Intimations Of Aging

My siblings and I were shooting skeet at the Range and we started talking about movies we loved growing up. It was raining, so our plans to go to the Rodeo were not looking like much fun. Esther suggested we watch The Man From Snowy River and Return To Snowy River. These seem to be those movies that were not well acted, were not well made but a clasic none the less.

At our house, it was one of those career inspiring movies. After you watched it, you wanted to live on a ranch and become a master horseman/woman and learn how to do cool things with a whip. Maybe it was the cool Australian accents, maybe it was the cute actors or maybe it was the music, but you remember it. (Digression: Same thing with Top Gun. We wanted to be fighter pilots or at least work around aircrafts that went mock-anything and own a bullet bike and cool sunglasses. One of us even went as far as to ask others to refer to them as "Mav" ).

I went to Blockbuster to rent the movies. The young girl behind the counter was chatting with me about the movie as compared to the original poem and books. They didn't have either movie there and she checked all the Blockbusters in the Ogden and Layton area's. None. She suggested I go to Hollywood Video. The man behind the counter had me repeat the name 3 times before he got it right, and then asked me if it was a sci-fi movie.

Really? This is a circa 1982 or something. Not that old, I thought. They had one copy that would be out for 3 more days, didn't have the sequel and called 2 other stores for me to see if they had it. No luck, neither had it and neither had not heard of it. He suggested I go to FYE and "pay like $3.00 or something for those older movies that no one rents anymore".

Thanks buddy. I called FYE. It didn't get better.

The guy in the video department had me repeat the titles only two times; said that he thought his grandpa may have told him about it. Seriously? They had the first movie for purchase ($13.98 thank you very much), but suggested that I look on E-bay for the sequel b/c "it may be old enough that it was never put on DVD".

I can see this type of reaction to some random films we watched such as Condorman or the original cartoon of The Little Mermaid, but for a clasic like Snowy River? (Sigh) I now own the movie, still remember most of the lines and Esther and I both want to end up with cowboys that look like Jim Craig. I don't think it will be easy for her to find a cowboy in Boston. I need to put "learn to use a whip" and "learn to ride a horse" on my 30-list.