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Wednesday, March 07, 2007  

Wheels Up

M. Small has finally seen Cars -- or, as he calls it, Race Car and Tow Truck (the Mater) all the way through -- in several short installments, and with the scary parts skipped past, but at least he's made it to the end. And so have I, so that now when he points at certain of his Cars toys and asks me who Ramon and Guido are, I can tell him instead of stuttering, "Uh, the voice of Cheech Marin and some, uh, pit crew guy. Look, he's holding tires!" I'm not ready to undertake explaining to my two-year-old who Cheech Marin is and why he's famous. Sure, I could pretend his career started with Nash Bridges, but that would be dishonest.

Anyway, he gave it a positive review: "One more and that's it," he asked, which is what he says at the end of a Curious George or Kipper short. There's no reason he should get that feature-length cartoons don't work that way; fortunately, Pixar closing credit sequences are entertaining enough that it provides a gentle transition. Another thing I'd like to thank Pixar for providing? All the fun little details they put in their movies that are going to help me sit through this one God knows how many times over the next few years until he's old enough to deal with Toy Story. And of course we still have "Mater and the Ghost Light" to look forward to, not that I appreciated all the unsubtle plugs for that short in the movie proper. Shut up, Mater, I'll watch your little movie when I'm damn good and ready.

Anyway, this time, instead of us making a big event out of his first movie viewing, we let him set the pace himself. It was triggered last Sunday when Trash was watching the Oscars on the upstairs TV and the opening sequence featured a cameo from Lightning McQueen. "That's Mike McQueen!" cried M. Small, noticing him on the screen ("Lightning McQueen" is kind of a mouthful for him). But McQueen was only on for a couple of seconds, which wasn't nearly enough for M. Small. He wanted more. But what to do? If we didn't have that Cars DVD sitting down in the basement, he'd be out of luck.

But we did, so we went down and watched the first twenty minutes or so. This time I knew where the upsetting part in the beginning was, so we were able to skip right past that without his noticing the difference. I'm pretty sure he hasn't yet developed the trained cineaste's eye to tell him when some after-market hack (i.e. me) has fucked with a film's editing.

Over the rest of the week, he would occasionally ask to watch "some more Race Car and Tow Truck (the Mater)," and if it wasn't almost time for bed or to go someplace and he hadn't recently thrown anything, we'd agree. Such was how we ended up getting through the whole movie eventually.

When I wasn't much older than M. Small, there were no VCRs so if your dad wanted you to see a Disney movie, he'd have to pack you and your older sister in the car to give mom a break at home with the baby (or to give himself a break from the baby -- looking back, I'm really not sure which). Even worse, at that time Disney was putting out unmitigated shit like Superdad. I'm pretty sure my dad took us to movies before that, but this is the first one I can remember any of. All I recall is being confused as to why Bob Crane's daughter was different ages in different scenes. I would have been even more confused had I known what Bob Crane was up to behind the scenes.

Of course, none of this is my dad's fault. He deserves credit just for getting us out of the house. You think we've ever dared bring M. Small into a movie theater? Hells no. Maybe when he's twelve.

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posted by M. Giant 4:17 PM 3 comments

3 Comments:

M. Small hasn't seen Toy Story yet? My daughter has watched that since the cradle (she's 4 now.) (Mainly because it's one of my favorites. :))
Matter of fact, we happen to have a cat named Buzz.

By Blogger Unknown, at March 7, 2007 at 5:12 PM  

"Race Car and Tow Truck (the Mater)" sounds a little like "Romeo and Ethel, the Pirate's Daughter." Maybe you have a budding Tom Stoppard on your hands there.

By Blogger Febrifuge, at March 7, 2007 at 9:33 PM  

My 6 & 2 yr olds LOVE Cars. My autistic 6 yr old can do every line of dialogue right along with the movie. Talk about annoying . . .. For a special treat, there's an easter egg accessible from the menu. Let the menu run for a while (about 5 passes of the Piston Cup trophy) and a Dinoco logo appears in the lower right of the screen. Click on it and you see a take-off on Boundin', the Academy Award nominated short from Pixar (the original Boundin' is on the Incredibles DVD, disk 2). My 2-yr-old loves the Jack-Jack short on the Incredibles disk also. And yes, we are total geeks who owned everything Pixar had released even before we had kids).

By Anonymous Anonymous, at March 9, 2007 at 9:08 AM  

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