On The Land Before Time

When I was in preschool, The Land Before Time was THE SHIT. It was, if memory serves, the biggest movie that had ever come out ever, at least to my five-year-old mind. The thing was, I didn't really have all that much interest in it.

Until all of my friends started talking about it. They talked about how amazing it was. They described all of the characters, and I didn't get it when the girls in my class kept saying "Yep yep yep!" They were all scared of Sharptooth, but that just made him the coolest of all of them (we were boys, after all). And most of all, whenever I told them I hadn't seen it, they implored me to see it.

I caved. I suddenly really wanted to see it. You have to remember that this was 1988, a year before Tim Burton's Batman was released and I learned what it was like to really, truly want to see a movie. As far as 5-year-old me was concerned, The Land Before Time must surely be the be-all and end-all of movies, and I knew this because all of my friends had told me so. I begged my parents to take me. Begged. And they wouldn't have it. Which, of course, meant that I would just beg even more and even more incessantly.

Then, one Saturday, they had a surprise planned for me. They were going to take me to see The Land Before Time. A joyful day for Joe, right? Well, not really, at that point. For some reason, I didn't want to see it anymore. I think, looking back on it, that the peer pressure that had made me want to see it to begin with had worn off. So when my parents told me that they were taking me to see it, I cried - cried - with not wanting to see it.

Boy, did I get in trouble that day.

Twenty-two years later, Jennie and I watched The Land Before Time. She was shocked that I'd never seen it, and I was pretty excited. And it was a decent, if not really, really short, movie. But I'll never be able to think of that movie without first thinking of what a total brat I was as a five-year-old. I can only imagine - and probably apologize for - how I was for Batman.