The Evil Show
by James Roland
I made an unsettling discovery.
I was watching a movie trailer the other day. It was playing in the background while I was cleaning the living room. I had my back turned to the screen when I suddenly heard a familiar voice that I hadn’t heard in years. This warm sense of well-being filled me. You know how smells or sounds can trigger some buried memory; a memory that isn’t really a specific event or person, just a feeling and emotion from a certain time in your life?
Well, that happened to me. So I turned around to see who was speaking . . . and found myself staring into the dark eyes of Michael Eisner.
::shudder::
As near as I can figure, my reaction was some residual side effect from The Wonderful World of Disney. Those formative years, all snuggled up in blankets on the couch to watch talking animals, have made me prey to The Evil. One can only hope that the pure Goodlight from Pixar will follow John Lasseter and fill every crevice of that dark castle.
This is a very bad habit of mine (being influenced by movies and television I mean, not battling the forces of heinous evil).
For years I was plagued by a very real, distinct memory: I was visiting a friend’s house, and their younger brother got on the phone and called his dad at work. He proceeded to tell his dad that he killed mommy, and now he wanted to kill daddy as well.
Now, as I rapidly approached the age of thirteen I knew this memory couldn’t be real, but I had no frame of reference to tell me otherwise. How could I have such a memory? Surely I didn’t dream it; dreams fade over time but this memory was distinct and specific. And, as far as I knew, no family friends had been in the newspaper because their toddler slaughtered them with a scalpel (that was the tike’s weapon of choice).
Then one overcast day in Washington State, my sister brought home the movie Pet Semetary (which, by the way, is also the cause of my lifelong instinct to misspell ‘cemetery’). Along came the scene where, sure enough, the reanimated toddler corpse (thank you, Stephen King) kills his mom and gets on the phone with his pop to threaten him with the act of patricide (not to be confused with Padre-cide, a term used in the MLB’s National League during the pennant race).
I don’t remember the look on my sister’s face when I breathed a huge sigh of relief and started laughing.
I’m not the only one that was affected by this stuff. Jim Henson (bless his heart, incredible artist that he was) created Sesame Street, which taught millions of children how to read and write while consequently giving them A.D.D. for the rest of their natural lives.
Still . . . at least when I hear Jim Henson’s voice I don’t have to cross myself with holy water.
