When Violet was four and just discovering her love for unicorns, I, like an overeager fool , decided that this would be a great time to show her Legend.
I adored that movie as a child (with the original soundtrack- never show that movie without the original soundtrack, it will grate on your soul) and even named my last daughter for that Lily because not only was she mischievous, noble, and brave, but she looked fantastic in both day and Eternal Evening wear, and that’s really admirable.
Violet was fine with the goblins and Meg Mucklebones and the Great Red Sassy Satan, but I overlooked that a unicorn being dramatically just murdered in the beginning of the movie might be too much. I tried telling her that it was just sleeping, but there were a lot of tears. She was fine at the end when the unicorns ‘woke up’, but I had learnt my lesson.
So next in the quest to lace her budding psyche with my own influences was Labyrinth. Puppet goblins and dancing- aside from David Bowie’s pants (Magic Pants!) , it was way more PG and went over much better.
Too well maybe.
She spent days playing this game where she’d pile up all of her baby dolls somewhere and tell me I had to rescue them from her because she had proclaimed herself to be The Goblin King.
Something to factor in before bothering to dust off the old Willow dvd though are all the ways films have evolved since I technically became an adult. The 80’s lasertastic special effects just look so, so lame to a kid that’s seen any of the Harry Potter movies.
ET went over well when she was five because aside from some flying bikes, the effects weren’t overly digital and so stayed a little timeless. Same with Gremlins, though as cute as Gizmo is, that movie crosses into the horror genre for most kids once the gremlins show up.
Violet didn’t mind, but Lily found them terrifying, which is ironic considering that she seems in fact to be part gremlin herself.
Star Wars was part of my childhood as well, but it’s way more Mark’s fandom than mine. He used to delight in chasing toddler Violet around the house wearing the head from his authentic $800 Darth Vader costume ( from those long gone disposable income days Pre-Children) while declaring that he was her father.
The girls were familiar with the franchise through various artifacts around the house mostly pertaining to Vader. For Lily, any futuristic scifi she saw was Star Wars. The Starship Enterprise was “a Star War” along with any robot in existence, real or not.The Roomba was “a Star War” at some point.
It’s the right idea anyway? Sort of? But this meant that there was some hype surrounding the movies so they had a lot to live up to.
If they saw the movies too early and found them boring, they might always remember them that way and never want to try watching them when they were older. It’s a gamble. Maybe that’s why when he finally decided to sit down and watch one with them last year when Violet was 7, he made the curious decision to start with…. Episode One.
I mean, I get that that’s chronologically the right place to begin and the special effects are great compared to the earlier movies. And sure there’s Jar Jar for the kids supposedly and Anakin is around the same age as the girls; the spaceships and aliens are cool looking and occasional lightsaber battles were the best part of it, but in between all of that, it’s just a political space drama. A really long political space drama.
Violet stuck most of it out because Mark kept her engaged. Lily was done as soon as the popcorn ran out. Neither have asked to see it again.
Books are easier to pass down, I think. It’s not the stories that go out of style, it’s production values. Movies about books however, can apparently turn out not to not stand the test of time at all, but I won’t go into that.
