A Generational Movie Exchange

I’ve talked a bit in the past about the idea of hand-me-down movies. It’s something my wife and I thought up, but the concept is pretty common, especially in geek genre spaces. Parents love to introduce their kids to the things they love, from books to music to baseball teams, and there’s aways a lot of chatter in geek spaces about how excited parents get the first time their kids witness Darth Vader proclaiming, “I am your father!” or when they dress up as an Avatar: The Last Airbender character for Halloween. And this is all fun and true, but the other side is even more rewarding.

As a parent, I have discovered there is an even greater joy in your children introducing new things to you.

One of the daily routines I’ve had with my son since he was born is story time right before bed. Now, he is old enough to read his own books, so we’ll still sit in bed and read our respective books. Sometimes he’ll get interested in what I’m reading, usually is it’s a Star Wars book or Ninja Turtles comic (less so if it’s a “boring” or “scary” book), and sometimes he’ll want me to see what he’s reading, and I quite like the Dog Man books.

This past summer, partly prompted by his cousin, he started listening to the excellent podcast Greeking Out, which does retellings of classic myths (usually Greek mythology but it has expanded to include myths from an increasingly wider range of cultures), and he became obsessed with Greek mythology. Now, I love mythological stories, but I’ll be the first to admit that hoisting an unabridged translation of Homer’s The Iliad on an 8-year-old is a bit much. However, he requested, unprompted and with some slight hesitation on my part, for me to read The Odyssey to him. And you know what? It’s really fun! I had read both The Iliad and The Odyssey in high school and college, but it had been a long time, and I recently picked up a copy of the new translation by Emily Wilson, which is a really easy to ready. Also, it is so much easier reading and grasping an epic poem like The Odyssey when you read it out loud. Not that we read the whole darn thing in one sitting. It still took all summer, but it was fun.

That isn’t to say my son is having me read all the classics to him. This is a kid who is still obsessed with dinosaurs and dragons. In this house, we love How to Train Your Dragon. I had not thought of it more than once before he was born, but we have watched it enough for me to recognize it is a perfect movie. Even having worked in the animation industry and loving animated movies as I do, I don’t know if I’d watched and loved KPop Demon Hunters as much as I do without a child to prompt me. And not that I didn’t like Spider-Man before, but I was never a Spider-Man expert in the most remote sense. Between Into the Spider-Verse and the MCU, we have become a Spider-Man household, and I can’t complain at all.

And it’s gone even beyond the obvious.

One of my pop-culture blind spots for the longest time was the Godzilla movies. I can’t say I’d ever really given the rubber monster suit movies much of a chance, and I wasn’t much of a fan of Roland Emmerich’s 1998 version. I also did not truly understand how deep the Godzilla monster canon catalogue went. I don’t know where exactly he gained an interest in Godzilla, except possibly his general love of monsters and dinosaurs and just hearing about Godzilla from friends at school, but we started watching them, going back to Ishirō Honda‘s 1954 original, and gang, they are really good. We did some skipping around—he particularly loves King Kong vs. Godzilla and Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster—and we’ve watched almost all of the Showa era movies and a couple of the Heisei era movies. Five years ago, I don’t think I could even tell you the difference between the different eras. Now, we can tell you the complex histories of Mothra and Mechagodzilla and why Destroy All Monsters was really the most ambitious crossover in cinematic history.

At the end of the day, I love sharing these pieces of pop-culture with my son. I love when he enjoys the things I also love (or have personally worked on). I love when he brings home new books to read or wants to watch a new cartoon or movie with me because sometimes, I become a fan too.