Family Viewing

There are not many shows that we can watch as an entire family. Howard and I tend to like shows that are too intense for the kids. The three younger kids like shows that are too simple and repetitive for Howard or I. Kiki loves anime with a passion that is sometimes shared by the other kids, but not by Howard or I. Gleek loves Barbie movies which the other kids all swear they don’t like, but still end up sitting down to watch. Our differing tastes aren’t really a problem. We just schedule the use of the TV accordingly so that everyone gets a fair turn. But sometimes we want to sit down for a family viewing. It is frequently frustrating because the youngest two kids often bounce during the exposition parts of the film that the rest of us are trying to hear. Recently we’ve found two shows that engage us all, the Speed Racer movie and the Myth Busters TV series.

I did not expect to like Speed Racer. Nothing about the trailers interested me. I did not care about race car crashes in over saturated colors. I still don’t. The bright colors, blinking lights, and general flashiness are hard on my eyes. But I find the storytelling methods fascinating. Back story and story line are packed together so tightly. You switch from past to present so often that sometimes it is hard to tell which one is supposed to be present, and yet the story advances so that I am not lost. The movie itself seems like a race. Everything happens so fast. This film has one of the best uses of visual medium that I’ve ever seen. In most films the back story is told using dialog. A character tells about something that happened in the past. Sometimes you get a flashback scene to tell what happened. Speed Racer depends heavily on montage. There are places where a whole story of decision and regret is told wordlessly in less than a minute. Every time the kids turn on the show, I end up watching fascinated. I want to see how the storytelling is done, although most of it will not ultimately help me as a storyteller since my mediums are not visual. And yet it is still definitely a kid’s show. There are characters, such as the monkey, who only exist to be silly. But these silly kid scenes never lasted long enough to bore me. Similarly the few exposition scenes never lasted long enough to bore Gleek or Patch. And most of the exposition was accompanied by fascinating visuals or montages. I suspect that Speed Racer is a movie that people will either love or hate. The good news is that the first 15 minutes of the film is a self-contained storyline that introduces all the characters, all the back story, and comes to a satisfactory conclusion at the end of a race. If you don’t like the first 15 minutes, don’t bother with the rest.

Myth Busters has a very different appeal to our family. It also keeps the interest high by keeping the scenes short. But we are fascinated by the cool things they get to build and frequently blow up. And it ends up being educational because invariably there is some aspect of the show that the kids don’t understand and we then have to pause and explain. Just yesterday I got to explain to Gleek what breast implants were and why someone would want them. Less awkward for me, but equally fascinating to the kids are the discussions we’ve had about electricity, microwaves, the reason we don’t perform these experiments at home, and why we can’t have an electric eel for a pet. I love that the show gives us stuff to talk about. I love hearing Kiki and Link expound about things that they know which Gleek and Patch do not. Then Howard or I weigh in and correct erroneous information.

We own Speed Racer, but there are only so many times we can watch the same film, even one with fascinating storytelling. We have several seasons of Myth Busters to go through. After that, we’ll again be seeking a show.