Now 12 1/2 years and I stand by this statement.
I was deluded to think “final time” meant something. I eagerly away this thread’s disappearance and re-emergence next time.
Shut up, you idiot. Don’t make a fool of yourself on the internet.
I’ve been following this thread with interest for years. For what it’s worth, I was born in 1978. I never saw the movie in theaters, but saw it on TV several times in the 80s and 90s, and never saw an ending with Susan becoming young.
I think it’s very plausible that people are conflating the ending of “14 Going on 30.” To those saying they don’t remember the movie - I didn’t remember it just by the title, but when I saw it mentioned here, I looked it up and realized that I did see it as a TV movie - I think it was part of “The Wonderful World of Disney.” I just hadn’t remembered what the title was.
This is a bit off-track, but I’d like to give an example of how memory can be faulty, and how it’s at least possible people are conflating Big with 14 Going on 30, despite the fact that some of the latter film’s ending don’t match people’s memories.
So this is my faulty memory story: For decades I’ve had a memory of a movie I saw as a kid in the early 80s. I distinctly remembered a teenage boy seeing something fall out of the sky. He approaches the fallen object, saying, “Woah, a meteorite!” That stuck in my head, because as a 4-year-old (or thereabouts) I had heard the word meteor but not meteorite and wondered what he meant. As I remembered it, the teenager then opens up the meteorite. Then the next day he is in his bathroom, looking at his chest, which is covered in green mold, presumably from the meteorite. He looks at his shower/bath wall, which is also covered in mold. This was all shown very seriously, with little dialogue.
Last year, after much Googling, I managed to track down what I thought was the movie: Creepshow. It was an anthology of different horror stories written (or co-written) by Stephen King. When I saw the intro scene, about a boy getting in trouble with his dad for reading scary magazines, I though, “Yes! This is the right movie.” That opening scene had also been in my memory for years - I hadn’t realized it was from the same movie as the meteorite/mold story.
The first anthology story didn’t ring any bells. Then comes the one I had been waiting for. Except, wait a minute, it wasn’t exactly as I remembered:
-No teenager. It was an adult played by Stephen King.
-He never says “woah, a meteorite.” When it falls, he says something like, “I’m dipped in shit if that ain’t a meteor!” He says this right after seeing the object fall, without having approached it yet.
-The whole story, while creepy, was played for laughs
-The bathroom scene had plenty of dialogue. It certainly wasn’t silent.
So what’s the answer? Did Creepshow film the story with a teenager first (which I saw) and then scrap it for a King-starred version? Or, more likely, I simply misremembered the scene for these past 3 decades, perhaps conflating it with some other movie in which a teenage boy finds a meteorite. I’m inclined to go with the second explanation. Memory is faulty, which is why I still think people are thinking of 14 Going on 30, despite the fact that the dialog and/or character hair color doesn’t match their memory exactly.
No, the point I was making is that your memory sucks and can’t be trusted.
I saw that movie, it played out exactly like that. Except, what the teenager really said was, “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K,” just before climbing into a silver DeLorean and running over some bodybuilder guy on a motorcycle who’s looking for a waitress named Sarah Connor.
Everyone – by which I mean everyone, I really don’t want to have to read the entire 8-page thread and call people out by name – pls. keep the discussion civil.
Thanks,
twickster, Cafe Society moderator
Your unwarranted exasperation aside, what you are saying is that you don’t actually have an example of anyone who claims to possess a tape of the scene in question, correct?
Interesting that when it suits his purpose, another person in this thread claimed he can only “count a dozen” people who claim to have seen the ending, yet, when it suits your purpose, you claim there are “many people” who claim to have seen it.
So which is it, people? Do a lot of people claim to have seen it, or do only a small number of people claim to have seen it? Can’t be both.
What is your basis for the claim that “no one has ever produced a record of it”? Because you don’t find it on YouTube? Isn’t this just another variant of the “It’s not on YouTube, therefore it doesn’t exist”, argument?
There is no physical evidence for the existence of the alternate ending. There is some non-specific number of people who thought they had seen the alternate ending, and did not change their mind when reminded of a scene from another movie, and did not first recall this memory based on prompting with a description of the alternate ending.
And we are challenged to prove it doesn’t exist?
Who “challenged” you? I’m not sure why everyone is being so confrontational about this. Until last week, I had always thought the movie ended with Susan becoming a child again. I saw it once shortly after it came out, with that ending. Then I saw it years later on television, and the ending was missing. At the time, I assumed the television station had edited it out. Those are the only two times I can recall ever seeing the movie.
Fast forward to last week. I see a thread titled “Anyone else remember the alternate ending to “Big”?” Remembering that the ending (which at this point I still believe to be “the” ending) was cut out of the television showing, I am intrigued by the thread title, and click on it. I discover it is a very old thread, and spend not a small amount of time skimming through it. To my amazement, I discover that what I thought was the “cut” version is what most people consider to be the “normal” version, and that there apparently has been a bit of discussion about it over the years on the internet.
Seeing that the issue didn’t seem to be resolved, I posted my recollection of the movie, in keeping with the question asked in the thread title. Frankly, I feel that I have been mercilessly attacked for that. I’ve been called a “truther”; I’ve been told that my memory “sucks”, and then people started getting rude;) If anyone is being “challenged”, it is me. That’s fine - I’ve got a pretty thick skin so I can take it. But how you could turn that around and claim I am challenging YOU, I don’t know. Sure, if you claim to have proven that ending never existed, I’m going to examine your “proof”. But I never “challenged” you to do so.
That’s life on the Dope. Don’t let it get to you.
