My kids like to tell a funny story about me. It happened when we were watching Twister together for the first time.
The movie, if you remember, is rated PG-13; my kids are eight and five … but they love twisters and don’t need much to suspend their disbelief, so it was a no-brainer to watch it.
Being a slightly overprotective father, I admit that I was a bit paranoid that they would hear Bill Paxton or Helen Hunt say something very adult-like that would damage their innocence; or maybe the sight of a semi-truck flying through the air while Bill and Helen’s much lighter pick-up truck stayed on the ground would confuse my children as much as it confused me. In short, I was on guard.
That’s when the action suddenly cut to the movie The Shining. It was that terrible, terrible scene where the ghostly twin girls with the abnormally large foreheads are asking poor little Danny and his Big Wheel to come play with them forever and ever and ever.
Holy Crap! I thought. They switched out the movie! The Shining scarred me forever! If my kids see the bad parts in it—the blood pouring out of the elevator, that “woman” in the bathtub—they’ll be scarred forever too! I’ve gotta save my children!
So I leapt from my comfortable position and, in one spectacularly swift movement, I blocked my kids’ line of vision to the television while simultaneously hitting the power button.
TV off, The Shining gone, Dad is a hero!
“What did you do that for?” they asked me.
“That movie,” I said. “It switched to that other movie. You can’t see that other movie.”
“No,” they said, “they were just showing it on the drive-in screen in the movie.”
“Huh?”
Apparently, in a neat trick of photography, the filmmakers had placed a brief excerpt of The Shining into Twister. By the time I turned the TV back on, The Shining was gone, another twister was coming, and my kids were laughing at me.
