It's a new year. And because I always say that I'm going to write more often, I figure that an easy way for me to do that is to write a little more often about what I know. And what I know is how movies affect me. For certain ones, I have full-fledged experiences with them. So, as a bit of an experiment, every once in a while (or maybe even more than that), I'm going to highlight some of those movies with my stories surrounding them. Occasionally I may even throw in some TV shows or books, depending on the inspiration.
So, to start off this little segment, I'm going to write about The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad. The very first time I saw the movie was when my Aunt Genie got the family tickets to see a sneak preview of it. At the time, she knew somebody who worked at Paramount, and she would sometimes get preview passes to certain movies. The Naked Gun was one of those movies. And I was 16 years old when I saw it. The perfect age. The absurdist humor from the guys that made Airplane! was right in my wheelhouse. I remember laughing from beginning to end.
Fast forward a couple of years, and I was in college. At Ohio University there was never any way to watch regular television unless you watched the main TV down in the lobby or you lived off campus and had cable. So I had to resort to videotapes if I wanted to watch anything. I watched a lot of different movies in my four years at college, but I also watched a tape that had The Naked Gun on it more than probably any sane person. It was my version of video comfort food. And it wasn't that I watched bits and pieces of it. Oh, no. I would watch the whole movie. And I watched it so much, that when I finally saw a version of it that they played on TV, I was able to pick out all the parts that they added for the network showing (and there were a lot). And that wasn't the only movie on that tape. It also had a film called Streets and Heathers on there as well. They were watched just as often, and Streets will get one of these posts one day. But what made that tape so watchable, besides all three being great(ish) movies, was that each movie felt different, so I could get a different experience out of each movie when I would watch that tape in full. Sometimes I miss the days when I could waste a day just watching movies. It was a time in my life when I could do that and not have to really worry about the world. Not that I worry much now, but it was just different. And I'm hard pressed to find anything that I think is as funny now, as The Naked Gun was back then.
And I'm not even going to bring up the OJ Simpson factor.
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