I don't know this for a fact, but I strongly suspect sometime this weekend I'll be taking the kid to the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie (or, to give its official title, TMNT--and could you imagine a less appealing title?). He's pretty jazzed about it, although since he's seven, he tends to get jazzed about everything. (He literally started singing with joy once when i told him we were going to Old Country Buffet.) The first time we saw a preview for this thing, Tabbatha leaned over to me and said, "You get to take him to this one."
Hopefully, bad CGI-rendered martial arts action will make him hungry for the real thing, and then I can finally get him into Jackie Chan and Bruce Lee. (My first exposure to Bruce Lee was the old Green Hornet series, and come to think of it, I have some episodes on tape somewhere. Wonder if that'd work...) We watched an episode of Samurai Jack the other day, and the deliberate pacing put him off at first ("This is a boring episode."), but by the end, he was literally on the edge of his seat.
As far as those damned ninja turtles, well, I suppose if they'd been around when I was seven, I might have thought they were cool. I wouldn't have been incensed that this is just a lame attempt to wring some more money out of a deservedly moribund franchise, but I suspect that the cheesy animation would have annoyed me to the point that I couldn't watch it. As a kid, I could tell the difference between good animation and bad, and so even though Filmmation studios cranked out action-oriented TV cartoons, they looked so crappy I couldn't get into them. And I was five or six--what aesthetic standards could I have possibly possessed? Enough, apparently, to tell me that even though a cartton based on Hot Wheels should have been cool, it wasn't.
Whether Paul has a similar sense of quality is open to question. After all, his favorite Star Wars movie is The Phantom Menace. But he's young. There's time.
