50 Days 50 Films - #41 "The Neverending Story" (Wolfgang Petersen)

When I was a kid we didn't have cable, and I don't remember my parents taking me to see a lot of movies. I'm sure they did, at least sometimes. The ones I remember being drug to, though, weren't necessarily meant for kids. I saw "Amadeus" in the theater when I was like six years old, for example, and I distinctly remember having no idea what the fuck was going on with that guy.

This wasn't always the case, of course. Mom and Dad (somewhat grudgingly, I suspect) did take me to a few kid's movies. I'm pretty sure we went to see "Return of the Jedi," and I vividly remember seeing "E.T." at the DeVargas Mall theater in Santa Fe and crying more poor little eyes out. But these were more the exception than the rule, and so consequently there were a whole mess of 80s kid movies that dominated popular culture at the time but with which I was only vaguely familiar. "Star Wars" wasn't really my thing, and I would only really discover Indiana Jones when I was a little older. And, with the exception of "Robin Hood," Disney films played almost zero part in my burgeoning cinematic consciousness. 

What I did have, however, was my dad's friend Louis, who had one of those behemothic early 80s satellite dishes in his back yard. He didn't get HBO for whatever reason, but he did get The Movie Channel, which at that point (early-mid 80s) was already kind of an also-ran. And he used to record movies for me on his VCR.

So, by and large, my favorite kids films of the 80s tended not to be blockbusters but rather the slightly off-kilter, older, and foreign ones that I assume TMC could afford to pay the licensing fees for. I never saw Ralph Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings" adaptation or even Bass & Rankin's "The Hobbit" cartoon, but I just about wore out my copy of the B&R follow-up "The Return of the King" (the one where John Huston did the voice of Gandalf). The original "Planet of the Apes" was a mind blower to me, the Dabney Coleman-starring "Cloak & Dagger" was a perennial favorite, and the Australian cartoon/live-action mashup "Dot and the Kangaroo" pretty much never left my VCR.

The king of them all, however, was Wolfgang Petersen's 1984 classic "The Neverending Story."

I was a lonely, bullied kid who read too much and spent way too much time inside my own imagination. In other words, I was Bastian. I don't think I can overstate the degree to which I identified with that character. And that (the movie seemed to be saying) was okay. Imagination is good. It made me special. It might even help me save the universe.

Lack of imagination (such as I perceived I saw in all the football, skateboarding and country music obsessed douchebags I spent elementary school with) was... well, The Nothing.

I wanted to be Atreyu. I wanted to fly around on my own luck dragon and — in some fundamental way — I believed that was possible.

I wanted to be the hero.

You can be the hero, the movie seemed to say.

Just keep reading those books, keep dreaming, and keep your head in the clouds and your feet off the ground.

 Say my name, Bastian.

I rewatched the movie on a nice, brand new Blu Ray disc a few years ago, and the impact it had on me as an adult was immediate and visceral. It transformed me right back into that same little kid watching the same worn-out VHS copy over and over and over again. This is a movie that lodged hooks in me and never let go.

Objectively, I would say it still holds up pretty well. The special effects are better than you might imagine, and the story is more coherent than I suspected it would be to a 30-something year old man.

But some of those images — Artax sinking into the Swamps of Sadness, the red-eyed Gmork exploding from the depths of his cave, the wise but ominous Morla (seen above), the Ivory Tower floating in space amongst the asteroids — are as haunting to me today as they were back then.

I simply love this movie. There's nothing much more to be said about it.