To Remember Them
Saturday. I mentioned I'd ordered an old Gene Autry made in 1935 movie serial earlier this week when I read a review in The New York Times to mark its DVD release thinking it was probably a serial I still remembered brief flashes from in the late forties when I was four, maybe five. I've just watched Chapter One. Gene and the kids are in trouble, so I guess I'd better watch Chapter Two. Is it the serial I remember? Or had Hopalong Cassidy or Roy Rogers made a cowboys meet Flash Gordon movie too?
Well?
Well, it's awful (of course) to the point of camp. Camp camp. Maybe beyond camp, maybe a sociological study of an earlier civilization. One we all perfectly understand, but, you know: dumb. Really dumb. Not unlike one or two of my Saturday night Japanese soaps.
Aha!!!
No! No! I don't watch this stuff without pain and I don't go looking to find others like them! I seem to remember watching this thing when we were staying at my grandmother's house in Ballard (Seattle) waiting to move to a new home in Woodway Park just south of Edmonds (north of Seattle). When you're four or five and find yourself sleeping on a couch, the old house sold to strangers, the new one coming, but not yet; sleeping on a couch instead of your bed, not really knowing emotionally what was happening; well, you probably have nightmares and Gene Autry stuck twenty-five thousand feet underground in Murania (where robots abound) is probably not the thing you want to watch at the age of five for comfort and solace.
Do you remember others?
Chandu the Magician. He was cool. Weird and cool. I remember watching it early on in the new house. Had to be the new house as we didn't have a television set until just before we moved, which makes me think I watched Gene and the kids ride around underground in Edmonds rather than Seattle, but, I suspect, location isn't necessarily relevant sixty years later.
Boy are you old.
I'm starting to think so too. Do you suppose it could be true?
Nah. We'll make this one of our few points of agreement since I'm sharing the ride. We are merely becoming more physically challenged and, if the weasels in the walls appear to be louder, well that's happening to everybody. Blame it on Bush. Any others?
I remember watching George Pal's War of the Worlds at the Edmonds theater when it was released (kid's tickets: 12 cents). Scared the shit out of me. Do you suppose they have to scare you to remember them?
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