Pirates

Today Garrett and I headed off to the movies. As many of you may be aware, the new Veggie Tales movie, "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything", is now in a theater near you. From early on, Garrett has been a fan of all things Veggie Tales. His first song to sing along with was the Veggie Tales theme song and his first attempt at dancing was in time with "Ultimate Silly Songs", part of our Veggie Tale collection. His interest has waned some now that he's older and Disney movies have been introduced, but on Saturday mornings, if we're home, he still catches some of the TV versions of it.

When I saw that this movie was coming out I just knew that I wanted to take him to see it in the theater. There are very few movies that I think he will sit through in a theater and I love the whole movie-going experience pretty much regardless of what I'm watching, so I was excited to head out this morning. There was a 10:30 showing and since it was Friday, I was in hopes that we would have the theater to ourselves. Apparently a lot of area schools have made this typical 3-day weekend into a 4-day weekend this year because there was probably 20 or so other people watching it with us, a good number of school aged kids amongst them. More people than I was expecting.

Garrett had been to the theater twice before today. The first time doesn't really count because he was 7 weeks old and Keith and I just wanted to see how he would cooperate if we took him to the movies (and we were desperate to get out and do something "normal"). We went and saw "War of the Worlds" and he slept the entire time, it was great. Every so often Keith would lean over and ask me if Garrett was still breathing because he was so still.

His second trip to the movies was pretty much out of necessity. We were having wood floors installed in our house and Garrett and I needed to kill time somewhere, so we went and saw "Meet the Robinsons". Garrett was 20 months old and that time we were the only ones in the theater. He slept through part of it and the rest he cooperated really well considering that's not really a movie geared toward kids that young. So today, I didn't really know what to expect, but he was actually pretty good. He loved the fact that I bought popcorn and ate atleast half of the medium sized bag that we had between us. I also snuck in a bag of M&M's (or "M's", as Garrett refers to them), and he scarfed those down too. (When we left the theater and got out into the light, he had chocolate smeared everywhere. I don't think M&M's are still "melts in your mouth, not in your hand" anymore.) He thought he was entitled to numerous sips of my Coke as well. Finally after he drank much more than I thought necessary (2 year olds do not need additional caffeine in their diet, atleast not my 2 year old), I moved the cup and told him it was all gone. I don't think he really bought it, but he went back to drinking the juice in his sippy cup. When the movie first started, Garrett looked at me and asked "Where Buzz?" I hated to tell him that this was not a Toy Story affiliated movie and Buzz Lightyear would not be making a showing.

I was a little disappointed in a couple of things. First, there wasn't a strong Christian theme in this movie compared to the last Veggie Tale movie, "Jonah". I mean, there was a good message behind it, but then again, there's also typically a good message in most Disney movies too. God was never mentioned and it was not based on a Bible story. So I felt a little bit of a let down because of that. My second disappointment was that Bob the Tomato wasn't in the movie!! He's my personal favorite (Garrett prefers Larry the Cucumber). We never once saw him until a brief bit during the closing credits. I don't know why they couldn't have given him some part somewhere, but apparently his salary demands were too high to include him in the movie.

Overall it was a cute movie. I think Garrett enjoyed it pretty well, though if Buzz had made an appearance he probably would have been much happier. He was mostly excited about all the popcorn, M&M's, and Coke that he got to consume, which was a special treat. So I would definitely recommend this movie to all of you cartoon lovers out there. Just don't go expecting the typical Veggie Tale movie because it's not your "Where's God When I'm Scared"-type of movie, but still good, and still including the vegetables that we all know and love.