A Monday, in Which I Am Frightened of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang

There were two movies that scared me when I was a little kid. One of them was the 1968 Ian Fleming-penned adventure fantasy Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, starring a flying automobile and the manic dance gymnastics of Dick Van Dyke. Also, there was a villain called The Child Catcher.

Has anybody seen this recently? I started watching it this week. First time since it gave me nightmares as a kid. I thought that my memory, as often happens, magnified the terror of my early cinematic experience with it.

Nope. Here I am, an adult, watching The Child Catcher make his screen entrance, and my heart rate is shooting up. He is a genuinely malevolent and terrifying figure. Like an evil, Pinocchio-prosthetized doppelgänger of Gene Wilder's (original) Willy Wonka. Creepy, scene-stealing, Pied Piper-ish magnetism. I am not joking: the Child Catcher is one of the most overlooked villains in film history. Genuinely disturbing.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968)

It's a lovely little family film, aside from the fact that it will probably give your entire family nightmares. Some great musical numbers and a risqué and charming sensibility that makes it enjoyable for big people too. But that Child Catcher...wow. The Hannibal Lecter of family films.

Just my take. If I am on here posting at 3am, you'll know why I'm not sleeping. Now I gotta put on something light. Silence of the Lambs, perhaps.

Good night, and don't let the bedbugs bite. Although you really shouldn't have bedbugs to begin with, because they're gross.

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It was 8pm, and I hoped, and it was not the case.


It was very quiet, so I had this faint hope that our grumpy little boy might have fallen off to slumber. 

Nope. Sharpening his Star Wars pencil by lamplight.


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Cirque du Mall (The Inexhaustible Inalterable Magnificent Reality of Children to Turn Open Space Into Playground).

Cirque du Mall (The Inexhaustible Inalterable Magnificent Reality of Children to Turn Open Space Into Playground). February 22, 2013

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Where is my blue lightsaber? he asked. 

He looked at Becca. Looked at me. Laying in bed, he has the contents of his Star Wars gift bag strewn across his blanket, snuggled up in preparation for a good night's rest.

We looked at each other, then looked away, the shame too great to share. 

We couldn't tell him the truth.

His blue lightsaber, the one he was wondering about, the one that we thought would slip off his radar, the one that was wrapped in cellophane because it was a lightsaber composed of a long pretezel stick covered in frosting...

Yeah, we ate that lightsaber. 

Wow, we are awful parents.