The next big movie I could not wait to see was The Road Warrior. I had never seen or even heard of Mad Max, but the commercials looked so cool. I was so excited to see that movie, and this time there was no school program to interfere. Unfortunately fate still conspired against me. My dad was a little unstable sometimes, and he had this cockatiel that he was absolutely in love with. He had taught it a few tricks (biting on command, which he thought was hilarious) and a few words, and he was more proud of that bird than I had ever seen. As much as Dad loved that bird, I hated it. I mentioned the biting, Dad thought it was the height of hilarity when he would tell the bird to bite me and it would nip my ear. I would get yelled at for using the record player, but when the bird stood on a spinning record and scratched it to oblivion that was cute. And the night of The Road Warrior, about 20 minutes into the movie, the bird suddenly got very sick. Dad freaked out and insisted this an all hands on deck situation. As a pre-teen kid I'm not sure what I was supposed to do exactly. Dad crushed up Tylenol and tried to feed it to the bird. He found an emergency vet, something that wasn't common back then, and we prepared to load up and go. I protested loudly, and got yelled at for not caring about the bird. The bird died before we left and we ended up holding an impromptu funeral for it, causing me to miss the rest of the movie. I didn't get to see it until a few years later when we got a vcr.
Sunday nights were great, because that was the night The Wonderful World of Disney aired. Sometimes they would play nature documentaries, which were fun but not what I hoped for. Usually they would play one of the live action Disney movies, which I always enjoyed. Over the course of many Sundays I enjoyed The Shaggy Dog movies, the Herbie the Love Bug movies, Treasure Island or the Kurt Russell movies like The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes. The jackpot nights though were the nights they would show one of the animated movies. It always felt like a huge deal if they showed Snow White or Sleeping Beauty. There was no way to see these movies at the time unless they re-released them into theaters, so the rare opportunity to see them on television was a huge deal. The one that felt like the biggest deal, and is still one of my favorites, is Fantasia. I also got to feed my burgeoning love of horror and sci-fi when they would show things like Something Wicked This Way Comes and Escape to Witch Mountain. That feeling of excitement when you finally got to see a movie you had heard or read about is something that was mortally wounded by cable and home video, and completely put to rest by streaming.
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