The Top Five Most Memorable Movies from My Childhood

Filed under there's a difference between films and movies

Earlier this week, my sister texted me to say that Return to Oz, one of our favourite childhood movies, had arrived at her house from Netflix. I went to Wikipedia to read the plot synopsis, and even nearly thirty years later, it still seems just as magical even when distilled down to a few paragraphs that don’t mention any of the dazzling props nor character voices that you can hear in your brain even when you haven’t seen the movie for fifteen years.

It got me thinking about how my mom used to take us to the Pickaway County Public Library, a fifteen-minute drive from our house to the next town over, so many times throughout the year that I could almost draw you a map of the places where the floorboards in the old building would creak when you’d walk on them. It was housed in Memorial Hall, which at the time seemed to me like the biggest, coolest castle I’d ever seen. (The local community theatre, Roundtown Players, is also housed there, and I spent months on end rehearsing a musical on its stage when I was in junior high, because apparently I was outgoing and involved when I was a kid.) A side room held rows of photocopied video cassette and cassette tape covers that had been laminated in thick plastic so that you could thumb through them like records at a music store. Later, they would add the covers of CDs and DVDs.

I don’t remember them being in any kind of order, neither alphabetically nor by genre, so my sister and I would have to look at a hundred boring Oscar-winning film laminates before we found the much-coveted Faerie Tale Theatre movies, hosted by and starring Shelley Duvall, who my sister and I thought was the most beautiful woman in the world and named all of our stuffed animals and Barbies after. (Now that The Shining is one of my favourite movies (thanks, Kamran!), it’s hilarious to me to think that I found this woman attractive as a kid.)

Anyway, all of this nostalgia had me thinking about the most memorable movies from my childhood, and here are my top five:


No big deal. Just Tik-Tok and FAIRUZA BALK as Dorothy.

Return to Oz: I’m pretty sure my entire love of chickens stems from Dorothy’s pet chicken, Billina. There’s an I Hate Billina Facebook page, which I will not link to because I find the idea of someone being serious about hating a movie chicken inconceivable.

Labyrinth: My mom, an English teacher, used to show this to her Humanities classes, and I accidentally saw so much of it as she was preparing questions about it for her class that I got interested and finally asked to watch all of it one day. It eventually became such a tradition for my best friend, Tracey, and me to watch it on Friday nights at her house while eating Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food that we fell in love with David Bowie and became devotees of the website dedicated to his crotch.


Don’t worry, guys. It’s not poo.

The Peanut Butter Solution: My mom was known for recording things off of TV; if I offhandedly mentioned to her that I liked the band Bush, she’d set the VCR for me every time they were on any of the late-night talk shows so that Tracey and I could later sit in front of her TV for hours with the closed captioning on, writing down lyrics so we could sing along to their songs back in the days before the Internet had every lyric to every song ever. She taped The Peanut Butter Solution for my sister and me for god knows what reason, but it turned out to be one of the movies we watched over and over and over. It was scary and exciting and about peanut butter, so how could I resist? Plus, according to Wikipedia, it “features the first English-language songs performed by Céline Dion”. (WHAT?) I had outgrown it by the time my mom died when I was eighteen, so I’m sure my dad didn’t think anything of throwing out the old videotape when he got remarried and moved into my stepmom’s house. Luckily, Tracey is AMAZING and bought me a bootleg DVD of it a few years back. I’ve been too . . . I don’t know . . . sentimental? . . . to watch it yet, though.

The Phantom of the Opera: Again, my mom taped this off of TV for no apparent reason, but I couldn’t get enough of the thing. I don’t actually remember anything about it except for this one shot of the Phantom’s underground lair, but that scene and the way the light from the water reflected onto the wall is so vivid in my mind that I have no doubt I could figure out which adaptation it was if I watched them. I’m almost sure it’s the 1990 version, which would explain why I like Teri Polo so much. Also because of “Felicity” and the “Criminal Minds” where she was a child molester, but mostly because of “Phantom”.

Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure: I’ve never seen Star Wars. There’s no reason I’d be interested in this movie. But I guess my mom thought all girls like cute, cuddly things, and I remember being called back downstairs one night after I’d already gone to sleep, lying down on the living room floor on blankets and pillows next to my litter sister, and watching this while wearing my footie pajamas. It became a tradition every time it was on TV when we were kids. Eventually I wasn’t able to stand having my feet enclosed and made my mom cut the footie part off, but the idea was still the same.


So, what are your top five? Write me a blog post if you’re as wordy as I am!

