TNMC

My oldest son is obsessed with Wall-E.  He has plenty of obsessions, so this by itself is not particularly remarkable.  But Wall-E takes his imagination to places and heights his other obsessions don't quite reach.  He's crazy about Herbie and Thomas the Tank Engine too.  It's not the same though.  He plays happily for hours with his Thomas trains.  Occasionally he draws them too.  He draws a lot of Herbie pictures as well.  We have every Herbie movie on DVD and have seen them all many times.  I'm not proud of this but if need be I can go into a fairly length discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the various Herbie films.  For instance, Herbie Goes Bananas is clearly the weak sister of the series, which is actually a pretty rotten thing to say about it.  The modern version, Herbie Fully Loaded, is mostly rendered tolerable by Lindsey Lohan's short skirts and tight shirts.  That's a pretty weak endorsement but when your kid watches something on an endless loop, you'll grasp at any straw you can for sanity.

But then came Wall-E.  My son liked it quite a bit when we saw it in the theater.  I didn't actually think it was a huge hit with him at first.  He complained about how sad part of the ending is.  At six years old, he doesn't go for the downer sections too much.  But after a couple weeks he was still talking about it and it began to feel like Wall-E had joined the family.  Certainly in Colin's mind, he had.

Then came the DVD and we turned a corner rather hard.  He's watched it a bunch of times since then and even watched all the extras on the DVD.  It's an excellent release by the way.  I highly recommend it.  Colin started asking me questions about the movie.  This is pretty standard.  Stuff he doesn't understand he asks me about.  But usually these are major plot points or action scenes, the sort of things a six year old mind doesn't have any experience to connect with the movie.  The Wall-E questions started taking a much different direction.  He was asking about really small details.  So small actually, that I simply couldn't answer them.  I would have to watch the section of the movie in question again to pick out the little detail he was intrigued by.

This was a bit frustrating, as I hate not having answers for his questions.  But it was also pretty thrilling because it gave me an idea of the depth to which he was examining this movie.  When he's asking what it means when Wall-E's power meter flashes because Eve touched him, we're clearly not just looking at the surface of this movie anymore.  

The reason I'm writing about this is because it hit me like a thunderbolt that I had seen this before.  Sort of.  When I first saw this dynamic, I was on the other end of it.  The movie was Star Wars and I was driving my parents mad talking about the tiniest details of that movie.  I lived and breathed Star Wars starting when I was six and it first came out.  And I can see almost the exact same thing now with my son at six.  It makes my geeky heart go all warm and fuzzy.

I'm not trying to say that Wall-E is going to be this generation's equivalent of Star Wars.  Maybe it is, maybe it isn't.  Probably not.  But I am trying to say that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree.