Monday, May 24, 2010

I Don't Know What Happened, But I'm Thinking That it Might Have Been Better Had I Been Drunk Off My Ass

Childhood is a funny thing. We become attached to things that most definitely will be completely uninteresting and unentertaining - and possibly have become terrifying - by the time we reach adulthood.

Of course, the immortal Gummy Bears, Muppet Babies, Fraggle Rock, and any and all Saturday morning cartoons do not fit into this category. Kids these days? They have no IDEA what they are missing come Saturday morning. They've got crap. We had PURE GOLD.

Anyway. There are movies, especially, that stand out. Movies that gave us pure entertainment or unadulterated joy back in the day sometimes... do not age well. Again, like television, there are the standards that will never die and never become stupid in our minds (the first that comes to mind is, of course, The Goonies, but there are more), but there are some ridiculously mind-blowing things that were in the theater and on television in the eighties that will either scare you shitless or leave you wondering why on EARTH you were such a retarded psychopath of a child.

No, this rabbit-man is not creepy at all.

Movies that somehow didn't scare me as a child, but give me chills today? Number one, for the boat ride alone, will always be Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. What. The fuck. Happened? There was a millipede on a person's FACE.

A close second? The Neverending Story. The Nothing. Artax dying. Big bullies being mean to Bastian. Good God, I think that it's scarier now.

Anyway, I will now return to the story I started telling.

Right, so Mike had become a little obsessed with getting a certain version of Alice in Wonderland on the Netflix. He remembered watching it on VHS at his grandparents' house and he remembered that he liked it. So after weeks of waiting (mostly because we were holding on to three different DVDs that we hadn't watched nor had the get-up-and-go to mail the damn things back), it arrived.

And we watched it.

Well, we watched about forty-five minutes of the THREE HOUR-LONG MINISERIES before realizing that it was the weirdest, creepiest, most mind-fuckingly insane thing we'd ever seen, and we recently watched Super Mario Brothers.

What the shit is going on with that lady's hat?

It was a 1985 television miniseries starring practically everyone who was anyone in showbiz in the 1960s and 70s, none of whom I will list here, because I know very few of them. Of course, when I read the cast list to my dad, he nodded at each and every name. But then again, he knows everything, so that's to be expected.

I'm guessing that this miniseries was quite the television event, with the never ending cast list, but I could be wrong. I was only five, after all.

Anyway, it was weird and it kind of sucked. Really sucked. And that's my warning about revisiting childhood obsessions.

I don't know what the fuck is going on here
because we didn't make it this far into the film.

This was the only scene to make me laugh,
mostly because Alice was getting SO PISSED OFF
at the Madhatter for being insane.


If you end up watching this travesty, let me know how it turns out. Forty-five minutes was MORE than enough.

6 comments:

Sunny said...

I remember watching that movie with him. It was creepy even back then.

But the phenomenon you describe is exactly why I am resisting watching this version of "Babes in Toyland": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0090683/

Despite how tempting. Did you see Drew Berrymore and Keanu Reeves are in it?

Oh, so tempting.

Heather said...

sunny - No! No no no no no no! Do NOT watch Babes in Toyland. That is EXACTLY the type of movie that will terrify you with its insanity. I don't think that I watched it more than once as a child because it was so creepy!

But if you want to see Keanu try and "act," then I suppose it would be worth it.

Waayers said...

Speaking of disturbing children's movies, my coworkers and I were recently talking about Return to Oz. Have you ever seen it? Scared the living bejeezus out of me.

jal said...

This was my favorite version of alice and wonderland as a kid, and probably still is to this day since the lastest one was a sequal.

Wore out our VHS copy I watched it so many times. It scared me then too, especially the Jabberwocky part, but i always like the psycadellic stuff.

lem said...

I've seen that version of Alice many times. There might still be a VHS somewhere.... Yes, it was slightly creepy. The Jabberwocky was definitely scary.

Know what movie scared me? Labyrinth. And not because of David Bowie. It was the creepy little gremlin things that steal the baby in the beginning. I'm ok with them now.

Heather said...

waayers - Return to Oz was seriously messed up. And you know? I think that freaky ass movies like those made us stronger. Kids these days are total pussies.

jal - Maybe it's a guy thing. And we didn't even get to the Jabberwocky part, so I'm grateful for that.

lem - See, and Labyrinth is only memorable to me because of David Bowie and his tights. But those goblins were horrifying, that's for sure.