Saturday, January 23, 2010

No, It Was Not Animal House

Looking for another movie from my childhood, and I may submit this one to Kindertrauma too, since they did such a bang-up job finding The Five for me like they did.

It's a musical, probably filmed in the early 60's, but maybe the late 50's, in bright vivid Technicolor. The only scene I remember was that it appeared that all these children of various ages were in "heaven", dressing in colored togas, and I want to think that the boys wore blue togas and the girls wore pink, but I might be remembering that wrong. The children's names were being called one at a time to board a giant ship, and when I asked my father what was going on he told me that the children were all waiting to be taken down to earth to be born and only a few at a time could board the ship headed to their new homes, where they would forget everything about their heavenly life (angels? reincarnation?). In one scene a teenage boy's name is called and he is clinging to a teenage girl, not wanting to leave his love and never see her again. The boy is pried away from the girl and dragged to the ship, and the girl crumples into a heap in tears. As the ship sails, the children face forward on the deck and sing solemnly, and when I asked my dad why they were singing so sadly he told me that really the rest of the children were just happy to go and become born to families that will love them. Though damn if I could see it that way at the time.

I never heard of or saw any more of this picture, nor seen or heard of it ever again. Anybody got a clue? I would love the ease of mind in knowing that I didn't just dream all of this on one of my trippy childhood nights when I would sleepwalk through the house getting into showers fully clothed and weeping about lost lima beans.

2 Comments:

Anonymous aunt john said...

That has to be THE BLUE BIRD!

Fast forward this youtube clip until you hit the 3:25 mark.

10:19 AM  
Blogger Melissa said...

THAT'S IT!!!

And the most ironic thing was that I had read that write-up about The Blue Bird days ago and I was just thinking about how much I wanted to see if that was available for rent because it looked awesome.

Aunt John... THANK YOU! You don't know how much this means to me! And thank the folks at Kindertrauma too!

11:31 AM  

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