Flashbacks

When I was in Hawaii with the basketball team over break, we often had short periods of 15 minutes or so where we had to wait for everyone to get ready and take showers ect. During this time, what better was there to do besides watch TV, Spongebob Squarepants in particular. Somewhat strangely, while watching Spongebob, it did not seem as if our sense of humor had matured at all as we laughed constantly at the pointless jokes made by the sea creatures of Bikini Bottom. The episodes were certainly still as funny as they had been seven years ago and although the new episodes were certainly not as good as the old ones, whenever the old ones came on we would be flooded by memories of the good old days and all of our favorite episodes. I mean, who could ever forget the Band Geeks episode or the episode with the colorful Krabby Patties? We were even able to quote many of the lines made in the episodes, even though we hadn’t seen them in years. Weird how we can remember little things like these but have trouble memorizing things such as facts about Reconstruction in America even though we spend 100 times the amount of time studying Reconstruction as we do hearing that single line. Overall, reliving this one childhood experience was refreshing. Refreshing to sit back, relax and just enjoy a TV show that isn’t over complicated or filled with drama or romance, but also refreshing to know that childish humor still remained in all of us.

Fake or Real?

I really can’t remember the last time we had a real Christmas tree inside of my house. According to my parents the last time we got a real one was when I was 2 so I’ve never had that experience of going into a forest/farm (where do you even get Christmas trees?) and chopping one down and bringing it home. Maybe it’s because Christmas isn’t a huge deal in my family. Sure it’s fun to see all the lights and it’s definitely great to have a few weeks off from school, but the actual Christmas day isn’t all that spectacular in my household since it’s basically only me, as an only child, sitting around with my parents around our fake tree. But then again, when I step into someone’s home with a real Christmas tree, it’s different. First the smell hits you, then you reach out to touch the tree and the realness of it is something that just can’t be captured in a tree made out of plastic. So I’ve always wondered if getting a real tree would change Christmas at my house, maybe it would make it more real. Except the saddest thing about Christmas is driving around a week later and seeing all the dying trees lying out on peoples driveways, waiting to be picked up by the garbagemen and sentenced to their final resting place and I don’t know if I could deal with giving it away that easily!

Dancing and Singing Penguins?

As we were watching March of the Penguins, someone whispered something to me about the movie Happy Feet and how cute it was so I decided to look up the trailer and try and remember this movie which I had seen so many years ago. After getting over the cuteness of the baby, animated penguins, the first thing I wondered was, why dancing and singing? From what I saw in March of the Penguins, penguins are somewhat clumsy and their legs don’t look long enough to do anything except waddle. Maybe that was just the irony of it. That the filmmakers decided to personify the penguins by giving them a quality that they would never actually have in the real world.

But then what about the singing? From the trailer it seemed like every penguin could sing well and they all bursted out in song at random moments like they were characters on Glee. Yet in the movie, penguins made the oddest screeching sound that kind of shocked me when I first heard it. Unlike most sounds that other species of birds make, the penguin noise didn’t sound very musical at all.

I guess that’s all the fun of having an animated movie though. Although it may not portray penguins in a completely accurate way, it wasn’t meant to be an educational video anyways so what’s the big problem with having a little fun with it? Probably nothing.

National Dog Show

It’s a tradition every Thanksgiving that I go over to my family friends’ house and we watch the National Dog Show on NBC before settling down to eat. I honestly have no idea how they judge these competitions and my friend and I usually just spend our time making fun of the ridiculous haircuts that they put on the poodles. So what satisfaction do humans take out of simply watching animals walk around? Is it really that fascinating to see adorable collies parade around an arena or to spend your life devoted to documenting and spending time with wild grizzly bears? Timothy Treadwell did all that he did for love, because he simply loved bears and wanted to know everything about them and protect them. But then people don’t typically watch the documentary on his adventures because they want to know more about bears, it’s because they want to know more about Treadwell and his death. So if the majority of people aren’t naturally inclined to watch the footage that Treadwell spent a great deal of his life filming, then why does the National Dog Show attract almost 20 million viewers if a lot of us could simply look across the room and see a dog that doesn’t seem all the different from the one on tv? Maybe it’s the cute factor. I mean, it was the cute scenes in the Treadwell documentary, such as the baby foxes, that made people perk up and those were a lot of the parts that people remembered and talked about afterwards. But then again, half the dogs in the show aren’t all that cute, especially the ones that have been shaved on numerous parts of their body. Or maybe it’s because they are so unknown to us. The fascinating thing about Treadwell’s footage is that it showed a side of grizzlies in nature that people had never seen before. But in the dog show, the humans control the dog’s every move and its appearance so its not like the dogs are acting in some strange way that we don’t know about. I don’t even know why I watch it but it is oddly entertaining and a good distraction from the pain of waiting for our Thanksgiving meal. 

