And then. Oh. My. And then you are suspended in the largest open space you can possibly imagine, flying. Over a forest. Under a bridge. The wind is in your face and you cannot see yourself attached to anything and the disorientation is utter and complete. I thought: well, this is everything I hate, isn’t it? So enjoy.
It was nothing I would ever willingly do, and it was spectacular. My God – you crashed through roofs, were spat upon by spiders, blasted by a dragon, something big like the limbs of a tree reached for you, and the spectacles moved with such speed it was difficult to discern the real from the filmed. By the end I’d given myself over completely to the experience, and was flying over the water to the very castle I’d entered an hour before, and it was the most utterly exhilarating thing I’d never really done.
It’s for kids, but I’m not sure kids enjoy it anymore. Francis Ford Coppola! George Lucas! Michael Jackson! Er. Hmm. The first was lost and coasting, the second had not yet been unmasked as something less than the Greatest Visual Genius of His Era, and Michael Jackson was still black and popular and charismatic, but you know how the story ends: with a snootful of rhino trank and a paralyzing fear of the outside world. From the beginning the Dismay you feel is enormous: it’s a two-headed chicken Muppet-thing running a spaceship with Comic Relief Alien Elephant and a cat with butterfly wings. Also a robot with a monocle. I repeat: a robot. With a monocle. They have to save a planet through dance; this is accomplished by shooting light beams at minions who turn into Fiercely Dressed professional prancers with 1985 hairstyles who make serious faces while executing certain steps. The evil queen, who is sort of a proto-Borg suspended by wires and tubes – the only thing in the piece that still holds up – is turned into Anjelica Huston, and then it’s over.
Oh, it’s 3-D and interactive; must have been quite novel back then, but at the end when the spaceship takes off into the vacuum and you feel wind on your face, well.
“That. Was. Bizarre,” said daughter.
“That was the 80s,” I said. I didn’t tell her that her mom once sported the ‘do the lead dancer had, a modified Sheena Easton, and it was hot.
Eighties hairstyles look very eighties now (think girlfriends in Back To The Future), but they didn’t seem so bad at the time.
I’m guessing that I’m in Megan’s class when it comes to the number owned, but I also rare use them any more. It really is a lot easier to just look up a recipe on the web with a netbook on the kitchen counter. I mainly use them for traditional recipes that I’ve made for years for special occasions, like holidays (I’ve been using the New York Times cookbook for decades). Also, most cookbooks I have don’t do well with a paleolithic diet.
Nothing works to destroy self-esteem quite like telling a black child he will be held to a far lower standard than whites, Asians, or Hispanics. Recognition that poverty plays a role in lower test scores is one thing; codifying that difference by telling students that you are expected to underachieve compared to other children is tantamount to surrender. The problem is too large and too complex to solve so we will hide our failure by simply dumbing down the standards by which we judge our own progress.
