As soon as I heard the chorus to "Holiday Road," I was suddenly filled with memories upon memories of watching the dubbed tape of this movie at my grandma's house. The quality was bad, we constantly had to fix the tracking, and the scene when they visit Dodge City and get their hubcaps stolen always had a lingering static gray line along the top of the frame. The dubbed VHS also cut off the credits and switched to the movie "Glory" which my sister and I never took the time to watch, since our 6 and 10 year old minds couldn't quite grasp the themes of prejudice in the civil war (to this day, the extent of that film I've watched is the 3 seconds in the middle of the title sequence the dubbed tape cuts to, right before I got up to press stop and rewind on my Grandma's VCR).
This movie especially hits home for me since my brother, sister, and I spent a lot of time at my Grandma's house (every weekend, nearly) in San Francisco. These weekends spent in the city are partially why even growing up as a resident of the East Bay I still consider San Francisco itself to be home. But what these weekends also did was give me a repetitive 3-4 hour regiment of the same 3 or 4 videotapes my Grandma happened to have at her house (Angels In The Outfield and Home Alone 1 and 2 were the others), because what the hell else were we supposed to do there? The Bayview neighborhood wasn't exactly the safest, and the Game of Life box was missing all of the paperwork.
Thank you, Wally World, for the memories.
Really now?! Walking to work and a tour guide for a group of Asian tourists asked me to please stay with the group...
-KD