After all, it's just jello...

As indicated by the last post, we're becoming slightly obsessed with The Blob over here chez Middents-Dadak. Since Angela has been posting about this on her Facebook page, I suppose I let the world know why. For the last few years, our department has hosted a Literary Dessert Party, featuring all sorts of inventive confections inspired by works of literature. Since I am one of the film folks, we decided last year to enter with a film-inspired dessert instead. (You can see last year's entry here.) I still like the idea of One Hundred Cookies of Solitude, but our oven's being on the fritz prevents that from happening. In fact, that prevents most desserts... except, of course, gelatin.

Hence: our entry this year will be The Blob.

Angela gets all the credit for this, having heard the NPR story about the flick's 50th anniversary last week. I did go out, however, and acquire the flick from the library's collection. It was wonderfully campy and, I thought, hilariously funny, right from the opening credits with the fab Burt Bacharach theme song. ("Beware of the blob, it creeps, and leaps and glides and sliiides across the floor!" Priceless!) I watched it on Tuesday when no one else was home and was telling Angela all about it at the dinner table that evening.

Xan, of course, was listening. "Can I see The Blob, Dad?"

Angela looked at me and said, "I don't know. Can he?"

I considered this. Remember that he has been exposed to a grand total of about a half-dozen movies in his lifetime so far, mainly ones featuring musical numbers or trains like Singin' in the Rain or The General. So if we were to show him The Blob, it would be one of the very few we've allowed. On the one hand, I'm loathe to show him what is actually a horror movie at the tender age of three-and-a-half. On the other hand, when I taught my course on horror movies, my students indicated that they had been exposed rather early to really terrifying movies at the age of five. Besides, the boy has already entered Pirates phase and is all about swashbuckling and what-not. (There seems to be a progression of interest from trains to dinosaurs to pirates among young boys; if this is true, we seem to have skipped over the Tyrannosaurus for now.) So how much harm would cinematic man-eating jello cause? Certainly this is less creepy than Grimm's Fairy Tales (which we also haven't started) and I suppose there are worse things to happen than to develop jangelaphobia.

Luckily, I had to return the movie before Xan could watch it. But now he's curious about it. So I open the idea to you: do you think it's to early for The Blob? (It creeps!)

(By the way, we are not dressing him as the Blob for Halloween. Although maybe that's not a bad idea for me...)

UPDATE: In case anyone wants to see what the end result looked like (although it's a shame you can't taste it, because it tasted far better than it looks...):