by Flack » Sun Jun 28, 2020 6:16 pm
(I was dreamin' when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray.)
I think I'm three years younger than you, which shifts the age at which I first experienced these films. I was born in the summer of '73, and hadn't turned 2 yet when Jaws debuted. I don't remember life before that, obviously. My first memory of Jaws isn't even of the movie; it's of the board game, in which players took turns fishing old tires, anchors, and license plates out out a shark's belly before it eventually snapped it's rubber band-powered plastic teeth on someone. Even as a kid, it was easy to grasp the concept.
Jaws aired on ABC in the fall of 1980, which is probably when I first saw it. It definitely would have been the scariest movie I had seen in my life up until that point, and for several years to come. The very next day, I told my mom I would no longer take baths, as I was afraid Jaws would come up through the drain and get me. Even after she convinced me this would be impossible, I stopped adding bubbles to my bath water. If Jaws was gonna get me in the tub, I at least wanted to see him coming.
In the summer of 1982, my family attended the World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. We got tickets at the last minute, and the closest available hotel we could find was in Gatlinburg, an hour's drive away. Just north of there is Pigeon Forge, a place my dad referred to as "a sideshow without a circus." They had dark rides and kiddie rides and Showbiz-like animatronics, but the thing I remember most strongly was a room full of different monsters kids and adults could take their pictures with. There was a gigantic King Kong head, Frankenstein's monster, and the one I remember most vividly, a lifesize version of Jaws. Looking at the photo now it looks pretty silly, but the thing terrified me. It took me several minutes to work up enough courage just to go near the thing. Eventually I got comfortable enough to stick my foot in its mouth. Don't let my grin in this picture fool you. For many years, I was scared to swim in lakes, creeks, and on occasion, swimming pools because of that movie.
The year after the Knoxville World's Fair, Wargames was released. By 1983, I had already been using a TRS-80 for a couple of years, and ditched it for an Apple II. Unlike our TRS-80 our Apple came with a modem, so by the time I saw Wargames, I was already calling BBSes (and my dad was already running one).
The theme of Wargames, or at least what I took away from it at the time, was that even though adults may have built this new electronic world, kids were going to own it. In real life, if an adult told you to do something, you did it. When a grown up said keep your hand out of the cookie jar, you kept your hand out of the cookie jar. But in this new online world, all bets were off, everyone was equal, and everyone was anonymous. By the time I was twelve, much like David Lightman's discovery of his school's password, I had found where my dad kept the secret phone number he used to bill long distance calls to his office, and started using it myself. When I was thirteen, a friend of mine showed me how he was pilfering credit card numbers from his parents' tax business and using them to buy computer hardware. I was fourteen when I learned how to hack voice mailboxes and started learning about the workings of the phone company (and fifteen when the guy I ran a BBS with got arrested for hacking Sprint and ended up serving 10 years in prison). The point is, the adults were the ones who built these systems -- who set up security measures (or not) and hooked all these computers up to phone lines. And then it was us -- the kids who knew where to find the school's passwords and how to scan exchanges for modem tones who were having an absolute blast tearing it apart (and learning a thing or two in the process).
Every time I watch Wargames, my chin starts to quiver when "Joshua," undeterred by the end of the simulation, makes one finally attempt to find the launch codes and start World War III. I try to hold it together during the tic-tac-toe sequence, but as Joshua utters his final revelation ("The only winning move is not to play.") I break down in tears every time. Wargames is not intended to be a sad movie, and nobody would describe it as a tearjerker. But something in me connects to that scene; it's like the computer, an innocent computer named after Professor's innocent son, Joshua, realizes this universal truth and man, it hits me like a punch to the gut every time.
