OK, I suppose that this can be classified under “bragging about your kid” or of boring other people with your kid’s doings, but I was fascinated by this. My daughter clearly knows more than I realized she did, and I’m amazed at her ability to synthesize knowledge from her very limited experience.
First, as many of you are aware, I am obsessed with mythology and movies. I won’t elaborate, but those who follow this board will realize that “obsess” is possibly too weak a word. Suffice it to say, we’ve got lots of movies ariound the house, and we talk about mythology at home.
My daughter fell sick over the weekend, so even though yesterday was a nice, warm, sunny day, we were in watching movies.
1.) My daughter asked if we could go to “the movie store” and buy the one about “the alien knight and the donkey”. It took me a moment before I realized she was taking about the yet-to-be-released film Shrek, in which Eddie Murphy voices a donkey and Mike Myers seems to be an ogre/troll kind of thing. What amazes me is that she called him an “alien knight”. It’s true that he wears armor in one scene, but the new image of an extraterrestial is a big-eyed short gray guy. Howcum she still relates to the image of normal-eyed green people with antennae? Weird.
2.) She wanted to watch the movie about “Hercules and Medusa”. As many of you will appreciate, I know a lot about Medusa, and I have copies of most of the movies with her in them. And I think I know about the others. I am not familiar with any movie that has Hercules and Medusa in it (except for brief glimpses of Medusa in the Disney movie Hercules). After she stuck in one of the “Land Before Time” movies, my daughter called for me. There it was, she said. On the screen was a preview for the animated Hercules/Zena movie. She was taking Xena (like Medusa, one of the few strong female characters associated in the modern mind with mythology) as Medusa.
3.) She was watching Jason and the Argonauts (the Harryhausen film) and protesting that Zeus and Hera didn’t look the same as in the Disney Hercules. Later on in the film she observed that Hercules looked different, too (he shouldn’t have a berad), and so did the Hydra.
I’m really impressed. Scared, but impressed.