10 Childhood Movies

[cimorene]

These are the formative movies of my childhood in order of importance. I'd be fascinated to hear anyone else's lists, so I guess this is my attempt to start a meme, in a way, except I hate memes. So obviously I won't call it that.

The short version is: 1. Singin' in the Rain, 2. Bedknobs & Broomsticks, 3. The Princess Bride, 4. Fantasia, 5. Don't Eat the Pictures (Sesame Street @ the Metropolitan Museum of Art), 6. The Addams Family, 7. The Phantom Tollbooth, 8. Aladdin, 9. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, 10. The Sword in the Stone.

1. Singin' in the Rain (1952). Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen, and Cyd Charisse. Light-hearted musical comedy set in the 1920s, beautifully filmed and full of OT3 goodness.


2. Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). Angela Lansbury and David Tomlinson, Disney. A children's musical movie combining animation with live action, magic and WWII.


3. The Princess Bride (1987). Cary Elwes, Robin Wright Penn, Mandy Patinkin, André the Giant, Wallace Shawn, Billy Crystal, Christopher Guest, Fred Savage, and Peter Falk. Hilarity, whimsy, magic and fairytales, and meta.


4. Walt Disney's Fantasia (1940). My favourite Disney movie. The Greek mythology parts were especially influential.


5. Don't Eat the Pictures: Sesame Street at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1983). Typical Sesame Street humour, with the addition of an art museum and a healthy dose of Egyptian mythology, for the lesson of the day. The A-plot is Big Bird and Snuffy, and that was always my big Sesame Street OTP.


6. The Addams Family (1991). This movie came out when I was nine, and we watched it at home a lot because my dad's a giant fan of the old comics by Chas Addams on which it's based. It's its own very special brand of theatrical, meta-tastic morbid humour.


7. The Phantom Tollbooth (1970). An animated educational children's movie based on one of my favourite children's books - same name, by Norton Juster. Magic, music, a real boy transported to a fairy tale realm, and a lot of puns. I think it's that meta that does the trick - I always prefer my fantasy with a strong dose of meta, as in Diana Wynne Jones or Monty Python or the Princess Bride or here.


8. Aladdin (1992). This was my favourite Disney fairytale movie even though I was almost ready to outgrow them by the time it came out: this is the peak of the second golden age of Disney, in my view. Robin Williams as the genie does a lot for it, and here was also, I think, the peak of the animal sidekicks - they're kind of lame in Pocahontas and they're annoying bits of furniture in Beauty & the Beast, but Jafar's parrot is a hilarious character in his own right, and Abu and Carpet's squeaking and pantomime communication add a lot to this one. The music is totally great, too. I think the genie songs are even better than "Under the Sea", which was otherwise my favourite Disney song as a kid.


9. Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). One hardly needs to describe the appeal of Monty Python and everyone has seen this movie, I presume.


10. The Sword in the Stone (1970). My mom's a King Arthur nut and so my interest came kind of second-hand, and when I was a very small child, too young for T.H. White or even MZB (once I reached an appropriate age I discovered I hate MZB even more than I hate Mallory, but that's another story), this was the way it was introduced to me. My mom always carefully explained the differences from the real legend to me. It was a way of bonding. And this movie has its cute points, not least the animation, which is so different from the style of most of the princess-containing Disney classics. The anachronisms included in pursuit of humour kind of spoil it and it doesn't hang together very well, but some of the sequences with Merlin and Arthur and the witch are really enchanting.

Comments

[aynatonal.livejournal.com]

Wow! That's interesting, because I've seen *everything* on your list. Of course, some of this stuff is very particular to my being partially raised by my grandparents, who had a video disk player before VHS really became an available and affordable format for home use--the Robin Hood (with Basil Rathbone!), Three Musketeers, Pirates of Penzance and My Fair Lady are all things we used to watch together. I think that all of them except for Pirates of Penzance should be pretty readily available.

Willow and Ladyhawke are kind of canonical 80s fantasy flicks (along with The Neverending Story, which almost made my list and Legend, which wouldn't), so you were maybe too young to catch them when I did, although I'm a bit staggered that you haven't even heard of Willow. It was written by George Lucas and directed by Ron Howard, although you shouldn't let that put you off. It's pretty great. Ladyhawke has wonderful bits and features Matthew Broderick in his late teens and Michelle Pfeifer, also extremely young. The sountrack, however, is *unbelievably* terrible--it could not be more dated and inappropriate to the tone of the movie. I recently watched it again for the first time in years (thank you Netflix) and I was boggled by how awful it was.

This should be a meme! I'll put it up in my journal too.