The Parent Trap

Ah, innocence. Once upon a time, even our most troubled of starlets were just wee littles children struggling to break into the business under the crow-like watch of their obsessive stage parents. Yes, those were the days. When 11-year olds could be goaded and herded to open modeling calls and Jell-O commercial auditions, their parents seeking their vicarious big break. And we wonder why child actors grow up to have all manners of complexes.

Regardless of her current lot in life, back in 1998 Lindsay Lohan was a cute little befreckled redhead with a hell of a British dialogue coach. She starred in the ultimate suspend-your-disbelief-or-exit-the-theater-now movie, playing a set of intercontinental twins separated at birth. A remake of the 1961 original of the same title, The Parent Trap pushed the limits of reason with its endless array of uncanny coincidences. Though the film wasn't winning any medals for sense-making, it had a certain charm in its ludicrousness.



Lohan plays dual roles as Hallie Parker and Annie James, two ordinary 11-year old girls living on either side of the Atlantic ocean. Hallie lives with her single dad (Dennis Quaid as a totally believable DILF), a vineyard owner in Napa Valley. Annie lives with her single mother, Elizabeth (the late talented Natasha Richardson), a glamorous British wedding gown designer. Naturally, neither of the girls knows much about their mysteriously absent second parent, but conveniently has one half of a torn picture of the parent they've never met. I think we can all see where this is going.

Here's where things get a little dicey on straight-up believability. Miraculously, despite the incredibly vast physical proximity, both Hallie and Annie are sent by their respective caretakers to Camp Walden for Girls. In a series of none-so-friendly encounters, the two quickly become rivals, challenging one another to fencing matches and high-stakes poker games. You know, like all 11-year old girls do. The usual.


No one seems to say much about the fact that the two are absolutely, undeniably identical. Sure, the British one's got a stuffy long haircut and the considerably more with-it Northern Californian sports pierced ears, but other than that they're two identical girls separated by an accent. Not one of their friends or counselors remarks to their respective twin pal, "Hey, have you noticed that girl is your twin sister? Maybe instead of feuding, you two should make some effort to sort this whole thing out."

That would be too easy. Then again, the counselors seem notably absent from the film. I can only imagine the liability issues the camp's insurance company faced for lack of proper supervision. For such a reputable camp, the girls seem to
be pretty much on their own.

Continuing on this poorly-supervised theme, the camp staff becomes so unspeakably fed up with their feuding twin charges that they send them to (gasp!) the isolation cabin. Yes, that's right. The punishment at this camp is going to some podunk cabin with the person you hate to duke it out completely unsupervised. Oh, and you get to bring scissors and needles! Makes perfect sense, right? Good, I'm glad you're coming with me on that one.

After a freakishly long period of time without questioning their obvious physical same-ness, the two warm to one another and begin discussing their lives. They find not only that their birthdays are on the same day, but that their half-pictures of their respective mystery parent fit together to form a full picture. Who would've thought? I know I was shocked. A mischevious plan to switch places is quickly hatched and since no adults have stopped in to check on the two, they're able to get away with crazy shenanigans like cutting each other's hair and piercing ears in a horribly painful needle-and-apple manner.

Oh, and I can't leave out my favorite part in which Hallie has to master the handshake that Annie does with her butler. Did I not mention she had a butler? Because she's English, you see. In American movies they all have butlers. Anyway, the spectacular handshake goes a little something like this (performed by Hallie in disguise, who passes the butler test with flying colors):



Both girls do some careful stepping to try to fit in with their newly acquired parents, and generally do pretty well minus a minor misstep here or there. Okay, so Annie's fam is tad flabbergasted to hear her professional-grade assessment of the dinner wine, and Hallie's brood is marginally suspicious of her suddenly proper manners, but all in all things seem to be going pretty okay. That is until we meet the obviously gold-digging Meredith, the pretty young thing dad Nick is planning on marrying. Because in Disney movies we can't just let people make their own major life decisions, the girls decide this would be a great time for an intervention via the good ol' twin switcheroo.