The thing I love about Wargames is that there's an entire adventure going on that the adults are oblivious to. The teacher had no idea that David Lightman gets himself to the principal's office intentionally (to get the password). His parents have no idea what he's up to in his bedroom while playing on his computer. Even the military officials are, for the most part, a step or two behind the kids. While I certainly never came close to anything like what happened in the movie, I remember being knee-deep in shady BBS activities only to have my mom barge into my bedroom with a frozen pizza on a plate and asking me what I was up to on my computer. I would just smile and shrug, which was good enough I guess. Then she would go back to the living room, sitting on the other side of a wall while I typed random passwords over and over into Pizza Hut's central computer, trying desperately to get that stupid thing to send me a free pizza. (It never did.)
While both of these movies contain a single conflict (man vs. computer, man vs. shark), I think the difference is that in Wargames, the conflict is overcome by a kid, whereas in Jaws, it's adults -- and maybe that's why the former hasn't aged as well as the latter. As a kid, it was exciting to think that a kid could outsmart the military and play war games on a whopper of a machine. As an adult, we know that long before that plot would have kicked into motion, that machine would have been disconnected from the phone line and powered off. In the movie, a goofy guard gets distracted and lets David Lightman escape before they have a chance to fully interrogate him. In real life... well, waterboarding.
But in Jaws, we're the old men. Whether you identify with Brody, Hooper, or Quint, those guys are us guys. They're who we are now, or at least who we want to be. We, or at least I, would like to think that when confronted with a decision that involved sacrifice and heroism, we would do the right thing. Because all of us would like to save our collective towns and blow up a shark in the process.
And so that's the difference, or at least how I see it. I think if you polled all of us in 1983, we would all say Wargames was the better film because none of us would have risked our lives to chase a shark, and all of us wanted to be the hackers who were smarter than the adults and saved the day. And today, none of us want to think that high school kids are smarter than we are, and things like honor and duty mean more to us now.
(I warned you it might go astray...)
PS: My very first alias was "Robbie Franklin" -- my first name at the time and the model of computer (Franklin Ace 1000) that we owned. In 1983, I briefly changed my alias to David Lightman -- me, and a thousand other kids. I alternated between the two for about a year until another film, Cloak and Dagger, was released...
(I was dreamin' when I wrote this, forgive me if it goes astray.)
I think I'm three years younger than you, which shifts the age at which I first experienced these films. I was born in the summer of '73, and hadn't turned 2 yet when Jaws debuted. I don't remember life before that, obviously. My first memory of Jaws isn't even of the movie; it's of the board game, in which players took turns fishing old tires, anchors, and license plates out out a shark's belly before it eventually snapped it's rubber band-powered plastic teeth on someone. Even as a kid, it was easy to grasp the concept.
Jaws aired on ABC in the fall of 1980, which is probably when I first saw it. It definitely would have been the scariest movie I had seen in my life up until that point, and for several years to come. The very next day, I told my mom I would no longer take baths, as I was afraid Jaws would come up through the drain and get me. Even after she convinced me this would be impossible, I stopped adding bubbles to my bath water. If Jaws was gonna get me in the tub, I at least wanted to see him coming.
In the summer of 1982, my family attended the World's Fair in Knoxville, Tennessee. We got tickets at the last minute, and the closest available hotel we could find was in Gatlinburg, an hour's drive away. Just north of there is Pigeon Forge, a place my dad referred to as "a sideshow without a circus." They had dark rides and kiddie rides and Showbiz-like animatronics, but the thing I remember most strongly was a room full of different monsters kids and adults could take their pictures with. There was a gigantic King Kong head, Frankenstein's monster, and the one I remember most vividly, a lifesize version of Jaws. Looking at the photo now it looks pretty silly, but the thing terrified me. It took me several minutes to work up enough courage just to go near the thing. Eventually I got comfortable enough to stick my foot in its mouth. Don't let my grin in this picture fool you. For many years, I was scared to swim in lakes, creeks, and on occasion, swimming pools because of that movie.
[img]https://i.imgur.com/S36P36u.jpg[/img]
The year after the Knoxville World's Fair, Wargames was released. By 1983, I had already been using a TRS-80 for a couple of years, and ditched it for an Apple II. Unlike our TRS-80 our Apple came with a modem, so by the time I saw Wargames, I was already calling BBSes (and my dad was already running one).
