The Wordy Shipmate

The Little Mermaid

I never saw The Little Mermaid in theaters. I’ve only ever seen it on home video. I always just assumed that the movie was one of the classic Disney films that came out during the time of Snow White and Pinocchio. Imagine my surprise many years down the road that the movie came out just a year before I started watching movies in theaters.

What I can’t remember was the first time I ever saw it. I remember vague memories surrounding the movie. From tracing the VHS cover art to closing all the blinds in the house so I could pretend I was in a movie theater. I know I liked the movie at the time but I wasn’t in love with it. That didn’t happen until later on when I realized just how great the movie really is.

Ruminations

These days I day-dream about how I want to decorate my future apartment and how I would go about my life if I were in a relationship, Not too long ago I would day-dream about all the movies I would make and each story beat that happens, along with how audiences would react to them. I hate that I’m becoming normal.

Beauty and the Beast

The only other movie I was able to see more than once in theaters as a kid was Beauty and the Beast, the second time was an accident, I had originally wanted to watch Macaulay Culkin in The Nutcracker but upon arriving at the theaters we saw that its run has ended and in its place was a re-release of Beauty and the Beast. Having traveled all the way to the theater (it took a rather long bus ride through really congested streets to get there) we decided to watch it again.

A few months later I was able to rent the movie at a local rental store with my grand-aunt. I saw the tape over and over again, to the point where the rental store clerk had to come to the house and have my grand-aunt physically take the tape from my hands. It’ll be months before my mom would send me my own copy which I would eventually lose to nefarious cousins. It wouldn’t be until 2002 that I would finally see the movie again.

Jurassic Park

Like many kids, I was fascinated by Dinosaurs growing up. So you can imagine my excitement when Jurassic Park came out. I was very young when it came out but old enough to go to the movies. At the time funds were short and movies could only be seen once, as mandated by the adults in charge of me. Jurassic Park was the only movie I intentionally saw twice in theaters.

Years later I’d be kept awake at night thinking that there are Velociraptors outside my window, waiting to eat me.