The twins scheme that their parents will have to see each other during the exchange process and will obviously fall madly and deeply back in love. Children with separating parents, take note: just make your estranged parental units switch you with your twin from across the globe in a grand elaborate plan. It's a pretty airtight method.

The twins along with their house-help cohorts plan a recreation of their parents' meeting on a cruise ship. Everything goes swimmingly (boatingly?), with both remarking that they remain hazy on the details of their split in the first place. Unfortunately for Hallie and Annie, their parents don't immediately reconcile their disparate lives in a wave of passionate impulse but rather more mundanely decide the kids can go visit each other from time to time. Obviously a second-tier backup scheme was necessary to clinch this reunion, so the twins refused to tell their parents who was who until they took them on a family camping trip.

The vile Meredith tags along and mom Liz backs out at the last minute, making for an interesting crew. The girls of course do everything in their power to completely and totally piss her off:




Meredith gets so angry over their antics that she demands Nick choose between herself and his daughters, an ultimatum that obviously expels her from the family. Naturally, Elizabeth and Nick get back together, and everyone lives happily ever after. Even the butler and housekeeper, who despite their mildly ambiguous respective sexualities also end up engaged by the end credits. Altogether now: awwww.

Sure, the movie's not necessarily the most realistic story in the world, but it delivers the fantastical goods in pure Disney fashion. The all's-well-that-ends-well predictability makes the movie satisfyingly unbelievable. Overall, it's a fun film, but more importantly it provides us with a handy time capsule of little Linds so we can remember her as she was: cute, freckly, and according to the following interview, loving the attention. Yikes. That certainly sounds like some dark foreshadowing:

Nickelodeon GUTS

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I've said it before and I'll say it again: the 90s were a simpler time. An age before text messaging, tweeting, and facebooking. A time when nations put aside their difference to battle in vaguely athletic harness-dependent events. A time when the greatest feat a kid could aspire to was to climb a giant heap of neon-lit scrap metal. A time when Mike O'Malley was still young and good-looking and not forever irritating me with his incessant plugs for Time Warner digital cable.

Yes, those were simpler times. Oh, how my friends and I yearned to be contestants on Nickelodeon GUTS. We were even willing to overlook that gross foamy yellow mouthguard we'd be required to wear. How's that for compromise? All we wanted was for British referee Mo to describe us by our chosen nicknames (I was partial to The Raging Tornado myself) and to describe our position on the coveted leaderboard.

Was that really so much to ask?

Unsurprisingly, this ambition never became a reality. Unless you count my boyfriend and I dressing up as a GUTS contestant and Mo respectively for Halloween. But I suppose you probably wouldn't, would you now.

There was nothing more I wanted in the world than to become one of these famed child athletes, immortalized for posterity in VHS form:



Unfortunately for me, the correct answer to "Do-do-do-do you have it?" was a resounding no. For three lucky kids per episode, though, this was their chance to shine. Literally. That snow that pelted them from the Aggro Crag was super sparkly.

Nickelodeon's GUTS ran from 1992-1995, with endless rerunning throughout the decade. The show was a sort of kid-based takeoff of the then immensely popular American Gladiators. Three kids competed against one another, clad respectively in their representative color of blue, red, or purple. Before each event got under way, individual contestants were interviewed (later, they aired pre-taped segments) in a little feature they liked to call "Spill Your Guts!"

The athletic events themselves took place in the Extreme(!) Arena, and were sometimes loosely related to actual sports. More often, they were elaborate tests of athleticism made possible through the use of harnesses, mouthguards, and well-placed safety nets. There were obstacle courses, wave pool events, and all sorts of extreme(!)-named events for the players to compete in. Mike O' Malley narrated, saying ridiculous things like, "He took to the water like a porpoise!" Then, for the official stuff, we cut to Mo.

Mo was a British referee/officiant who explained the leaderboards, points, and made official rulings on if a kid's toe was over the line. She also got to say official-sounding phrases like "Players will start at the sound of my whistle". First placers earned 300 points, second earned 200, and third earned a measly 100. Luckily for those kids, there were only 3 competitors, meaning everyone gets a medal.

