When I was young, we didn't have cable TV, and we only had a handful of movies that my parents had recorded off of broadcast TV, including such kid-pleasers as The Ten Commandments, Tora! Tora! Tora!, Ben Hur, and On Golden Pond. My sister and I, during our summers at home, generally gravitated towards Gone With the Wind, a compilation of Christmas specials, and above all, The Sound of Music. I'm not sure that it's possible to count the number of times I've watched that movie, partly because we liked it, and partly because there was nothing else to watch. My freshman year of high school, our school did a production of the stage version, so it became even more deeply ingrained in my memory.
Until this year, when my niece got into musicals, it had probably been at least 20 years since the last time I had seen the movie, but I can still recite some scenes line for line along with the actors (and, to the chagrin of my boyfriend, lyric for lyric during the musical numbers: "Happy are they, lay-dee-o lay-dee-lee-o! O lay-dee-o lay-dee lay-dee-lee-o!"). Seeing it again with my niece made me realize that the movie is the audiovisual equivalent of comfort food for me, so I ordered it through Amazon -- although it's really just by chance that it played such a big part of my formative years (although I don't think Tora! Tora! Tora! really had any chance), putting it into the DVD player takes me back to a time when the worst thing to worry about was whether Nazis would catch the Von Trapps after the big concert.
Watching it is like catching up with an old friend (and discovering new things about that friend, since I had only ever watched it on a bad VHS tape on a small TV, with scenes cut out to make room for 1980's commercials -- it's very different when it's been remastered, with no cut scenes, on a big, widescreen TV with a real stereo system).
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