There are times when memories are jolted out of my subconscious by sudden recognition. It happens, most enjoyably, with movies. For instance: When I was young, 5 maybe?, I wandered into the room when my dad was watching a movie. I saw a guy who was lying in bed, this girl pushes a button on the wall and the bed flips up, then two guys come in with guns and shoot into the back of the flipped up bed. I remembered it for a long long time, but never knew what movie it was from until I was about 14 or so and I got to see You Only Live Twice with Sean Connery, and that scene is where he gets "killed". After they shoot him in the bed they put his body in a coffin and throw it overboard, burial at sea style. A submarine picks up the coffin, brings it on board and James Bond just gets out and later has plastic surgery so he can look Japanese.
That's a pretty big scene from a movie everyone knows, or knows of, that was floating around in my head until I suddenly came upon it. I love James Bond movies and have been watching them for a long time, but I had no idea when I started watching You Only Live Twice all those years ago that I would finally be able to put a title to that scene I saw when I was 5. A similar thing happened when I watched The Goonies...but it was kind of in reverse. We were shown The Goonies in school, second grade I think, and then I didn't see it again in its complete form until I was almost 20. I always had this recollection of seeing a guy in a jail cell who had hung himself, but when the guard comes in the guy kills the guard and escapes, and of course that's the opening of The Goonies.
When I was a kid we had a Beta deck instead of VHS. That meant I could never rent movies, but we always had tons of recorded cartoon specials and movies and shows. It was kind of fun because you could keep seeing the old McDonalds commercials and old trailers for movies that were coming out into the theater then. Our recorded Beta tape of Garfield's Halloween had a trailer on it for The Ice Pirates, an awesome low budget sci-fi comedy from 1984 with Robert Urich, Ron Pearlman and Anjelica Huston. Trust me when I say that it's funny and ridiculous. So I spent many years watching this trailer, always wondering if I'd ever see that movie in my life, or if anyone ever saw it. Then one day my dad came home with two huge boxes. He had gone to an electronics store, and because Beta had recently lost in the format war to VHS, he got a shit-ton of Beta tapes for cheap. We ended up with the oddest assortment of crap and greatness all at once. Imagine my surprise and excitement when I rummaged through the boxes and found a copy of The Ice Pirates! I saw the movie and it is what it is: Not great, but far from awful; very watchable and enjoyable. Plus it's always fun to go back and revisit old movies with people who were just starting their careers, but maybe that's tomorrow's post.
I'll leave you with one more, and then maybe you will want to share some scenes that are lost in your own minds. (Maybe I can help you piece those mysteries together.) My favorite holiday is Halloween and I love, more than anything else, the atmosphere that pervades television during Halloween. Channels add all sorts of cauldron and cobweb graphics, and the color and music queues change to reflect the feel of the haunting season. I never took note of television schedules. I never watched any shows on a regular basis, I always just turned the set on and checked the channels that I remembered had good shows. Consequently I would tune into the middle of interesting things never to know what they were or see them again. One year in October I tuned into some channel and saw a Halloween cartoon that I had never seen before. There was a green goblin-looking guy in a suite with a huge cape and some costumed-kids were hanging onto the ends of his cape and they were flying. They flew to a place where there was a broom festival and witches were chanting and cavorting about. The show had a great feel to it, good atmosphere too. I always wanted to know what it was, but never saw it on TV again. By accident I started reading a great Ray Bradbury book, years and years later, called "The Halloween Tree". Something in my memory jogged and I checked good ol' imdb.com to see if there was ever a movie version made. There was of course, an animated movie of the same name. I rented it, and then bought it immediately. I still watch it every year, but on VHS as there isn't a DVD version yet. Searching specifically for something can be fun, but stumbling upon some treasure from your past is even better.
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