Our good pals Mo and the then immensely handsome Mike O'Malley. Am I alone in this childhood crush or what?

Of course, these events were fun on their own but nothing in comparison to the awesomeness of the ultimate culminating event. The Aggro Crag (succeeded by the Mega Crag and later the Super Aggro Crag) was a mountain-type structure constructed of what we can only assume were dangerous sharp-edged deconstructed Nickelodeon sets.



Contestants were to activate the "actuators", which really just meant they were supposed to turn on some crappy touch light as they bounded up the almighty Crag. You have to admit, "actuators" sounds way cooler. Each third of the Crag was swathed in colored light corresponding to each player's representative color. This sounds like a pretty easy if completely unnecessary task, but the show threw in some special effects-type obstacles to sweeten things up. Avalanches, glittery snowstorms, flashes of lightning, and even nuclear flying crystals. Yep, that's right: nuclear flying crystals. Just like climbing a real mountain.

The first kid to the top of the Aggro Crag received 725 point, most often nullifying all of those other pointless preceding events. There was an eviable awards ceremony in which the competitors received their inevitable medals and the gold medal-winner was given a piece of the Aggro Crag. Admittedly, this plutonium-esque hunk of plastic looked pretty dissimilar to the Crag itself, but it was still arguably the most coveted piece of neon green plastic around.

To illustrate the desirability of taking home a piece of the crag, do a little Google search for something along the lines of "buy a piece of the aggro crag". On eBay, the site even comes up with alternative search suggestions for you, implying that numerous people search for "piece of the crag" and then follow that up with "GUTS aggro crag." These now-grown ups are still dying to get their hands on a piece of the crag. You know what they say: if you can't beat 'em, buy 'em.


In 1994, Nickelodeon produced an Olympic-style spinoff of the show entitled Global Guts, pitting kids from different countries against one another in a battle to prove superiority at Extreme Dodgeball and Wave Pool Kayaking. It's a competitive field, I know, so these segments were pretty tense. Kids came from places like Israel and Kazakhstan to prove their worth and earn a piece of the almighty Crag (by now, in Super form). Not only did this did the international competition add a new element to the show (particularly when we battled the forces of former communism on the rock climbing wall), the winner got to do a sweet flag-flying victory lap as well. Talk about doing your country proud.

Sure, Nickelodeon brought back a version of it as My Family's Got GUTS in 2008, but the era had passed. For the children of the 90s, that is. Those of us with as-of-yet-unrealized dreams of bringing home a piece of the Crag will suffer forever from unrequited semi-athletic accomplishments. Unless one of you happens to find a piece of it on eBay, that is.

Toy Story

It's tough to imagine a time when computers didn't reign over every and any thing. Though the computer animation-less past seems distant, there was once a time before we bowed down to our benevolent microchipped masters. While now computer images are pretty ubiquitous in animation, just fifteen years ago it was a new and innovative technology seeking to revolutionize animation as we know it. Oh, and to tell us stories about cowboys and astronauts. Mainly the cowboys and astronauts thing.

While now Pixar is a booming enterprise churning out hit after adorable, heartwarming computer animated hit, back in the early 90s they were still in the startup category. Sure, it had been around 10-odd years or so, but it had yet to give us a full length feature film. In a decade that gave us Disney gold like Aladdin and The Lion King, expectations for animated movies were riding particularly high.

Luckily, the good people at Pixar delivered the goods. Pixar garnered some attention through their Oscar-winning short Tin Toy, a computer-animated film featuring a poor little abused tin soldier named Tinny. Tinny hides from his frighteningly abusive baby master and finds a slew of other quivering, humorously traumatized toys. Thus began the initial spark of the idea for Toy Story, which was at first set to star our pal Tinny. In the likely case that you've never seen the 1988 Pixar short film, here's your chance:



Pretty impressive for 1988, no? Sure, everything's a little wobbly and the action's a little choppy, but overall a valiant triumph for our friends at Pixar. Once the deal was signed to develop a feature-length film, producers updated their initial conceptions of the characters and Tinny morphed into the flashier astronaut Buzz Lightyear. All seemed to be going swimmingly for the Pixar folks.