30 Comments

  1. Katrin says:

    Oh, I love the Ewoks. I am a huge Star Wars fan though. I have to admit that I have never heard about the Peanut Butter Solution but I guess that’s just because I am German. :)

  2. Cassie says:

    I have never heard of such things. They all sound equally creepy and intriguing all at once. Except for anything regarding the Wizard of Oz. That movie was just wrong, and so are any sequels.

    I loved the Brave Little Toaster and Milo and Otis as a kid. And when I got a little older I loved watching The Man in the Iron Mask.

  3. Erika says:

    Muppet Christmas carol – saw this in the theater and my mom got it for us oh VHS. My sisters and I watched it YEAR. ROUND. Now as adults we all have it, except for my sister who still loves at home with her 3 year old and it is still on the VCR in the basement in te middle of summer.

    Teenage mutant ninja turtles – I don’t know why, because this is something that normally would have scared the Peterson children, but I guess since it was presented in the correct context, we loved it. Could not get enough. Watched it after school and played tmnt for years.

    The electric grandmother – my friend Caitlin rented this from the worthington public library at least once a week and when I’d sleep over we would watch it. Hardly anyone has heard of it except for a band I saw in 2005 that played it behind them during their show??

  4. Kim says:

    Return to Oz traumatized me as a child! The Wheelers? Nightmares forever. I’m probably going to start having them again now. I really liked Pet Sematary in fourth or fifth grade, though, so make of that what you will.

    My top five were Escape to Witch Mountain, Jaws, Annie (yes I once liked a musical!), Dirty Dancing and Adventures in Babysitting. I barely even needed to think about this.

    I feel like you were much more sophisticated than I was.

  5. I have never seen any of these movies! I was that weird little kid that liked to watch home movies growing up, but I also liked Annie, The Big Green (remember the soccer movie), and embarassingly, all of the Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen movies.

  6. Cassie says:

    OH, OH, OH! And Three Men and a Little Baby!

  7. Cassie says:

    Crap. And now someone reminded me how I used to watch The Princess Bride every day for a few months (you know, 8) and then would quote it all.

  8. Megan says:

    Yes! Labyrinth! I haven’t seen that in ages. Also, The Shining is in my top 10 favorite movies… in high school my friend and I would watch that almost every weekend while we crafted. We could recite every line and it never got old.

    Another childhood favorite of mine: The Neverending Story.

    Now I’m all nostalgic…

  9. bluzdude says:

    I never watch kid-movies, other than Oz, which I hated because of those stupid flying monkeys. Plus, VCRs weren’t really around until I was out of high school, so to see a movie, you had to go to the theater, or it had to be on TV as Movie of the Week. Either way, they were grownup movies. So my earliest favorite movies are all from when I was a teenager.

    Jaws (scared the ever-lovin crap out of me)
    Poltergeist (great effects, for the times.)
    Nightmare on Elm St. (There’s your Johnny Depp)
    Halloween (come to bluz, Jamie Lee…)
    Blazing Saddles (my first R-rated movie)
    Airplane (laughed my head off, dragged my parents to the theater to see it the next weekend.)

  10. Jessica R. says:

    I was a sensitive and impressionable child I guess because Return to Oz terrified me. Didn’t the evil woman steal other women’s heads and wear them around? CREEPY.

    My favorites were all extremely happy musicals like The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Oh, and The Secret of Nimh, but that’s probably because those are the only four movies my dad agreed to watch with me (he had a thing for Julie Andrews).

  11. Noel says:

    I was thinking that I didn’t have any favorite childhood movies, but after reading these comments, it is all coming back. We loved Labyrinth at our house too, like you all because my mom pushed it on us. Now as a mother myself, the concept of my baby being stolen from the cradle by David Bowie is totally terrifying. I can still hear all those awesome songs in my head, though. I’d love to hear how your mom used that movie in class.

    We loved Neverending Story at our house, as well as The Secret of Nimh. I remember watching The Rescuers Down Under a lot, and we also loved All Dogs Go To Heaven.

  12. Tracey says:

    I’m so glad you didn’t specify that these five were in any particular order, because I would have BEATEN you for not putting Labyrinth first. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you go on about Phantom of the Opera. I really can still learn things about you!

    My top five would be impossible, since, as you know, there’s little in the world I love more than movies from my childhood. Last year, the Drexel theater asked in its newsletter what films they should consider showing in their kids’ summer movie series, and I emailed them back with a list of about 30. And I was holding back.

  13. Ryan Cordle says:

    I’ve never seen Star Wars either, but I had a summer babysitter that forced me to watch the Ewok movie. I thought they were chipmunks or some class of rodent, because I never got the back story.