True Love?

This idea that our pets just love us because we give them the things they need to survive has been bugging me ever since we discussed it in class. Personally, my cat means the world to me. I’m almost 100% sure that I’ll miss her more than I will miss my family when I go off to college so the idea of her not truly loving me back seems like such a horrible idea.

Sure, I’ll admit it does seem like she likes me more when I give her part of the chicken I’m eating for dinner or when it’s particularly cold at night and she wants to crawl under my blankets next to me at night for warmth. But are these really the only reasons she loves me? We try to compare human/human love to animal/human love but it’s not really something that is comparable because honestly, there’s not much else a cat can do besides eat and sleep. And is the fact that they might only love us because we provide things that make them happy really that different from why humans love each other? We love other people because they make us happy: they brighten our day up when we are sad, they take us out to dinner, they make us laugh, they’re simply there for us and isn’t that somewhat similar to what we do for our animals by providing food and shelter that makes them happy as well?

 

Requited Love

Watching Grizzly Man in class, I didn’t really get the impression that the bears wanted Timothy Treadwell around them. In numerous scenes, we see the bears creeping up on Tim and walking away angrily as he shoos them off. In fact, the movie somewhat makes it seem like the only creature who really appreciates Tim’s presence in the forest are the foxes he befriends and runs around playfully with. At least that’s what I thought until I read Ned Zeman’s article in Vanity Fair called The Man Who Loved Grizzlies. Hidden among Zeman’s explanations of Tim’s girlfriends and the disturbing scene of Tim’s death is the paragraph that  surprised me the most in this article. This paragraph helped me understand why Tim would keep isolating himself year after year and putting himself in danger in order to be closer to bears. It starts off talking about a bear named Booble who Tim was close with and describes their relationship:

“Before Booble went off to gather food—the only time a mother will leave cubs—she nudged her little moppets toward Treadwell. In fact, several mothers availed themselves of the new day-care service, parking the kids at Treadwell’s feet, heading off to run errands, then returning.”

I’d imagine that a mother bear would need a huge degree of trust in a human in order to leave her cubs with him which would not be something that is easily gained. So in that aspect, I commend Tim for his connection with bears since it is clear that this is not a feigned relationship but one that means a lot to both sides.

Boundaries

Who doesn’t want to be able to spontaneously take off and drive across the country and experience everything it has to offer whenever you felt like it? What if we were allowed to do whatever our hearts desired? If we could speak our mind about absolutely anything we wanted to whoever we wanted? This would be a world without boundaries.

Personally, this sounds like the best thing in the world to me. As high school students, we have boundaries wherever we look due to our age. As we age, the boundaries get less and less applicable to our lives as we become teenagers, get our licenses, become legal adults, can legally drink, the list goes on and on. Although these boundaries are understandable since chaos would probably ensue if five year olds were operating vehicles on the daily, but I also believe these boundaries restrict our ability to learn and gain experiences as individuals, thus restricting our ability to reach our full potential. Because we can’t do whatever we want, a lot of the time it is hard to be satisfied with what you get done when you see other people, with looser boundaries, getting things done that you are not able to.

