Wander the Rainbow World Map

Persistence of Vision

July 24th, 2010 by David Jedeikin

For those of you who’ve read (or are reading) Wander the Rainbow, you’ve probably picked up on a motif running throughout the book: my continued fascination with movies, and how they partly inspired my choice of locations worldwide.

I was reminded of this last night when attending a showing of (yes, really) E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, the now-classic Steven Spielberg movie I’m just old enough to remember seeing for the first time in theatres.

But not a theatre like this! Oakland’s Paramount Theatre is a movie palace from Hollywood’s Golden Age, in its day the largest on the West Coast. A band of dedicated locals have kept the place alive and in top Art Deco glory — right down to uniformed ushers and pre-show newsreels and cartoons. Heading to the East Bay for this event with some friends felt like a mini-re-enactment of parts of my grand world journey.

I was equally impressed with this classic kids’ movie’s power to entrance: In attendence were scads of little ones, all a generation younger than the film. In spite of living in a CGI-saturated era, however, the audience was just as enthralled with this film as I remember them being back in the early 1980s: applause in all the right places (including those magical bicycle lift-offs devoutly yearned for by every cyclist kid with an imagination), laughter throughout… and more than a bit of nostalgia for those days of Asteroids, Dungeons & Dragons, and kids able to safely navigate Halloween trick-or-treating after dark.

For my part, I was reminded how those sci-fi films of the 1970s and early 1980s inspired my imagination and will to take flight: like Elliot, I yearned for something more than my familial existence and school-day life — though growing up in snowy Eastern Canada in a somewhat old-school community at-times hostile to Hollywood flights of fancy, the California suburbs depicted in the film seemed to me impossibly exotic.

Perhaps, then, that’s the role of imaginative films like E.T.: Not only to entertain, but to inspire the imaginative among us to look beyond their immediate surroundings and off to the horizon… where incredible places, amazing experiences, and (though it hasn’t happened to me yet) the odd extra-terrestrial may come calling.

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