Deadly Furniture

The other day, as Elizabeth and I watched the 1985 classic Witness, I couldn’t help but hear my father’s voice over entire scenes of Harrison Ford’s thriller: “Look what she does here---she fills his glass first,” “She how the Amish almost seem to rise-up out of the land,” “Now this is foreshadowing” and, of course, “Be careful out among the English.” I remember the nights when my dad would watch it for some reason or another and would let us all watch the barn raising scene, a scene that I believe I have watched more than any other in cinematic history. By the time I got around to watching the movie in its entirety, I already knew the entire basic plot because my father loved to tell it so much.

In the end, perhaps most of the movies and books we read and loved as children quickly become a part of our nostalgia, a part of our lives that we never want to have tarnished or forgotten. We love them because of who we were or where we were at the time and therefore protect them as a piece of our history. Take, for example, the BBC version of C.S Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Looking back at them now, they suck. A lot. The acting is atrocious, the adaptation too literal, and Aslan is some strange puppet/electronic thing that can barely open its mouth.But as a child, I couldn’t help but love those movies to death. Each Friday, my siblings and I would walk to Calvin College’s audio and electronic or something department and my dad would check us out a new one. I swear we just rotated them out for each other. (To be fair, however, we all knew from the very beginning that the Lucy actress was horrific. We still say “A badger, I’d love to see a badger!“ whenever anything Narnia-related comes up in conversation.) Even after all these years, when we saw Walden Media’s superior The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, we all hoped to hear BBC’s old Narnia theme somewhere in the soundtrack.Take for example, Zoobilee Zoo. Besides having perhaps the most fantastic opening sequence of anything that has ever come before or since, it’s basically about a bunch of grown-ups dressed up as animals doing stuff. The plots are somewhat of a distant memory, but that song tune is forever ingrained in my head (my older siblings could probably sing it to you, word for word, right now). The same can be said for The Polka Dot Door, Inspector Gadget, or Sharon Lois & Bram’s Elephant Show (famous for the song “Shinnamarink.” And yes, I can so do all the hand motions). Do these shows now look outdated if not somewhat disturbing? Maybe, but for me they still bring up memories of sitting around in Grammy’s house as she cooked something in the kitchen down the hall. Pretty soon, she’d call us to breakfast and we’d all run back and sneak around to our spots at the table and laugh and talk and laugh some more. In the end, these nostalgic parts of our past connect us to moments of time that are gone and people that we love who we’ve lost.