Slowly Moving Up In Line

The way I see it, coming of age simply represents a progression of maturity  and knowledge until you have a concrete purpose and direction in which you can base your future on. According to my definition, on the surface, Call of the Wild doesn’t really apply. At least not until you focus on the simple idea of dog sledding. When a dog, such as Buck, starts off in his lineup on the dog sled, they aren’t put at the head of the line. Instead, they must learn, through trial and error, how the concept of mushing works and how to work with the other dogs as well as complying with the musher. This may seem a tad cheesy but you could compare this process to a child growing up. A child starts off in school where they are not sure how to act or if what they are doing is right, but over time, they get better at what they are doing by interacting with others and following the lead of their parents and teachers. As time passes and both children and dogs learn what their role is, they move up, whether it be in grade level or a buckle closer to lead dog until eventually, they reach the point in time where they have achieved their coming of age.This point is eventually reached by Buck, as he fights for his rightful position as lead dog where he would lead the rest of the dogs, and have greater over control of not only himself and his direction in life, but others as well. Although there are always forces beyond your control that you can’t ignore, such as a musher, that may guide a person’s path through life, once someone has reached the end of their coming of age they will hopefully have enough control over their lives to steer their own path. But then again, maybe we never truly reach an end to our coming of age since, as humans, we are always progressing and learning more things that ultimately effect who we are and who we become.

Living the Teenage Dream

According to my personal interpretation of the Lion King, we only see Simba as a teenager once in the movie, during Hakuna Matata when Simba, Timone and Pumba are walking across a log and Simba transitions from a cub, to a teenager, to an adult lion. Although we only seen a second of Simba as a teenager, a lot of assumptions can be made about his life during that time span. It is apparent that he grew up with Timone and Pumba, apart from his family and living without restrictions or responsibilities. This is somewhat of a reflection on teenage life as a whole, reflecting on the desires and aspirations of a stereotypical teenager. As teenagers, we spend a considerable amount of time away from our families, 10 hours per day at school and sports, numerous more hours locked up in our rooms doing homework, and then on the weekend, we spend even more time out with our friends. Personally, I know that at this point in my life, I try and avoid confrontations with my family as much as possible, knowing that the painful subject of college applications will surely come up within five minutes of the conversation. Even though Simba may not have to deal with applying to college, his teenage life is still spent avoiding his family for other reasons. Also, by escaping from his community, he avoided all the restrictions and responsibilities that normal teenagers must take on and instead, got to enjoy his teenage years without worries, through the idea of Hakuna Matata. However, despite living his teenage years in total independence from his family and pride, Simba still values the lessons he learned as a cub as shown through the scene where he, Timone and Pumba are gazing up at the stars and Simba recites Mufasa’s star theory. Simba also has not lost his sense of responsibility  and loyalty even though he was living apart from the pride as visible by him returning to the Pride Lands and battling Scar. So who knows, maybe if teenagers were allowed to live by the rules of Hakuna Matata, we would all end up doing the right thing?

The 6 Steps to Making a Disney Movie

In Rosemarie Gavin’s article, “The Lion King and Hamlet: A Homecoming for the Exiled Child,” taken from the English Journal, Gavin puts into perspective the similarities in structure between Simba and Hamlet’s journeys throughout their stories. Although I personally have not read Hamlet, I was intruiged by this article and as Gavin spelled out the six steps that each of these characters take in their stories, I found that these steps seem to apply to numerous Disney movies outside of the Lion King. Obviously if Disney felt he must structure his movies in similar ways every time, there must be some significance to each step which I will provide a short opinion on, deciphering why Disney includes each step:

1. The child is exiled from their previous home which usually is related to royalty: This is seen not only in the Lion King but in practically every Disney Princess movie where the child either leaves or is excluded from their home and the other people/creatures living there. By doing this, Disney isolates the main character so you are able to see him or her without having biases about them due to their status or influence from their parents, guardians or others around them.

2. The child is saved by those of lower class than he is: Whether it be Timone and Pumba in the Lion King, or Pacha in the Emperors New Groove, the exiled child ends up living with people that had previously been considered below him. The significance of this is to sympathize with the viewer since obviously we are not all royalty, yet it shows that everyone is capable of helping one another no matter their social rank. Also, by showing the main character meeting someone new, the viewer is able to see the character’s true nature which is not possible in a relationship that has already been developed.