I had a mostly pleasant, sometimes challenging, weekend with my family. At least once, as it often does, our conversation turned to shared formative media. This inspired the following list of movies that my sisters and I, and sometimes our parents, enjoyed together and often quoted when I was growing up.
1. Harvey (1950)
This black-and-white classic, in which Jimmy Stewart’s best friend is a giant white rabbit that almost nobody else can see, was an old favorite of my parents’; they showed it to my sisters and me when I was a young teenager, and it’s been a family viewing standard many times since. Every once in a while, something will prompt one of us to exclaim, “Doctor, that is not my mother!” or remark, “You can be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. For years, I was smart, and I recommend pleasant.”
2. The Hobbit (1977)
The Rankin/Bass animated version of The Hobbit might have been one of the first movies that I ever watched, when I was a toddler and Older Sister was seven or eight. (Around the same time, I named one of my stuffed animals “Bilbo.”) Since then, she’s read the book to me, and I’ve read it on my own, and I still think the movie does an amazing job of bringing the characters and songs to life.
3. Unico in the Island of Magic (1983)
Recently, I summed up this one to my housemates as follows: “early anime adventure in which an adorable baby unicorn tries to stop an evil wizard from turning people and animals into living puppets.” Someone in my family almost certainly picked up the VHS at an independent video store in our hometown, and the genuinely terrifying villain obviously wasn’t a deal-breaker for me or my sisters.
4. The Princess Bride (1987)
You know it, you love it. The Princess Bride was another go-to viewing choice for my family, and remains one of the rare adaptations that I enjoy more than the source material. Although Goldman’s novel is clever and inventive, it’s tonally very different from the movie, which blends humor and sincerity in a way that I overwhelmingly prefer. I fully admit to having been the obnoxious kid who could – and often did – quote some of the scenes from memory. (Or sometimes I’d just let out a snarl when someone said, “Rodents Of Unusual Size? I don’t think they exist.”)
5. Hackers (1995)
This is another one that means more to my sisters and me than to our parents, which is understandable, since it is so very ’90s. During one of our many viewings, as we watched colorfully dressed high school students (played by visibly older actors) rollerblade to secret gatherings where they pooled their “elite” computer knowledge, Older Sister said, “Wasn’t there a time when we thought this was what teenage life would be like, if only we could find it?” There absolutely was. Honestly, I could not tell you whether the technology makes any sense at all, and I’ve been known to forget the plot from one viewing to the next, but the characters and the humor and the aesthetics are, well, hard-coded into my memory.
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