Blockbuster Boy

Apologies for no post last week. To be fair, this tackle of Wee Sing was always meant to be a two-parter, so I figured it would be just as fair to lump both together into one mega post so that I could take extra care to write out everything to my liking. But as I think you’ll come to see, that extra time was not well spent. But anyhoo… As time has gone on, I still return to certain movies from this era of my life, and that’s simply because many of them hold up as genuinely entertaining. The Disney Renaissance movies, for instance. Others are just kind of stuck in my head like a bad song, clinging to my memory like benign tumors. And they whisper to me: TIME FOR THE SHOW TO START, TIME FOR THE SHOOOOW! I’ll never be free of its gripping siren song. So yeah, there was this VHS series known as Wee Sing, originally a company that produced sing-along tapes, the kind we all listened to on Sony personal cassette players full of songs like “the farmer and the dell” and “she’ll ...

The year is 2001. We fade in on a sunny day. A green tree, swaying in the breeze. A boy riding a bicycle, a man watering his lawn. A swarming beehive. And another. And ten others. One clutched to the underside of a roof, another right underneath a swing set seat. A swing set situated in the backyard of one Lloyd family. “No playing outside today,” said a fictional representation of my father, peaking outside, “the bees are out.” He drew the shades. He and his loving wife look worriedly at their two adorable children, sucking on popsicles and watching Barney on a 4:3  CRT TV. “This will only keep them occupied for so long,” They said aloud in unison. “I have an idea,” said my dad, “let’s go to blockbusters.” They step in front of the tv, which angers us. I thought we raised you better than this. “Hey kids, dad is gonna go rent a movie. Is there anything you want us to get for you?” My sister and I don’t even need to lock eyes. We’re already on ...

Having a blog is like raising a child. One of the reasons I enjoy committing to writing regularly is to reap the benefits of having a dedicated routine, similarly to watering plants or feeding the fish. But sometimes as a parent, you get into that panicky “oh crap, it’s 4 pm and the fish sticks aren’t defrosted” and you just kind of have to take the loss and take your kid to McDonald's instead. Now, I’m not sure if that’s an apt analogy because you and I both know that this kid is stoked to gobble up some chicken nuggies, but I guess we’ll see in due time whether or not I’ve totally dropped the ball or if I’ve become the best mom ever. My point is, I didn’t have a great idea for a way to begin exploring my childhood through the context of movies I’ve seen, and now it’s the day the blog is meant to go up, so I put something else together that I hope gives you just as much, if not more, satisfaction with what you could have gotten if I had planned this out better. And probably hyper...

Well, it’s a new year, and that means its time once again for me to commit to something I know I’ll regret once I get busier. And I know this year will be an interesting one because I’m already almost an entire week behind in putting out this intro post. I’ll try to actually finish off a full year this time, and it should be easier because I’m not committing to two posts a day (in fairness, reading one chapter of Les Mis a day for five months almost destroyed my will to live and I just could not continue with that insufferable novel). I also want to do more with pictures and memes this time around, which is partially why I have this slightly worse looking new site; BlogSpot doesn’t have a limit to how many unique pictures your blog can support at once. I consider it a plus for the memes. Let’s celebrate! Ehhh…. Never mind. Let’s not. You know, settling on a topic for this year’s blog was an interesting journey. Up until very recently, it was going to be about the wild and w...