Humble Tidbits of Vacuity

Here’s a funny story.

Ever since I was a kid, I can remember my dad liking the movie Shane. Every time it would come on television, he would watch it. It didn’t matter what he was doing…painting the garage, wallpapering a room…if Shane was on TV, my dad was watching it.

When my parents got their VCR (1992), one of the first things I did was purchase Shane on video for my dad. He could watch it whenever he wanted, without commercial interruption.

However, he never opened it. About three weeks later, I asked to borrow it so that I could watch it. I took the shrink wrap off, popped it in the VCR and sat down with a bowl of popcorn to watch Alan Ladd as the reluctant gun-fighter. I found out that I had been watching an edited version on TV all those years. There were about 10 minutes of footage I had never seen before.

I returned it to my dad a few days later, and told him how there are scenes on the video that they don’t play on TV, but he just smiled and said something like, “Well, I’ll have to check that out sometime.”

But he never did.

Fast forward to 2003. My family and I are at my parents’ house eating dinner. My dad says, “We have to hurry up and eat. Shane comes on at 6:30, and I was reading on the WebTV that in the opening scene of the movie, if you look in the background, you can see a white truck driving by. You have to really look, though. I wrote down where you’re supposed to be able to see it.”

After dinner, we turned on the television to find that we had missed the opening sequence by a couple of minutes.

“Ahhh, Hell’s Bells! We missed it.”

“What’s the big deal, Dad? I’ll just go get your tape and pop it in.”

“Nah, it’s not that important.”

“Really? We could put the tape in and watch it in slow motion, or if we miss it we could rewind and look again. I’ll just…”

“That’s too much trouble. It’s on again at 2am. I’ll set the VCR to tape it.”

I just don’t get it.