As a very young kid. Do my kids deserve the same?

Single mom, 4 kids, north Florida, 1980’s. You do the math.

I don’t even remember when it started, when we were “allowed” to watch movies with nudity, cussing, sex, killing. They just always seemed to be there, but more than that, they were a part of our family lexicon.

“Looking good, Louis!” a regular from Dad, to which a sub-10-year-old would reflexively respond: “Feeling good, Todd!”

“Aloha, Mr. Hand!”

“Game Over Man, game over!”

See, my single mom had discovered how to shimmy a folded index card inside the seem of our cable box. If placed just right, we’d be able to get both HBO and Cinemax. We started taping any movie of interest — usually squeezing three whole films onto a single VHS tape. A mainstay of my formative years were these 3 or 4 shelves stacked with movies, and a single, type-written sheet cataloging every movie contained therein.

Now, Mom didn’t let her 6-, 8- ,9-, and 11-year-olds pop cassettes in, willy-nilly. Not at first. I can remember watching Fast Times at Ridgemont High and my dear mother walking over to the VCR to fast-forward a few minutes. “Why are you fast-forwarding?”

“We don’t need to watch that greasy guy (Mike Damone) and the girl (Stacy) [have sex in the pool house].”

So there was some censorship. But that faded with time. She was busy, I had older brothers. Before the age of ten, I was mostly free to roam the dozens and dozens of movies without mom’s red pen.

Although this new vein of movies seemed like an endless spring of boobs and shits, this was still the 80’s. A lot of what came through HBO and Max were on severe repeat. When a new movie was released in theatres, if it was any good it was given a months-long run, it moved to the cheaper theatre, was dicked around with, then priced on VHS between $50 and $100, mostly for rental stores to purchase. Maybe a month or two later it was given a well-promoted world premier on HBO, before being put into eventual rotation. After a year or six months, you might be able to find Ferris five days a week.

That was the case for movies like The Breakfast Club, Beverly Hills Cop, Trading Places, Ghostbusters, Aliens, Beetlejuice, The Goonies.

The less mainstream movies seemed to just appear on the movie channels, stuff you’d never heard of but watched because it was on at 10:00 on Friday night. It was just on. Then it was on again on Sunday, then you taped it. Troll, House II, Friday the 13th II, A Nightmare on Elm Street II, Cheech and Chong’s the Corsican Brothers. Find a cassette with a space, tape ’em, add it to the list (by now in pencil). Bloodsport, Better Off Dead, Commando.

I bring up this rotation and (relatively) small pool of movies because what eventually happened was that we had, even from the 50 or so in our library, perhaps 10 or 12 that would get heavy airtime during short stints. So my brothers and I might watch Cop II several times within a week, then pop it in during a sleepover, then again when that one friend visited who wasn’t even allowed to watch PG-13’s.

The result? A house full of pre-teens who could quote the collected works of John Hughes, Harold Ramis, and James Cameron, and could do the voices of Spicoli and some of Eddie’s barber shop guys.

It’s not the quoting, dear readers, that I’m really stopping to think on, now that I’m a father of two boys, under the age of 10. It’s everything else in those movies, everything I was allowed to see, hear, and ponder in fourth grade, what collectively formed my sense of right and wrong, how to treat people, what I valued in others, in myself, and the scenes that certainly formed and continues to form my entire sense of humor.

What I Saw as a Nine-year-old

• Mike Damone banging Stacy in the pool house (sorry mom), unprotected, eventually leading to an aborted birth
• The old man preacher demon in Poltergeist II, full stop
• JCVD, full splits
• Goose, dead
• The Duke brothers use the N word, quite brutally, Billy Ray in the stall nearby
• 63 different boobs (“Get ya ass to Maahrs”)
• Johnny, dead
• Lou Gosset, Jr. give birth to an alien baby, then croak

Suffice to say, I’m naming just a few here. But I can remember asking my dad, “Goose is gonna come back, right?” “No, bud.” Or, “why is he looking at her like that?” “Because he wants to do kisses, bud.” Or repeating “Hostage Crisis” (Chunk) with zero idea what it meant, and being told, simply, don’t say that.

My personality became a meld of Gary (Weird Science), Venkman, Akeem, Bender, and Clark Griswold. I repeated lines, aped voices, and during my seventh birthday party at Burger King, rubbed two burger buns over my cheeks, sort of like what Rick Moranis does with pizza in Ghostbusters.

With my dad out of the house and my mom working and driving 4 kids all over creation, Florida, these movies truly were raising me. I should add here that we watched a lot of movies, a shitload. Hours every day and night, focused watching, or background. They were surrogate examples of how older humans acted and spoke and related.

But here’s how my kids are different:

1. Different time.
2. More movies. 1000x more, always available, huge supply of kids’ movies, many screens.
3. Different movies. Mighty Ducks (PG): “Oreo line?” or “That’ll make great bathroom reading.” The Goonies (PG): “Oh shit, what?” or “We’d be pissin’ in our faces.”
4. Two parents in the household, only 2 kids, not 4.

So should I allow my kids the same experiences I had, at the same age? Or have we learned better, are there more choices, is there less excuse?

Last month, I told my seven-year-old there was a movie where some kids go looking for pirate treasure, with lots of booby traps. We started watching, and my immediate heli-parent knee-jerk kicked in: piss? penis? shit? drugs? Chunk’s hand in a blender? But then my muscles relaxed. Wait, I watched this at seven, a dozen times. I was spouting “Heeey you guuuys,” in second grade, and 15 years later dressed as Brand for Halloween. Look how I turned out.

Sure, I didn’t understand half of what I was seeing, couldn’t comprehend that Bender’s dad was the one who’d purposely cigared his son’s forearm, or that Victor Maitlin was trafficking cocaine. But I still picked up so much of who I became from these 80’s movies, because I was allowed to watch them waaay before the prescribed 17 years, or 13, or…well, the PG rating was obviously a joke back then, too.

I suppose I’ll allow my sons to do likewise, perhaps with a little of my mom’s editorial pen when it comes to naked stuff, or when Bishop gets halved in Aliens. And eventually, I don’t know, maybe I’m not in the room and my kid decides to put on Weird Science and gets the whole earful.

And if one day I get called into the principal’s and told my third grader just said “You dick!” to his teacher, I’ll be amply mortified, and corrective, all the while thinking, in the back of my head: well done, son. Well done.