Thursday Movie Picks #192: Childhood favorites

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of "Thursday Movie Picks", the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This week, the theme is childhood favorites, which is easy enough except for the fact that I'm getting old and childhood was a long time ago. (OK, not that long ago. My dad is still alive at 80.) I'm picking three older movies, as well as a shout-out to Dad at the end:

King Kong (1933). I was a kid when the Jessica Lange remake of King Kong was released in 1976. The local library's children's program organized a showing of the 1933 original, so I would have been about four years old when I saw this, I think. The showing I saw might not have been in conjunction with the remake; my memories of that young an age are of course a bit hazy as are most people's memories from when they were just four. And the library is no longer in the same building. The old library was across from the old post office, which had already been torn down by that time, with a Jack-in-the-Box fast food joint in the location. That hasn't been there for decades, with a series of restaurants being in the location. The library wound up near Grandma's house; within walking distance when we were warehoused there while Mom and Dad were out for a day or something.

Rabbit of Seville (1950). When I was a kid, the networks still ran cartoons on Saturday mornings, and not that E/I scam designed to put programming on air that the nannies in Washington think is good for the children. (I know I've seen reruns of Saved by the Bell with the E/I bug on one of the digital sub-channels.) Anyhow, one of the channels ran the old Looney Tunes shorts, and we all watched them not realizing that these old shorts had been shown in the theaters when our parents were children. Woody Woodpecker, Tom and Jerry, Popeye, and the Pink Panther were among those shown syndicated, from what I recall. As for Rabbit of Seville, it's the short with Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd in a barber shop, set against Rossini's overture to The Barber of Seville. They have the race in the barber chairs, and Bugs stands on Elmer's scalp, massaging it with his feet.

Yours, Mine, and Ours (1968). I saw this one as an older child, again on TV -- I think this was what is now the local Fox affiliate, before there was a Fox network. Hollywood made quite a few movies in the late 60s dealing with the generation gap, putting older stars in movies trying to make them appeal to the teen audience by including young stars. The ones I've seen are uniformly terrible, like I'll Take Sweden and Where Angels Go, Trouble Follows. As I blogged about near the beginning of this blog, Yours, Mine, and Ours took a different tack and made a movie that probably would have seemed square to the young people of the day, but which stands the test of time and is much better than all the generation gap stuff. Lucille Ball plays a navy nurse who is a widow with eight children. Henry Fonda plays a naval officer who is a widower with ten children. You know the two are going to be right for each other in the end. Also stars Van Johnson and Tom Bosley.

My dad's abiding childhood memory, or at least the one we always heard about, wasn't of a favorite. He has mentioned seeing some of the Bowery Boys movies, but he always mentioned how, having gone to a Catholic elementary school, the nuns dragged the students out to see The Bells of St. Mary's when it came out in 1945. He's hated the movie to this day. Of course, it's a follow-up to the treacly and mawkish Going My Way, so there's a built-in excuse for anybody who hates it. My sister bought Dad a VHS tape of The Bells of St. Mary's as a gag gift one Christmas, that's how much we all know the story of Dad's hatred for the movie.