, however, takes us in an entirely different direction. I would’ve only been a few months old when they went to see it (as opposed to a little over a year for Empire), so most of it would’ve been noise and "Frog!", but I can’t help but think that some of Jim Henson’s bizarre and sometimes subversive humor embedded itself into my infant brain. It would certainly explain why I’ve always gravitated towards Muppets, either watching reruns of The Muppet Show, Sesame Street, or later a longstanding fascination with Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal.
Dad was a sci-fi geek, so in the mix with all the Disney movies mom would take us to see (I still remember seeing The Black Cauldron in theatres and wondering why it didn’t come out on video until I was in high school), dad liked to use the growing VHS market to introduce us to things like Tron, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and at a certain point, Blade Runner.
I’m pretty sure we were too young to understand Blade Runner when we saw it for the first time, but the fact that he’d mix it in with more "all ages" fare like Forbidden Planet made a real impression on me. Sure, we wore out our Star Wars tapes and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but Blade Runner was so dense, so sophisticated for a young kid that I never really shook it, and it continues to interest me with every successive viewing.
We would also see really random things, like Downtown and Disorganized Crime. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of either of them, but they’re sort of typical eighties comedies: Downtown is a sort of reverse Beverly Hills Cop starring (conveniently) Judge Reinhold, and Disorganized Crime, if I remember it well enough, is a little bit like The Ref or Trapped in Paradise but with the sensibility of Bad Santa and set in the midwest. I haven’t watched either in years but I remember thinking they were funny when I was 12.
Because of the local video stores (and this was back before Blockbuster and Hollywood Video ran everyone out of town), Carbonated Video and The Video Bar, there was always an opportunity to check something different out, like Murder by Death and Real Genius, both of which became fixtures in the house. There were also kids movies, but my brother and I had surprisingly leniency until the age of 14 or 15 to watch pretty much anything that looked interesting (which is how I saw Time Bandits), and because of the invention of Mick Martin and Marsha Porter’s Video Movie Guide, I had no shortage of possibilities.
They still make those guides, but I can’t help but think with the sheer increase in number of movies to review that they can’t possibily be as entertaining as the old guides were. Reading about Shock Treatment long before I ever knew what The Rocky Horror Picture Show was or understanding that Evil Dead 2 was "more of a remake than a sequel" armed me with information that wouldn’t pay off for years, but within all that was the making of someone seriously curious about movies.
And that hasn’t changed much since.
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