Remember the part in the movie High Fidelity where John Cusack goes back and looks up Catherine Zeta-Jones (Is it Zeta-Jones or Zeta-Jones-Douglas? Or Zeta-Jones-Drew Douglas-Roberts? The mind reels...), who plays the girl he remembers as being perfect in every single way? Remember how when he finally meets her later in life, he realizes that not only is she not as perfect as he remembers, but that she's actually quite boring and snobbish?That's the way I feel with some of the things I grew up loving. There are certain things that I remember from my childhood that gave me so much joy, and when I re-visit them as an adult, I realize that they aren't really as great as I remember them being. Let's take a look, shall we?
The Goonies
Easily one of my favorite movies as a kid. I remember watching this movie hundreds of times and loving every second of it. I loved the adventure. I loved the comedy. I loved Sloth. I got a copy of The Goonies for my birthday when I was a sophomore in college and couldn't wait to get it back to my room to watch it again. When I did...I was severely disappointed. Look, I was expecting it to be at least a little worse than I remembered, mostly because I had built it up so much in my mind. But it was just plain bad. Sure they were child actors, but the acting was horrid, even for kids. And there were just too many times where there were like 4 people talking at once and all of them seemed to be mumbling. And even for the time period, a lot of the special effects sucked. Still, I can see kids of today still enjoying it. I guess I was just disappointed that this movie wasn't as good as I remembered, while a lot of other movies I loved as a kid from the same time (Ghostbusters, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Star Wars) were all still fantastic.
Big League Chew
In little league, this stuff was worth its weight in gold. There weren't too many places around where I lived that sold Big League Chew, so when someone on the team could convince their dad to stop at the 7-11 2 towns over to get some, you had to be that kid's best friend to get just a few shreds of that delicious stuff. I tried Big League Chew again a few years back and was horrified both by the consistency and the "flavor". I may have never noticed as a kid, but even after chewing this stuff for an hour, it's still thin and gooey enough to almost be classified as a liquid. There's no "stick" to it, which means that you can't use it to blow bubbles. And it's got so much "gum flavor" to it that I almost had to spit it out as soon as I started to chew it. There was so much sugar in it that I immediately contracted Chip Wesley Disease (aka diabetes).
TMNT II: The Arcade Game for Nintendo
When I was young, I first saw this game in the arcades, and it was the greatest thing in the world. Keep in mind, I was a young Ninja Turtle fanatic. When the game came out for the NES, I just about crapped my pants. Paired up with the Game Genie, you could mow through the game every time you popped it in. I used to beat this game at least once a day for an entire summer once. When I got to college, I decided to give it another try for nostalgia. What used to be a fast-paced exciting game featuring my favorite characters of all time had turned into a boring repetitive game that I couldn't even force myself through once. How could I have spent so many countless hours playing this game as a kid when it was so dull?
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