Chris had hit me up a week or so ago to let them watch it for the first time, but I wasn't convinced. It happened to be on one of the disney channels yesterday and they caught a small bit of it. They begged me to watch it. So I told them we would for family night. We sat down together with our hot chocolate and began to watch one of my favorite movies of all time.
Pretty good hot chocolate, but I added less milk than it calls for :)
I was worried. The girls don't know the term boogieman. They don't think there are things under their beds. How would they cope with the shrunken head present? Or the jack in the box chasing the kid? Would they mimic boogie's boys? What about Sally pulling herself apart or throwing herself out the window? What about drugging Dr Finklestein? Ugh.... about half way through I turned to Chris and could tell from the look on his face that he did not remember this movie scene for scene like I did. Seriously. Favorite. Movie. Lemur at one point told me to stop singing cause she couldn't hear the movie. I haven't watch it in..... 7 years? I asked Chris if he was having second thoughts about letting them watch it. He admitted he did not remember it as well as he thought.
We turned on another show for Howler... while I know she would love the music, not sure she's ready for the movie. Tamarin and Lemur were sucked in immediately. Lemur sat quietly and watched the whole time. Tamarin kept asking who the bad guy was. It's funny. I have talked to her since we watched Star Wars about how that the bad guy usually doesn't realize they are a bad guy. By the time they do they think it's too late to change it. We talk about it pretty often, but this one was hard for her to digest. Maybe because all the halloween town people look like bad guys? Overall they liked it. They told us it wasn't scary at all. They didn't have any trouble getting into bed and going to sleep. It didn't give them nightmares. Just goes to show sometimes you worry for nothing.
Something I didn't think about though is it reaffirms stereotypes. It's funny when the girls can point out five minutes into a movie who the bad guy is. Not because they have done anything, but simply from visual cues. The bad guy is usually unattractive or greasy looking. Usually with dark hair. Depending on who the hero or heroine is the bad guy will be the physical opposite. If the good guy is the dorky skinny kid, the bad guy will be fat. If the good guy is the fat kid it'll be a skinny bad guy. It's sad that they pick up on this juxtaposition so early. It reinforces the idea that whatever is different from me is bad. Shrug that off is you want, but anthropologically speaking those are our instincts. It would have kept us alive in the past. It's just a matter or reinforcing it or teaching acceptance of the different.
On the positive side while they are all technically "bad guys" they all become "good guys" .... sorta in the end.....
PS. For those of you confused by the first sentence, Making Christmas is one of the songs in the movie.
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