Saturday, June 12, 2010

Saturday morning cartoons, the new era

This morning I had to get up with Reeve because mom was sick and didn't sleep so I pulled watch guard duty.

After going through some Handy Manny episodes, that I've seen about 5 times in the last week Reeve said to turn it off. He went over to the dvd rack and picked up his copy of Dawn of the Dead (yes for his 2nd birthday I got him his own copy). He said, "I want to watch Ken now!" He knows the movie only by Ken Foree's name, but none the less he knows all the imagery to ID it on the shelf.

So we turned off Handy Manny and popped in some good Romero zombie action. This reminded me back to my youth in the 80s. I would get up early on Saturday mornings and go into the living room and fire up the VCR and pop in the VHS tape that had Dawn of the Dead and Superman III and IV on it. I would lay on the floor and watch as much of the tape as I could before my parents got up. Usually at that point the raiders were tearing apart the mall and my dad was getting his coffee and paper and mom was making me breakfast. This was the normal Saturday routine for me until I was about the age of 10/11 when I started to sleep in more and the tape started to accumulate dust.

Growing up I had no clue who George Romero was or looked like. Ken Foree, Scott Reiniger, Gaylen Ross, David Emge and Tom Savini were strangers to me and to me there were just characters on the screen. Watching Reeve watch this film now on a weekly basis, he is able to show me George and the other cast of characters as they appear on screen, this include the Hare Krishna zombie, the kid knows his zombies.