Morning

¶ Mamma: I’m off to the movies — to see Mamma Mia!, if the winds are propitious (if the line, if any, isn’t too long, if the projectionist got a good night’s sleep, &c &c).

A great summer summer weekend to all — stay as cool as you can!

Oremus…

Morning, cont’d

§ Mamma. We did not see this show on Broadway; it wasn’t until I saw the trailers for the movie that I had any idea of what the show was about. Aside from one tune, “Does Your Mother Know,” ABBA left me cold when it didn’t actually repel. ABBA was actually one of the phenomena — Hanna-Barbera cartoons were another — that started me thinking that the term “popular culture” is a massive oxymoron, a kind of linguistic cardiac event.

Such snobbery kept me from even thinking of seeing Toy Story when it came out thirteen years ago. Even if the name of Pixar had been plastered all over it, the association with Disney would have been fatal to my interest. Now that I’ve just finished David A Price’s The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company, I feel thoroughly vindicated. The good folk at Pixar have revived the humanistic potential of animation that was lost at Disney round about the time of Fantasia.

I saw Toy Story yesterday for the first time. Loved it.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 9:00 am and is filed under Lively Arts, The Hours. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.