Wednesday, February 08, 2012

League of Extraordinary Bloggers | Saturday afternoon comfort movies



Brian at the Cool and Collected blog had a cool idea he's calling The League of Extraordinary Bloggers. It's sort of a bloggers' version of a group sketch blog where every week Brian will announce a topic and participants write about it. Sounds fun, right?

The first topic is about "Go To" Saturday Matinees, or as Brian explains it:
What movie is, or was, your “go to” Saturday matinee — the comfort movie you always popped into the VCR on a rainy Saturday afternoon, the movie you watched over and over again, driving your parents crazy while you recited the lines along with the characters on the screen?
This is a hard one for me because I'm old enough to have grown up without a VCR in the house. We didn't get one until I hit high school, so as a kid my Saturday afternoons were spent on whatever old movies the local TV stations decided to run. That was usually Tarzan or monster movies, which was cool, but honestly, by Saturday afternoon my mom was sick of my brothers and I having spent the entire morning in front of the TV with cartoons. Come noon, she shooed us out the door to spend some time outside.

By the time we got a VCR, I was working most Saturdays. Lucky for me, that job was in a video store, so I still got to watch movies (or at least be aware of them on in the background while I talked to customers). One of my favorites was Pee Wee's Big Adventure, a movie I somehow missed in the theater, but craved like crack on VHS. And I shared it like crack, too. I took it home, converted my brothers to it, and the three of us fulfilled the part of Brian's criteria above about driving our parents crazy with constant imitations of Pee Wee's laugh and recitations of "I pity the poor fool who don't eat my cereal," "Let's talk about your big butt, Simone," "Paging Mr. Herman" (in the appropriate voice), and singing "Deep In the Heart of Texas."

How in the world have I not shared this with my ten-year-old by this point in his life? Bad parenting.

Excuse me, I need to go to Amazon. And if you've never seen Pee Wee's Big Adventure, so do you.

7 comments:

Ken O said...

The summer Robocop came out on VHS I watched it every day. I'm not exagerating, every day of that summer vacation started with watching Robocop.

I usually play video games or paint to relax anymore. But The Warriors would probably be mine. Followed by Jaws and Sharktopus.

Michael May said...

I didn't even think about whether or not I have a current comfort movie, but your bringing it up makes me realize that I don't. Part of getting older for me is realizing that I'm never going to see all the movies I want to, so I don't revisit as many as I used to. That's time I could spend discovering something new.

Of course, it only takes discovering a few bad movies to drive me back into the arms of familiar favorites though.

Ken O said...

I think part of having a comfort movie now, is that I can put it on and I don't really have to pay attention to it. If I need to do other things around the house, I still have the movie on in the background. I can hear the dialogue, I know what is happening. I can make sure I'm somewhere I can see the TV when my favorite scenes come on.

Michael May said...

I should do that more. I rarely have the TV on unless I'm actively watching it, but that sounds nice. I can think of a lot worse background noise than Iron Giant or Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Cal's Canadian Cave of Coolness said...

That is too funny. I just saw a picture on Tumblr of Pee Wee on the motorcycle and I was looking for a vid of the whole biker bar scene but all the vids were not embedded. I love that movie so much.

"I say first we stomp him. Then we tattoo him. Then we hang him. And then we kill him."

I got in on this one too. Of course Golden Voyage Of Sinbad is my favorite saturday movie.

Michael May said...

Ha! I love that line, especially all the cheering in between each suggesting.

Brian (Cool and Collected) said...

Heading to Amazon now. It's been entirely too long since I've seen this movie. ;)

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