Reversing the challenge is technique Houdini used, but in this case all I’m doing is wondering what the argument is about. Feel free to go find the alternate ending if you can, a lot of people will have to eat crow if you do. In the mean time reasonably skeptical people will think it’s most likely the alternate ending does not exist.
Well that’s a copout. You wrote:
“However people claim that these VHS and DVD tapes exists right now”
If you’re going to make that claim, and make it central to your argument, then you ought to be able to back it up with more than “do your own research”. I don’t have a copy of the tape, because I rented it back in the late 1980s. It has probably long since been worn out and thrown away. To assume that, if the ending ever existed, there must be tons of people holding copies of it in their hot little hands and inexplicably refusing to post them on YouTube, based on a small unsourced paragraph in IMDB, is ridiculous.
Well it’s not inconsistent with your theory, but it certainly doesn’t prove it. We could all recount our recollection of the plot of Gone With the Wind, and I imagine there would be slight and maybe even substantial differences in our versions, but we still would all be remembering a movie that does in fact exist.
I’m not. It’s really life on the internet. People hide behind anonymity and behave in ways they never would in a face-to-face situation.
Search me. You all started the argument, why don’t you tell me?
I would love to. Not an easy task, though, if it’s something that only existed on VHS tapes in some markets in the the 1980s.
You’re entitled to your opinion, but I disagree that “being a skeptic” would automatically lead one to that conclusion. Frankly, some of you have made some pretty fallacious arguments that hardly befit a true skeptic. A skeptic would be open to the possibility that another ending was filmed, not doggedly insist that it’s impossible.
Cop out? Here’s the relevent text:
I’m not sure how it could be more clear. I personally still own videos from the 80s. Plus, my point was to refute the argument of why it was impossible for the clip to have shown up on Youtube. The point was that clip was on home release, so it’s not improbable that it could have ended up there. That was your argument I was responding to.
Who said prove? You said inconsistent details (Bah!) meant nothing. I presented a scenario where it was meaningful. Don’t move the goal posts and blame me for missing them.
Lost the edit window:
You make my argument for me:
I do not believe those tapes exist. I believe any claim to that ending is false. If those tapes exist it highly likely that by now one would have showed up on ebay, garage sale, in someone’s old tape collection etc. The claim is only an unsupported, unsourced IMDB paragraph. No credible, sourced cite that claim to have the alternate ending can be found.
On the contrary, if it was something that existed on VHS tapes released anywhere in the 1980’s it would have shown up on Youtube by now. There are plenty of websites that track alternate endings, lost scenes, outtakes of old movies and for a major hit like this those would have been found, digitized, and uploaded. You seem to think this would be hard to achieve, but I’m not sure why. Far more obscure lost tapes have been found in far less time.
I took it to mean that only a relatively small number of people are actually claiming to have seen this ending. Yet if it appeared in theaters or on home video there would be thousands or millions of people who have seen it - but none of them have come forward with any copy of the footage.
Yes, I thought that point was clear as well. In this thread we’ve had posters claim to have seen the classroom ending of Big in the theater, on television, and on video, and in the US and several other countries. So if the memories of these posters are accurate, this alternate version of Big must have been pretty widely available. It couldn’t have been something just shown to test audiences, for instance.
Back on page 2, we had a claim that the classroom ending was included in a Christmas 2011 broadcast of the movie on national television in the UK. Another poster found a website with the TV listings for Channel 4 that day, and Big apparently did air that evening. We have only one claim that this broadcast included the classroom ending, but if that claim is accurate then there must have been thousands and thousands of people in the UK who saw this ending less than three years ago.
No, not really. What you’ve failed to do is grasp the general tilt of the discussion here. Your posts fall into the category I call “high school debate”: instead of arguing the actual meat of whatever’s being discussed, you meticulously dissect the logic of each sentence and seem to think it’s a victory when you catch us in a generalization or a logical contradiction across several posts. That kind of argument isn’t well thought of - at least, not in “soft” discussions like this one - and it doesn’t really result in a win anywhere outside of debate or courtrooms.
We understand you’re convinced you saw the “classroom” ending. If you’ve read the thread, you should understand you’re one of many who make the claim. You should further understand that if you dozen, twenty, fifty or so saw this ending, then many thousands of people must have also seen it. (Any logic failing there?)
But in years and years of having the question posed, re-posed and defended as you’re doing it, no one - not one person, no matter how motivated - has come up with definitive proof that there even is any alternate ending to this movie, much less this specific ending, or any absolute proof of it.
This board excels in finding answers, moreso than any I’ve ever participated in over almost 30 years on line. Astoundingly obscure and difficult answers pop out of the posts of users who just happened to have the info at hand, or know where to find it.
But in twelve years, no one has produced a clip, an audio recording, a set still, a screen capture or photo, or even a definitive statement from a movie principal that any alternate ending exists. Twelve years - and it is not terribly rare for those astounding answers to come in “zombie” threads when the original discussion was exhausted and years later someone stumbles on it and quite casually posts the answer. But all that’s added to this interminable discussion is one more claim that someone saw the phantom ending… without any further proof.
Now, you can continue with the high-school/courtroom approach, but picking our weary familiarity with the argument to pieces on grammatical and logical minutiae is not going to solve it or give you any kind of “win” here. What will? Finding proof the ending you so fervently believe exists, exists. Strenuously arguing the double negative that we haven’t proven it doesn’t exist… well, you win the debate trophy, Mr. Time, and are thanked and excused.
Yes, exactly this. I’ve seen regional car dealership commercials from the '80s on Youtube, as well as tons of stuff that was only available on VHS and way more obscure than a studio blockbuster like Big. No way an alternate ending wouldn’t be online.
I’m starting to root for the alternative ending being real, 'cause how cool would that be- to be so spectacularly wrong about something!