Scratch Tape: Wilderness Without Flies
A Movie Review by Sam Aurelius Milam III
During
a determined bout of cleaning and sorting, I recently unearthed one of
my old Beta VCRs. Delighted, I grabbed at random from my stack of
old Beta videocassettes, most of which I've never watched due to the poor
condition of my Beta VCRs. Amazingly, the VCR took the cassette.
After only a couple of hours of tinkering, I managed to get the machine
to work. After that, I sat down for a well-deserved movie break.
The cassette was unlabeled and, since it had been recorded and given to
me by my good friend SantaClara Bob, I didn't know what was on it.
I admit to certain misgivings when I discovered the movie
Mountain Family
Robinson, an ancient Disney flick in the “wilderness family” genre.
My
misgivings were well-founded. The movie included most, if not all,
of the obligatory Disney “wilderness family” gimmicks. There was
the crusty but lovable old mountain man friend-of-the-family, Boomer, who
was mauled for about two minutes by a berserk mountain lion and suffered
only a small cut on his right hand. There was the obligatory bear
chase, where the head of the family, predictably named Skip, gamboled half-heartedly
through the woods, looking over his shoulder more than where he was going,
while the bear ambled along, obligingly staying just out of reach of its
prey. There was the obligatory storm, which nobody saw coming, and
the resulting obligatory flash-flood that washed away the goat and all
but a few of the chickens, which were heroically snatched from the jaws
of death by Skip. There were the obligatory wilderness pets, including
a mother black bear who didn't object in the least to people playing with
her cubs. There was the obligatory government agent who wanted to
throw them off of their land, who's helicopter conveniently crashed and
burned within scant yards of their homestead, giving them the opportunity
to wade into the roiling flames, drag him from the wreckage, extinguish
the forest fire, carry him back into the cabin, bandage him, and call on
the radio for help, thereby convincing him that he really didn't want to
evict them after all.
Overlaying
all of those trite gimmicks and many more that I lack the space to mention
was the fundamentally flawed situation. The Robinson family lived
in splendid isolation, except for occasional visits by the government agent
in his helicopter, a friend who had an airplane conveniently equipped with
pontoons so that it could land on the obligatory mountain lake, bringing
them things that they needed, visits from Boomer, and a radio who's battery
never went dead, with which they could call out for whatever they wanted.
The forest in which they lived appeared to be locked in perpetual springtime.
At least, they had plenty of time for playing improvised baseball, frolicking
with the various wilderness pets, who never clawed them, sailing on the
lake on an ingeniously improvised sailing raft, taking picnics during one
of which they were chased from their meal by the obligatory daytime skunk,
becoming playfully annoyed when the wilderness pets pulled the laundry
from the clothes line, picking wildflowers from the endless meadows, without
ever giving a thought to what they were planning to eat, come winter.
Indeed, they didn't have any herds of animals to slaughter and the goat
was lost downstream. They didn't seem to ever hunt game. Rather,
they appeared to be on a first-name-basis with all possible game animals.
They didn't have fields of grain. The only visible efforts to produce
food were the rescued chickens and a small vegetable garden that was destroyed
in the storm, replanted, had time to grow another crop before winter, and
was harvested only once. Meanwhile, they spent their seemingly endless
summer, without any visible source of food, living active lives, filled
with energy, hale, fit, healthy, and impossibly clean.
The
movie was too inane to keep. When it was done, I determined to erase
it and use the tape as a blank. Sadly, my VCR shuddered, gasped,
and refused to rewind the tape. So, there it sits. The best
that I could do to assuage my annoyance with the thing was to label it
“scratch tape” and put it back into the collection. Now, even that
won't do. Since I wrote this article, I have to keep the stupid movie
as documentation. There just isn't any justice.![10x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/10x5_Page_Background.gif)
Please use the enclosed envelope to send a contribution.
I prefer cash. For checks or money orders, please inquire.
For PayPal payments, use frontiersman@tomc.org.uk.
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Frontiersman, 1510 North
22nd Drive, Show Low, Arizona 85901
frontiersman@tomc.org.uk
Also see Pharos at http://tomc.org.uk/Sam_Aurelius_Milam_III/Pharos_Relay/Pharos_Relay.html |
January 2006 |
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