Until, of course, big bad Disney came in and crushed their adorably lifelike computer-animated dreams. The script was going through a too-many-cooks scenario, suffering through innumerable rewrites and changes. In 1993, Pixar presented to Disney series of storyboards backed by a rough soundtrack. The work-in-progress featured seriously hostile and bitterly sarcastic incarnations of Buzz and Woody. Not exactly the kind of characters you'd go home and beg your parents for expensive video games of their further exploits.

Needless to say, Disney hated it. In fact, they really, really hated it. So much so that they put the kibosh on production. After some begging and pleading, the Pixar team was given an ultimatum: turn this film into something that will put butts in the seats or you're out of the game.

Original storyboard panel from Toy Story. We can only assume this frame depicts the original a-hole Woody.

Disney was also clear about its aims as financial guardian angel: the movie better be a serious cash cow. Disney was seeing falling ticket sales and saw computer animation as a potential vehicle to rev up their sales. One of Disney's major requests (and criticisms of the first draft) was that the movie appeal to both children and adults. Back at the drawing board, Pixar developed quirky little personalities for a slew of toys baby boomers (read: the people buying the tickets) would relate to: GI Joes, Slinkys, Mr. Potato Heads, and so on. With a renewed sense of purpose, Pixar set out to get back on track with the project.

Scrapping much of the initial work, Pixar's animators and writers worked diligently to make the movie stop sucking so horribly. Enlisting the virgin voice talents of Tom Hanks and Tim Allen, the movie began shaping up. By the time of its 1995 release, the film had been sufficiently desuckified and far surpassed Disney's expectations by becoming a runaway success.

After so many reformulations, rewrites, and re-animations, Pixar somehow managed to pull it off. The movie told the story of Woody, a walking, talking cowboy toy who reigned supreme as favorite toy in Andy's bedroom.



Unfortunately, someone a bit more heroic was lurking in the wrapped birthday gifts. Woody is displaced by Buzz Lightyear, a newer, flashier astronaut toy. Really, much flashier. I mean, the guy had lights. How do you even compete with that when your main claim to fame is a pull-string with a few crappy recorded phrases? As you can imagine Woody becomes incredibly jealous, aiming to eliminate Buzz and once again reclaim his throne as top toy.




Meanwhile, horrifyingly terrifying toy torturer kid next door Sid is blowing up army men and reconstructing doll/robot hybrids. Buzz vows they will give him his comeuppance, but the other toys are justifiably skeptical. I mean, did you see Sid? That kid is scary, man.



Woody and Buzz get lost on the way to a family outing to Pizza Planet, but manage to stow away in a delivery truck. Buzz mistakes the claw machine for his spaceship and the two are stuck inside. They are unluckily captured by the sadistic Sid, and forced to bear their fate with plastered-on painted grins.



As you can imagine, hilarious antics ensue and the pair are forced to buddy up to battle Sid Vicious and his evil dog Scud. Buzz finds out he's just a toy, not the real Buzz Lightyear as he'd originally imagined. Yadda Yadda Yadda, heartwarming bonding and a daring rescue mission later, the toys are again safe and sound in Andy's house. A happy ending, minus a new puppy with untapped toy torturing potential.

The film was an enormous critical and financial success and spawned an extremely popular sequel. So popular, in fact, that its financial input outstripped the original's by over $100 million. Now that's popular. And lucrative! Color me impressed, then computer animate me so I can get in on some of this cash.

Though Pixar has since moved on to new things, our Toy Story pals are far from forgotten. In fact, they will be returning to a theater near you sometime around summer 2010. Here's the trailer to hold you over until then. They're hyping it up a lot, which is hopeful. This extremely long-awaited sequel comes so late in the game that Andy is headed to college. My, how the computer animated years fly by.