Bad Faery

Saturday, August 04, 2007

You could be happy here…

Today’s quote of the day on the IMDb was from one of my favourite ever movies:

“You could be happy here, I could take care of you. I wouldn’t let anybody hurt you.”
E.T. The Extra Terrestrial

I was almost the same age as Elliot, just a little younger and that was probably one of the reasons I loved it so much. Here was a child my own age that I could relate to. And having exactly the sort of adventure that I dearly wished I could have in the midst of my sleepy rural childhood.

E.T. has another significance in my life. My family bought its first VCR (that’s video cassette recorder to you DVD/Digital media generation people) that year and the first video I ever saw was a pirated copy of E.T.

The VCR was a front loading JVC which survived well into my teens. Apparently planned obsolescence wasn’t quite so prevalent back in the good ol’ eighties!

The following year my mum bought me and my sister two terrapins. My sister, in a wild burst of imagination, called hers Terry the Terrapin (our uncle Terry was not impressed in the slightest to have a tiny smelly green turtle named after him!). The first time I picked my one up, he stretched his neck right up just like E.T. and that’s what I ended up calling him. And while E.T. the movie may never have got a sequel, my terrapin did as it died after only a couple of weeks and was quickly replaced by E.T. number 2.

Our terrapins thrived for years, growing from tiny little things less than an inch big to about 6 or 7 inches large. At that point they were getting too big for us to care for them properly (my sister was long gone at that point) and me and my brother found a new home for them with a terrapin enthusiast whose own venerable old terrapin had recently died. I don’t know what Terry and E.T.’s eventual fates were but I’m glad that they went to a good home.

In between times my mother died, my father left, my sister moved away, my grandmother died, my brother left but that old JVC VCR? It kept on going, right till I was about 18 and leaving too.

I finally did get to see E.T. officially in non-pirated form at the cinema when it was re-released back in 2002 and let’s just say that my special edition DVD has been watched more than once.

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