Mik Muller, Sept 12, 2004, Montague Reporter
What has this world come to? I’m sure I’m not the only person to have thought that in the past few hundred years. And I’m not just talking about the pace of change or the morals of the people who occupy the space of time a particular parcel of change occupies, but in the lost cultures such past parcels hold.
What am I talking about? I went into Movie Gallery in Greenfield and asked if they had “The Maltese Falcon.” The girl at the counter – perhaps 19 and struggling to get through GCC while working to save up for her first car – stepped over to the checkout computer and poised her hands over the keyboard with uncertainty… “Is that a new release?”
I got this sudden overwhelming sense of déjà vu. I could feel the world around me sway slightly and everything seemed to take on a slight black outline. It was like a cartoon version of the situation. Then I realized my mind was playing tricks. I was merely remembering a cartoon I had seen taped to the wall at Captain Video in north Amherst, a store I visited whenever I needed a video (back when I worked at UMass).
The story in the cartoon strip went something like this: the main character who frequented a small mom and pop type video store (just like Capt. Video) notices one day that the store is no longer there. In its place is a giant Blockbuster-type video store. The character walks up to the checkout girl and asks what happened. She tells him the old store was demolished a week ago and the new box store was built in the week that followed. He looks around, impressed at the walls lined with videos, and asks if they have some movie classic, like, um… “The Maltese Falcon.” The girl asks if it’s a new release, and after checking the computer replies that they don’t carry it and that he needs to go to one of those small mom and pop video stores (the very kind of store that previously occupied the lot).
Standing there in the Movie Gallery, I laughed out loud.
What has this world come to? How can you be alive in this country and not know about Humphrey Bogart or The Maltese Falcon? How is that? How is it that the youth of today hasn’t been exposed to these icons of American history? People say that popular culture today is merely a regurgitation of a prior era and that there’s relatively little new culture being created. I say that’s bung, or at least partially bung.
As a child in the 70’s, the Saturday morning cartoons I watched were Bugs Bunny, the Flintstones and Underdog, among others. The Flintstones and Underdog were still being made at the time and as all cartoons typically do, at times reflected contemporary topics. The same for the Warner Brothers’ Bugs Bunny cartoons, except that these were made back in the 30’s and 40’s, during the aftermath of the depression and all through WWII and its aftermath.
These cartoons reflected the contemporary issues of THEIR days, and borrowed from the movies of their days, such as, well… “The Maltese Falcon” and others. In fact there are probably a half dozen references to Humphrey Bogart alone in the Bugs Bunny series. And since these were the cartoons that I watched as a child, these were the references I was exposed to. I didn’t have to grow up in the era, I just had to watch the cartoons made during the era.
What do the Saturday morning cartoons expose our kids to today? Pokeman, YuGiOh, and others try to outdo each other in violence and apocalyptical imagery. Sponge Bob actually does a fare amount of referencing, but is an exception.
In the end, most kids are not very exposed to our own movie history, and as such, if left unchecked, American culture will lose a portion of its media heritage and relegate such important films as Casablanca and The African Queen, not to mention Citizen Kane (all three of which I’ve shown on Movie Night at the Grange, and which the larger stores do not carry) and a few hundred others to the same bin as pre-movie era burlesque and Shakespeare.
In the mean time, keep your local mom and pop video place in business by renting the classics and have movie parties to introduce your friends to some very good films. The alternative is to lose these little shops forever, leaving online shops as the only place to find these movies.
Here’s looking at you kid.
Posted: to General News on Sun, Sep 12, 2004
Updated: Sun, Sep 12, 2004