back to the post, today i realized the problem with me. well, "a" problem with me. today tv reintroduced me to grease 2. well, what can i say? it was on all day and in between episodes of "the universe" on the history channel and reruns of "roseanne" on tvland it was a bit of nostalgia. so it came out in 1982 but i probably saw it on tv when i was like 5 years old i guess and i remember it being SUPER COOL! well, as a 5 year old at least i thought so. then i actually started watching it... how embarrassing!
the whole thing runs like high schooler's home-made youtube video. they could cut and splice scenes and show it verbatim on snl for that digital shorts thing and it'd fit right in. so lame. corny as hell. of course, when i was 5 i didn't get all the "adult" jokes and references (in one scene a guy leads his girl into a bomb shelter then has his friends run a fake siren outside so the girl thinks there's a war, then he sings "let's do it for our country, the red white and the blue, it's uncle sam who's asking, so your mother will approve..."), even though they were all hideously cheesy.
so watching it back again was eye-opening for two reasons. one, because it was just so utterly horrible. and two, because when i was young i actually thought it was the coolest movie. granted, of course, there is michelle phiffer, and she still looks uber-hot climbing that ladder (although now that i'm older i realize that the actual lyrics are "i want a cool rider, a co-o-ol rider, if he's cool enough he can burn me through and through, if it takes forever, then i'll wait forever, no ordinary boy, no ordinary boy is gonna do, i want a rider that's cool" barf). but overall i feel completely mortified that i ever wanted to be a "cool rider" when i grew up.
of course, i was young, in my defense, and my upbringing wasn't exactly full of real life experiences (as i've come to realize). so this all got me thinking that when i was a kid, man, i didn't have a chance! let's look at my parents, my mom (who went to a catholic school taught by nuns) is ultra conservative and my dad (who's nightly before-bed routine consists of him lying on the couch in the living room in the dark listening to songs from les miserables) is a kind of a nerd. when i was growing up i never heard the radio apart from the perry and price show every morning on the way to school (and therefore i never heard any actual music, just two old grumpy guys complaining) or krater 96-type songs from my dad's hand-held tape player. the only music i knew was from tv or movies so my early childhood (remember the late 80's and early 90's) music library was dominated by disney movie soundtracks and musicals like grease 2. i remember the first actual piece of music that i ever got i didn't even buy, it was a birthday present when i was in 5th or 6th grade, a cassette tape of dookie by green day (which turned out to be the savior of my music life, actually knowing that there are other kinds of music in the world besides just the wholesome kind of tunes that i'd been stuck with up until that point). i never even had a radio until i was in intermediate school. heck remember "the box" on good old rabbit ears antennae channel 56? man i wrapped so much aluminum foil around those antennae and taped them at the sharpest angles to my wall in my room to make sure that i could get reception for "the box," they'd play "here comes the hotstepper" like all day. haha, and that was my best media source for music... the box, ha. you could call in and request music videos, but it was coded so you could only request a select few. of course, it cost like $1.99 per call or something so i never did it (anyway, if you wait long enough eventually you'd see it played anyway).
so you can see my problem, i never had a shot. i was doomed into social stunted-ness by growing up in a disney world. everything was so cheesy for me, and perhaps that's what i used to form my impression of society from when i was very young. of course, i've had a lot of time to revise that impression since i was a kid, but y'know something about those very early childhood experiences and what gets smashed into your brain first right? makes me wonder what kind of slanted view that gives me other other issues... i mean, just look at this post i created with all the videos in between, man, i'm ashamed of myself even.
still... while i may have once watched this movie because i liked it, i now post these videos to laugh and point at. seriously i was falling off the couch laughing at some of these scenes, geez, can you believe this was actually in the theaters once?
"what would they say, if they knew it was michael?"
HAHAHHAHAHA!
oh man, it's even better with the chinese karaoke subtitles, ha!
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