Inter-generational Movie Night!

I Made My Kids Watch Airplane! (1980) and So Can You!

We’ve been doing this fun thing with the kids: everyone writes the name of a movie they want to watch (using invisible ink) on a scrap of paper. We put all the paper scraps into a bag and every time we have a family movie night, we pull one out at random to watch — the invisible ink cuts down on cheating. (Was cheating a problem? Yes. Oh yes.) The house rules are, you don’t have to like the movie that gets picked, but you do have to watch it. And every movie gets picked eventually. Only when the bag is empty do we write down another round of movies. We’ve had some positive results: turns out Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) and Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) are both really fun — fun I would NEVER have had if my child hadn’t insisted on putting both of them in the bag. And without them I doubt I would have tuned in for Knuckles (2024), which is really really fun.

Of course some of the entries are straight up retaliation. The kids were really impatient with Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), and needed us to pause the movie maybe six times to explain who the old cartoon characters were and why the jokes were funny. For revenge, they made us watch Zoroark Master of Illusions (2010), Hoopa and the Clash of Ages (2015), and Pokémon 4Ever (2001) — and I know what you’re thinking: surely, you can’t be serious.

But I watched every second of those toe-sucking, half-baked, un-evenly animated ads for Pokemon merch features. And then I made them watch Airplane! (1980). This brought me satisfaction, but once things start to escalate, it’s hard to settle the skirmish-dust: yes, I will have to watch the whole “Disney Buddies” series — and if you don’t know what that is, I WISH I WERE YOU — but at least this means that my kids have had to watch some movies I considered formative in my youth.

It’s also been a learning experience, tho: watching these movies with my kids I’ve learned that Spaceballs (1987) is really slow-paced, Star Wars (1977) has WAY too much shooting in it, Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is actually pretty scary, Ghostbusters (1984) has too much sex in it, and the most disturbing aspect of Jurassic Park (1993) is that a velociraptor killed Kamala Khan’s friend Nick Fury!

Or maybe Nick Fury had to fake his own death so he could start a new life at SHIELD — no better way to fake your death with no questions asked than to take a job at a dinosaur theme park!!

And their points of reference are, of course, reversed: when we watch Luke Skywalker approach the Death Star in his x-wing starfighter in Star Wars, they recognize it from all the parodies of that scene that they’ve been exposed during their lives, so to them it’s a “rip off” of an episode of Number Blocks. (I patiently explained to them that a parody is not the same as a rip-off and that 1977 happened first — just like Han shot first. This is all a part of their cultural education.)

But the influences work in the other direction too: when they realized that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) was the movie near the start of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutant Mayhem (2023) which Donatello, Leo, Mikey, and Raphael were watching approvingly from the rooftops, that added to Bueller’s appeal for them.

We’ve also subjected our poor innocent offspring to Back to the Future (1985), Mystery Men (1999), and, of course Demolition Man (1993), which they loved, “except for the sex part which was, uh, uncomfortable,” according to my grimacing child. To their (and its) credit, they actually really enjoyed A League of Their Own (1992), and the only thing we had to pause the film to explain is why the letter that came from the US Army was so terrifying to all the ballplayers.

Somebody’s husband was killed in the war — no not her, the other one.

So yes, I recommend this particular family ritual. I can’t say it comes at no cost: you will end up watching The Mighty Pups: a Paw Patrol Movie twice more than you ever wanted, but it’s worth it to be able to say, hey, sit back down Charlie Brown, this opening scene with two sisters milking cows in the 1940s might not contain the thrill of wild Pokemon swooping through a magical life-giving time-travel tree, but you know the rules, you gotta watch it. And in the end, they like it.

You gotta put in the work to get to the good stuff, in movies just like anything else.

And sometimes one family member’s work is the other’s reward.

What should I make them sit through next?