1984

There were a number of entertaining movies that came out in 1984. Memorial Day weekend saw the release of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom". The top grosser of the year, "Beverly Hills Cop" came out in December. On June 8th, 2 of the top 4 highest grossing movies of the year were released and both were good. The first, "Ghostbusters", was quite funny, a real crowd pleaser, actually. But my favorite of the year was a relatively small movie presented by Steven Spielberg. Though it was released in the middle of summer, the movie took place entirely over Christmas. There were no big stars in it and it had a bizarre mixture of comedy and horror. The "excessive" violence in it (for a PG rated movie), as well as similar issues with "Temple of Doom", helped bring about the creation of a new rating: PG-13.

The poster made it look so innocent though, didn't it?



Many parents said that since Spielberg had his name placed so prominently on the poster, they were expecting something along the lines of "E.T.", but they were quite mistaken. One of those parents was my cousin's mom. She took her 4 year old child, "Drew", to that movie and he couldn't stand to be left alone for months afterward (for fear the gremlins would get him), not even in the bathroom ("Is it clean?"). Thankfully, he got over it...eventually. In fact, he accompanied me to the sequel which came out in the summer of 1990 (By that time, he was a more appropriate 10 years old).

In the summer of '84, I was no longer living in Rollingstone. I was residing on the east side of Winona with me old geeza and siblings. It was pretty cool to be able to bike a couple miles to the movie theatre, something that wasn't possible previously since Rollingstone was located more than 8 miles from Winona.