Nostalgia Nights: We’re Back & The Baby-Sitters Club
I cannot for the life of me remember what made me decide to start this series, but it is becoming one of my favorite things. When it feels like the world is too much, looking back to the innocence of childhood brings a serious sense of comfort. And when you combine said nostalgia with food, drinks and friends, it’s the exact thing the doctor ordered. This time around, my friend brought We’re Back and my offering was The Baby-Sitters Club (the OG movie, not the Netflix series, of course).
Somehow, despite being a frequent Land Before Time viewer, I had never encountered We’re Back. On the one hand, I pity child me, because it’s a delight of a movie. On the other, I got to experience it for the first time at thirty and was able to appreciate the voice cast (John Goodman! Martin Short! Walter Cronkite?! JULIA CHILD??) and see a perfectly crafted kids’ movie. There were dinosaurs, time travel, life lessons, a bratty kid, wishes and an evil circus ringmaster. What else could you possibly need?
Okay, yeah, I could have done without the evil circus, considering anything involving clowns is a hard pass for me. That makes it the perfect villain though! How often do you encounter a ringmaster in your daily life? Hopefully not frequently. How often did a parent or relative joke about running off to join the circus? If you’re like me, pretty constantly. Therefore, despite it being a bit of a reach to figure out how you get from time traveling, intelligent dinosaurs to a dark circus run by a madman, it actually makes perfect sense within context. And it’s a really, really fun watch.
Every time I introduce someone to a piece of media that I love, I’m always so anxious hoping that they like it and that somehow this won’t reflect so poorly on me and my taste that they’ll judge me forever. (Don’t worry, this is something I’ll address with my therapist.) In the case of The Baby-Sitters Club, it is somehow even higher stakes. I wore out my VHS copy of the film recorded off the TV somewhere in the late 90s. And I truly cannot tell you how many of those books I had. It was probably somewhere around 150. This group of girls from Stoneybrook helped shape my childhood. I was obsessed. I’d also like to thank my friend for being on board and enjoying this silly movie decades after its release.
Some things don’t age well, including a 13-year-old girl pretending to be older in order to go out with a 17-year-old European boy (and being very scared for him to know she had diabetes, when, if you ask me, the real concern should be the age gap) and a dead beat dad who makes his kid sneak around and not tell anyone (especially her mom and the rest of her family) that he’s around. Watching it now, I was struck by just how icky that was, especially since I’m definitely closer to the parents’ age than the baby-sitters themselves. Thankfully, there is enough fun, silly moments that make this still an entertaining film, as long as you didn’t think too hard about it.
I think we may be still at a 100% success rate with these experiments, which definitely means the other shoe will drop at some point. It has to. Also, the picks for this installment had some A+ music that we were bopping around to, and it absolutely had nothing to do with the wine that came on this journey down memory lane with us. All this to say, these have been some of my favorite movie nights. I am irrationally excited to see how many more movie pairings we can come up with.
Thankfully, my friend loves this as much as I do, so we already have another set of movies planned that I’ll be writing about in August. Still, I’m always happy for recommendations of films that could fit the bill for this series.