Return Of The Blog
Hi to all my readers. Thanks for being patient while the blog went into temporary hiatus due to the passing of my father. Time to get back into the swing of things on here but, for my first return post, I thought I’d post the eulogy which I wrote for and read at my father’s funeral. Normal review service will return tomorrow, with the belated Halloween post which was scheduled to go live before the bad stuff happened.
My Dad At The Movies
From as early as I can remember in my life and up to and including his final week on Earth, my dad didn’t always call me by my Christian name... he often called me Wings. When I was very young I asked him why he called me that and he said it comes from Wings Around The World, from the 1936 Alexander Korda movie Things To Come, an adaptation of H. G. Wells’ 1933 novel The Shape Of Things To Come. And it would be true to say that the moving image is a huge part of my life, because it was a big part of my father’s life... and because of what he shared with me at a very young age.
Probably before I could walk he was watching films and TV shows with me on our old black and white TV set and, before I was seven, we were already watching things like the old Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly musicals, Laurel And Hardy, Tom And Jerry, Abbott and Costello, the James Bond movies, Thunderbirds, Doctor Who, the Universal and Hammer horror movies and, of course, that memorable time when I was waking him back up late at night because King Kong was climbing the Empire State Building.
I remember him getting very excited when, in the early 1970s, the BBC had acquired the rights to the Flash Gordon serials and had edited the first one into a two part double bill, sandwiching a Hopalong Cassidy movie in between it. It would be safe to say our love of the Buster Crabbe serials never diminished and we would watch them again at least once a decade.
Of course, my dad also had some complaints about the films he watched and, quite often, you would suddenly hear him proclaim “Knickers!” as he would then, at length, go on to explain that in real life, lifts didn’t have magically appearing trap doors in their roofs so the hero could escape from their threatening predicament. Similar exclamations and explanations would also come loudly whenever the main protagonist of a movie crawled into an air vent to circumvent the villain’s well laid plans. “Nope. They’re sealed tight for a reason, have machinery in them and are way too small to crawl through” would be the message there, each and every time somebody in a film would make the same, life saving mistake.
There are many movie memories I have of my dad, too many to mention here but, suffice it to say, every time Johnny Weismuller comes on in a Tarzan film I will still shout "Ungawa!” like I did with my dad... and I’ll still watch King Kong try to outfox those planes each and every time.
