As a general rule, I suspect most of us think our memories are pretty good. After all, we have a vested interested in believing that our recall of the past is accurate. A lot depends on it.
Science, however, has suggested that our memories are in fact more squishy—and perhaps less accurate—than we might be comfortable with. Memory expert Elizabeth Loftus of the University of California-Irvine told Slate last year, “We all have memories that are malleable and susceptible to being contaminated or supplemented in some way.”
That can even happen with how we remember pop culture—TV, movies, music. With the exception of content that was deliberately trying to be edgy and provocative—like, say, Animal House from the ’70s, Porky’s from the ’80s or the more recent Saw movies—I think we tend to remember the good bits about shows or movies and forget the racier stuff.
I was reminded of that dynamic last week when I came across a quote from actress Cynthia Lauren Tewes, who played cruise director Julie McCoy on ABC’s The Love Boat, which aired from 1977 through 1986. She said:
“Now people remember the show in a whole different reality than it really was. Which I think is funny because they remember it being this sweet, lovey show—and I remember people giving us trouble for, you know, being all about sex and free sex. ‘Cause it was about free sex. Julie never actually had any but she tried to hook people up three and four times a cruise if possible. I mean, that was her—my—job.”
Tewes suggests that when it comes to “feel-good” shows and movies from yesteryear, we fondly remember the good feelings those pop culture hits created in us and fail to recall stuff that might have made us more uncomfortable back in the day.
I’ve noticed this tendency in my own memories with regard to several films from the ’80s that have been remade recently. In the last four years, I’ve reviewed remakes of The Karate Kid (2010), Footloose (2011) and Red Dawn (2012). All three of the originals were released in 1984, just after I’d rolled into my teen years. As part of my review process with the remakes, I watched the originals again … and was surprised by the details I’d totally lost track of, despite having seen each of those films multiple times as a teen.
In the original Karate Kid, for instance, the villain, Johnny, smokes pot in a bathroom stall at a high school dance. Wow—completely blanked that out. In Footloose, I’d forgotten how recklessly promiscuous the pastor’s daughter was. While her sex life isn’t shown, it’s certainly alluded to strongly—so much so that I thought again, Wow, I saw this when I was 13? As for Red Dawn, I’d forgotten how grimly violent that film was, with one scene showing POWs being mowed down in a mass execution. Didn’t remember that disturbing image, either.
Another somewhat shocking example of this tendency is the movie Grease, which I saw as a preteen. Many of us who were around back then can sing “You’re the One That I Want,” “Grease” or “Summer Nights” from memory. But then there are the exceedingly racy lyrics to songs like “Greased Lightning,” and the fact that the whole movie pivots around the premise of teen sex and abortion. I saw Grease again recently for the first time in decades and was aghast at the film’s damaging and worldly messages.
The takeaway here, I think, is that when we’re perusing old titles to revisit from the past at Blockbuster—er, in our Netflix cues (sorry … can’t quite shake the past)—we might want to exercise some caution before introducing some of our faves from yesteryear to our own children. It might even be a good idea to re-watch (or re-listen) to them ourselves first. Because there may very well be stuff lurking in those old “classics” that our fallible, malleable minds deleted long ago.
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