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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Monday, June 01, 2020

entry arrow10:00 AM | The Film Meme No. 38



[38th of 100]. Every generation gets their own The Wizard of Oz, a cinematic adventure fantasy that is definitive of its childhood years. This was mine. I came of age in the 1990s but I grew up in the 1980s, in a pop culture landscape that now gets the nostalgia treatment via movie remakes and things like Stranger Things. This was the time of Betamax, when the movies finally arrived in the comforts of family homes, ready to be devoured in ways unseen before. I remember watching again and again films like Clash of the Titans and E.T. and Bluebeard's Ghost and all of the James Bond movies -- really the staples of my childhood's introduction to popular film. This 1985 caper occupied a central place in my imagination -- it was peopled with kids in the margins, just like me, stumbling into a search for a treasure to save their neighborhood from becoming a parking lot. And then there's so much more: gangsters and monsters and gadgets and hidden enclaves and pirates and maps and clues to an unfolding mystery. It's a circus of things that were delightful to a child dreaming of ways to escape the humdrum. Truth to tell, the whole enterprise was dreamed up by executive producer Steven Spielberg when he wondered to himself: "What adventures would a child dream up on a rainy day?" That question is the very heart of this film. It sustains childlike wonder, and it is to its credit that so many years later, it has not lost its magic even for the grownups we have become. What's the film?

For the introduction to this meme, read here.

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