Misha Merrill

So she just cut all that stuff out.

And so that means that like, you know, when I think about watching a movie as a kid, I really can't remember one movie that I watched that didn't at some point just freeze.

with two characters on screen like clearly about to kiss and then frantically fast forward.

And I was desperately trying to look past those gray squiggly lines on the screen, but I couldn't see anything because it was just this chaos of fast forwarding all the way through the scene and then it would stop and the movie would continue.

And she did this without fail with every movie that we rented.

And then what happened is, like, just to be safe and cover her bases, she wouldn't just, you know, cut out, like, sexy scenes.

She also cut out just huge portions of the movie because she was suspicious that maybe there's some, like, subliminal sexual content in there that she's not quite picking up on.

And just to be safe, let me cut out, like, this massive portion.

So, like, for instance, like, Grease, like the movie Grease, which I loved.

my sister and I would watch Grease and the way I watched, I thought like, wow, like what a weird kind of like avant-garde experimental movie when really it was this incredibly conventional musical because she had cut out like a third of the movie.

Then there was The Wizard of Oz, which I don't know if anyone remembers, there were these flying monkeys in the movie, which terrified my sister, so she made another version without flying monkeys in it.

Which I have to say did not affect the story at all.

Still a great movie without the monkeys.

So yeah, this is the way I grew up and how I watched movies.

And I eventually wanted to see the original format of these movies, and I did.

I watched them.

And I have to admit, I mean, I was...

pretty disappointed with the originals because they were really fake and phony.

And they had these stories that made sense and like a plot that was, you know, had a through line and an arc and a beginning and a middle and an end.

And I really liked what my mom did because the movies she made, these versions, my mom's versions, they reflect a lot more accurately my life.