Flashback Friday

Me in the cockpit of an F-4 jet, circa 1990. Yes. Im a dork.
Me in the cockpit of an F-4 jet, circa 1990. Yes. I’m a dork.

I’m not sure how we got them, but my friends and I somehow had access to free movie passes at one of the smaller movie theaters in town. One night, we all hopped in the car and my mom (I think it was her) drove us to the theater and dropped us off. And I got to go to my first evening movie with just my friends…no parents. There was a movie theater within bike-riding distance of my house. And we had gone to matinees before. But this was different. This was at night. And we were there without our parents.

It was a monumental moment in my life. And because of that, Top Gun will always have a special place in my heart…well…except the questionable presence of the volleyball scene – what’s the point of that scene, anyway?

Do you remember the first movie you went to without parents or other adults? What was it?

In one of the opening classes of Intro to Mass Media, Prof. Mattingly went on a mini-rant about the influence of this movie on the way news is presented. He recounted how he turned on the news (CNN, maybe?) at the dawn of Operation: Desert Storm and was shocked to see the file footage provided by the US military. It looked exactly like the action scenes from Top Gun. This blurred the lines between news and entertainment in a way he hadn’t seen before. It was a dawn of a new era. And it was all thanks to Maverick.

I don’t think he thought that was necessarily a good thing.

http://youtu.be/vwBbrngafl0

In the spirit of today’s video, I’ve included a picture from one of our Scout Troop’s trips to the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio. They have an F-4 Phantom on display where you can climb in and sit in the cockpit. When we visited the Museum back in April, the kids got to sit in the same cockpit. I thought that was pretty cool. I even posted pictures.

They definitely look much cooler than I did. Man, I was such a dork.

Still am.

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Howdy. I'm Matt. My wife, Christy, and I have four kids and two dogs, I'm passionate about orphan care. I'm a die-hard fan of the Evansville Aces, the Indiana Hoosiers, and Star Wars. I'm trying to live life by the Todd family motto: "It behooves us to live!"
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