The theme of Wargames, or at least what I took away from it at the time, was that even though adults may have built this new electronic world, kids were going to own it. In real life, if an adult told you to do something, you did it. When a grown up said keep your hand out of the cookie jar, you kept your hand out of the cookie jar. But in this new online world, all bets were off, everyone was equal, and everyone was anonymous. By the time I was twelve, much like David Lightman's discovery of his school's password, I had found where my dad kept the secret phone number he used to bill long distance calls to his office, and started using it myself. When I was thirteen, a friend of mine showed me how he was pilfering credit card numbers from his parents' tax business and using them to buy computer hardware. I was fourteen when I learned how to hack voice mailboxes and started learning about the workings of the phone company (and fifteen when the guy I ran a BBS with got arrested for hacking Sprint and ended up serving 10 years in prison). The point is, the adults were the ones who built these systems -- who set up security measures (or not) and hooked all these computers up to phone lines. And then it was us -- the kids who knew where to find the school's passwords and how to scan exchanges for modem tones who were having an absolute blast tearing it apart (and learning a thing or two in the process).
Every time I watch Wargames, my chin starts to quiver when "Joshua," undeterred by the end of the simulation, makes one finally attempt to find the launch codes and start World War III. I try to hold it together during the tic-tac-toe sequence, but as Joshua utters his final revelation ("The only winning move is not to play.") I break down in tears every time. Wargames is not intended to be a sad movie, and nobody would describe it as a tearjerker. But something in me connects to that scene; it's like the computer, an innocent computer named after Professor's innocent son, Joshua, realizes this universal truth and man, it hits me like a punch to the gut every time.
The thing I love about Wargames is that there's an entire adventure going on that the adults are oblivious to. The teacher had no idea that David Lightman gets himself to the principal's office intentionally (to get the password). His parents have no idea what he's up to in his bedroom while playing on his computer. Even the military officials are, for the most part, a step or two behind the kids. While I certainly never came close to anything like what happened in the movie, I remember being knee-deep in shady BBS activities only to have my mom barge into my bedroom with a frozen pizza on a plate and asking me what I was up to on my computer. I would just smile and shrug, which was good enough I guess. Then she would go back to the living room, sitting on the other side of a wall while I typed random passwords over and over into Pizza Hut's central computer, trying desperately to get that stupid thing to send me a free pizza. (It never did.)
While both of these movies contain a single conflict (man vs. computer, man vs. shark), I think the difference is that in Wargames, the conflict is overcome by a kid, whereas in Jaws, it's adults -- and maybe that's why the former hasn't aged as well as the latter. As a kid, it was exciting to think that a kid could outsmart the military and play war games on a whopper of a machine. As an adult, we know that long before that plot would have kicked into motion, that machine would have been disconnected from the phone line and powered off. In the movie, a goofy guard gets distracted and lets David Lightman escape before they have a chance to fully interrogate him. In real life... well, waterboarding.
But in Jaws, we're the old men. Whether you identify with Brody, Hooper, or Quint, those guys are us guys. They're who we are now, or at least who we want to be. We, or at least I, would like to think that when confronted with a decision that involved sacrifice and heroism, we would do the right thing. Because all of us would like to save our collective towns and blow up a shark in the process.
And so that's the difference, or at least how I see it. I think if you polled all of us in 1983, we would all say Wargames was the better film because none of us would have risked our lives to chase a shark, and all of us wanted to be the hackers who were smarter than the adults and saved the day. And today, none of us want to think that high school kids are smarter than we are, and things like honor and duty mean more to us now.
(I warned you it might go astray...)
PS: My very first alias was "Robbie Franklin" -- my first name at the time and the model of computer (Franklin Ace 1000) that we owned. In 1983, I briefly changed my alias to David Lightman -- me, and a thousand other kids. I alternated between the two for about a year until another film, Cloak and Dagger, was released...