Perspective (2)

Remember Gizmo and all the other Gremlins? My family went camping the summer this movie was released, and I begged and begged my parents to take us out of the campgrounds so we could see it on the big-screen. They obliged, and I became obsessed. Gremlins crosses my mind from time to time: how they went from cute to terrifying if not taken care of properly; the controversy surrounding the film...."Is this a kids film or a grown-ups film?"; and I flash back to the disturbing scene with Phoebe Cates's character, Kate, and how her father pretended to be Santa Claus, climbed down the chimney, then slipped and fell and broke his neck at Christmas; he wasn't discovered until his decaying smell permeated the house. I think about that scene a lot, actually--its power and sadness in the midst of this mainstream Hollywood (and maybe kids) movie. In addition, Jordan has this weird ability to speak the languages of other species, some of them from this dimension, some of them not. (Example: in New York, we played a Deep Forest album really loud and he chanted along with it perfectly.) On a family vacation a few years ago, while we playing cards and drinking beer, Jordan just busted out in "Mogwai" without a single hitch....But, as for my perspective angle of this post, maybe the best thing I recall about this film is that I wanted a Gizmo doll so badly that my heart ached. I used my first allowance to buy one. At the time I saved ten whole dollars and I thought I'd died and gone to Heaven. Poor Gizmo: he's probably still stuck in a box somewhere fighting off dustballs and generations of fleas.

Funny how the things in childhood--the things so important to us, almost ridiculously so--take on new meanings the older we get. And I'm sure when I'm 80, looking back at 29, I'll do the same thing. And in future lifetimes, when I'm looking back at this little flame of my time as Nathan Buck, I'll think, "Oh boy, you were such a goofball."

I can't help but provide these other examples of things/times when I thought my world would come to an end if everything didn't go my way. Funny, they're all related to TV and movies! And, as many of you know, I've never quite gotten over my pop culture whoredom. I started at a young age; so sue me.

1) Scooby Doo was my favorite show in my early years. (Daphne was my favorite character--Hello, Gaydar alert! Plus, she had all that red hair. Hmm. Maybe she was my precursor to Tori.) One time my mom got me home "too late" from running some errand and I missed an episode, and I screamed and cried bloody murder because how could this happen to me!

2) One day my brothers and I misbehaved so badly (this might have been the same day as the legendary horse whip incident) that she wouldn't take us to see Adventures in Babysitting (until she relented and took us, like, the next week). This broke my heart because I thought I was in love with Elisabeth Shue. Looking back, I don't think I was in love with her so much as I wanted to be her....When Cocktail came out, I was like, "Mom! I really like her!" so she took me to see it. But, really, it must have been that glimpse in the commercial of her and Tom Cruise kissing under the waterfall, and I probably just had a crush on Tom Cruise....Funny, there are so many movies from childhood where I used to go, "That guy is so cool!" but I realize now I had pre-pubescent crushes. My biggest one? Barrett Oliver, who played Bastian in the original The Neverending Story and was also the title character in D.A.R.Y.L. I had me a boy-crush back in the day! (And, in true geek fashion, I've even Googled him semi-recently to see what he's been up to. If only he knew that he could have had me back in 1984 when The Neverending Story was released! Sigh....)

3) There were these stuffed toys as kids--Popples, Aaron just reminded me of their names--that folded inside their pouches and became these poofy little balls. Then you could unfold these marsupial-like oddities back into their multi-colored original states of being. There was this special on TV, a half-hour live-action/Muppet-ish show, about the Popples and this girl they befriended. I remember that Mom and Dad forced me to stay at the dinner table in the kitchen while the program was recording, which pissed me off 'cause I hated commercials and I didn't want them interfering in my later viewing pleasure. I prayed to God--I swear this is true--that if I could have one wish in my whole life it would be that the Popples program would magically record without any commercials; I would never ask Him for anything else.

4) On a related note, when VCRs first became popular, I thought that you couldn't record programs without the noises being recorded in a room, too. In my typically bossy way, I would order Jordan and Aaron to be quiet so that they're voices wouldn't be "stuck" on the tapes with the TV shows.

5) Other TV tidbits you might appreciate: I used to sit in a chair right by the VCR, with my finger on the button, because I didn't want a single moment of commercials to get on the tape. I wanted the movies and TV shows to look "official." And I thought I was super high-tech when I would "splice" movies and their sequels/programs together. Two examples come to mind: I recorded Karate Kid II immediately after the first film, and I chopped off the ending credits of Part 1 and the opening credits of Part 2 so it would become one giant movie. In my head I went, "Well, Part 2 picks up the same night as Part 1. This way, it all flows naturally." The second example: I recorded the movie Starman (which is amazing, by the way, and has one of the most haunting scores ever, composed by John Carpenter) and then recorded the pilot for the TV spin-off immediately after, once again chopping off the credits so that it all became a giant "masterpiece"....Finally, Jordan, Aaron, and I always used to see who could wake up earliest on Saturday mornings so we could sneak into the living room and get first dibs on the recliner for cartoon bliss. Snagging that recliner seemed more important than the actual programs themselves! (Thank you Wildfire, Smurfs, Snorkels, Dungeons & Dragons, and Muppet Babies, just to name a few.)

I'll leave you with this, a final "important" memory and another example that being gay is innate in the blood: JEM became my pre-adolescent favorite show. It played on Sundays for a while--where they'd show ten minutes of three programs in a half-hour slot, each segment always "To Be Continued..."--and my dad would ask me to go outside and throw the football around with him. What could I say, though, but no--even when I saw his slumped shoulders and that disappointed look in his eyes? JEM was on, Dad, come on, get with the program, literally! JEM/Jerrica Bennett was and is truly outrageous, she had those kick-ass earrings, and I wanted her and the rest of the Holograms to whomp the Misfits. She also had great '80s clothes, a muse named Synergy, and a boyfriend--Eric--who was just too dreamy. If anyone, anywhere, in any political agenda has lingering notions about homosexuality being a choice in this day and age, they should just jump a time machine to my childhood and watch me watching JEM with open-eyed awe. Then they'll shrug, say, "Huh, it is true!", start supporting the gay community, and the world will be a better place.