Photo of the Week 21 Sept 2009
>> 21 September 2009
Walked out of Best Buy with this beauty, and thank goodness for that -- it was the only thing to console me after the BYU game on Saturday. Past experience with rewatching cartoons from the childhood had me fearing that it would disappoint, but I was pleasantly surprised.
See, a few years ago I came upon Thundercats while flipping channels. I loved the show as a kid, so was excited to watch it. I immediately regretted that decision. Dialogue was horrendous; the voices were unbearable; the plot line had no connection with what we call "coherence" or "quality." The cartoon was a confused, jumbled mass of storytelling crap -- basically cast in the Battlefield Earth mold before that mold even existed.
At that moment, I was like Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo when he found out that Fernand had betrayed him. Thundercats and I had been friends since childhood; I thought it was upstanding and good quality. But no. Like Fernand, Thundercats sucked. And it betrayed and demoralized me with the severity of its suckiness. (I will concede, however, that Dantes may have gotten the shorter end of the Betrayed By Childhood Friend Stick. In a lucky turn of events for me, I was not extrajudicially sentenced to an island-prison to be annually tortured by a deranged prison warden and left to do nothing but stew in my own human waste and vindictive thoughts. Hey, I'm just trying to be optimistic here.)
That experience turned how I viewed my childhood upside down. Was pulling girls' hair really as enjoyable as I remember it being? Was kickball even fun? The Book Fair was worth all of the time I put into circling the books I wanted in the catalogs they gave us, wasn't it? All of my past experiences were under evaluation.
And so I purchased X-Men with some trepidation on Friday and went home to watch it. I attempted to re-create an atmosphere similar to my X-men-viewing from childhood, just so I could get the most out of it: I may have put on some MC Hammer pants, set a Super Soaker next to me on the couch, and poured myself a large bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. Something like that. And after watching a fair amount of episodes, I will admit that while the cartoon is not better than what I remember, there certainly isn't the precipitous dropoff between expectations and reality that there was with Thundercats. It's pretty decent.
The lesson: Tread carefully when revisiting pleasant childhood memories. At worst, it will be devastatingly disappointing; at best, mildly gratifying.
Happy Monday, everyone. You'll have this song stuck in your head the rest of the day:
4 ideas preached:
My biggest disappointment when I went to see the first X-Men in theaters (jr. year of HS) was that they did not use the original theme song. I'm pretty sure the franchise missed out on a big opportunity there.
And there is NO way kickball is not as fun as you remember it.
Very impressive comparison between Count of Monte Cristo and Thundercats.
Most childhood memories may romanticize that period of life, but there's no one who can deny the timeless nature of....farts. Doesn't matter where, or when you do it, farting is always hilarious. In the tub--pretty funny; in a someone's face--hysterical.
Gotta love that intro song. I also think that would've been cool to have in the movie. Long live the super soaker. And something else you might find mildly gratifying - the original Transformers movie.
Kickball - still fun. Played it a couple times at parties while living down here (granted, with a huge bouncy ball instead of a smaller harder one I remember as a kid) and it's a good time.
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