Saturday, December 11, 2010

Flying Monkeys

In order to truly enjoy some movies it is required of the viewer to suspend all judgment, quiet the critic, silence the cynic and allow the gullible child to eat all the sweet nonsense that it wants. The Wizard of Oz is one such movie that truly tempts the child in the viewer.

Many years ago, at the still gullible age of thirty-two, I recall watching the Wizard of Oz. You no doubt recall the scene where the Wicked Witch of the North was watching, through her crystal ball, Dorothy and her crew advancing through a wicked forest and she instructs her hoard of flying monkeys to snatch Dorothy (oh, and her little dog too) and bring her to the castle. The monkeys launched themselves and swooped down, beat the stuffing out of the Scare-Crow, terrified the Cowardly Lion, and molested the Tin-Man. I must have suspended my judgment for a little too long and to too great a degree because after watching it I was firmly convinced of the existence of flying monkeys. If there are flying fish, flying squirrels, flying lizards, why then not flying monkeys?

I distinctly recall sitting at my desk at work and thinking to myself…”Yeah, I gotta get me one of those flying monkeys! That would be pretty neat!” I played with the idea for several days but, slowly, reality eroded my child like frame of reference and intruded, until finally, I snapped out of it. “Hey!…What?…Wow! What could I have been thinking? There’s no such thing as a flying monkey!”, was the piercing conclusion of that idyllic bubble in my life. What a shame, how sad,…there are no flying monkeys.

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