Have you ever bought a movie more than once?
I mean the same movie. More than once.
There are a few legitimate reasons for doing so, although normally it is a little bit excessive. I have a few movies I've bought a second time. For instance, I bought Iron Man twice because I lost my first copy. I still hold that someone slunk into my living room and surreptitiously plucked it off the shelf...the brigands.
I've bought Gladiator twice because it's one of my top-5 favorite movies and I wanted it on Blu-Ray. Then there's The Punisher and a few others that were in the same situation, I wanted them on Blu-Ray.
Every once in a while, maybe your favorite movie comes out with a new edition or is in a new format and you just have to buy it. Or perhaps there's some collectible with it that you couldn't have gotten otherwise.
I know I have a friend who bought another edition of Lawrence of Arabia because it was a special collector's edition that came with a book of the art from the film and an actual piece of 35mm film that ran in theatre when the movie came out on its first run. That's a perfectly worthy reason to buy a movie multiple times.
What is not a worthy reason, however, is just because.
So let me tell you a story about the time my mother bought the same movie not once...not twice...but three times.
See, there was this little movie that came out in 1995 called The Amazing Panda Adventure. According to IMDB.com, The Amazing Panda Adventure grossed just $7.5 Million. Half of that was from my mother buying the movie on VHS, probably.
I was either seven or eight years old at the time, and so my mom would always have to drag me along to the store whenever we would go shopping. Well, my mom must have seen something in this movie that she latched on to because she bought it.
My mother doesn't normally buy movies. She would buy the Disney classics. We had the Robin Hood movie where they were all animals. We had Darby O'Gill and the Little People. We had The Rescuers, which was my grandmother's favorite, but my mom wasn't really the type to just buy a random movie all willy-nilly when we were growing up.
If you ever wonder if those giant displays in stores work...my mother is living proof.
This movie's greatest contribution to society is that, for some unknown reason, Luke Skywalker and Superman made the most 90s photo ever to promote it. And neither of them are actually in it. (Image via WireImage.com and IMDB.com; Photo by Steve Granitz)
We would always see the bin with this one movie in it, The Amazing Panda Adventure. And every time, my mom would say basically the same thing: "Oh, wow. This looks like a good movie. We should buy it."
The first time we bought it, okay. Sure. My mom bought it and that was great. We watched it a few times. It's a sweet, innocent little movie about a kid who goes to China to visit his estranged father and saves a panda while having a pretty swell romp in the forest. One might call it an adventure. One might even say it was amazing.
One might like the movie so much that she immediately forgets that she bought it.
Because the next time we were in the store..."Oh, wow. This looks like a good movie. We should buy it."
I tried to tell my mom, "No. We already own this one."
What she said was, "No, sweetie, you're thinking of a different movie."
What she was thinking was, "What are you, like seven? I'm buying this movie."
So she'd buy it, take it home, and we'd watch it again. Then I would go get the box and show her that we already owned it.
Apparently that didn't help matters much because a few months later we were getting ready to take a trip to stay at my grandparents' house and she was out buying supplies...like movies that the kids could watch at the lake.
Sure enough, we come across that same display bin. Honestly, I think they probably just rolled it away and brought it back out when they saw her coming.
And sure enough, she would run through the tried and true routine of stopping and mulling it over, then buying it. Despite my protests, she would buy it.
And I would dutifully watch it again. There was a time as a child when I had this movie that maybe 10 people saw in theatres memorized.
Eventually mom caught on because she tried to buy it again. And again. Every time we would go in the store, she would try to buy this movie and I would have to explain to her that we already owned it. In triplicate.
If I hadn't persisted in explaining to her that we already owned more than enough copies of The Amazing Panda Adventure, there's no telling just how many times she would have bought The Amazing Panda Adventure. I couldn't get the Star Wars action figures I wanted, but dang it we just had to have one more copy of The Amazing Panda Adventure.
Relief finally came when Wal-Mart had figured that they'd bled enough money from my family with this one movie. After nobody but one woman kept inexplicably buying copies of this silly kid's movie, they figured they'd made enough money for the distributor and sent the rest of the copies, most likely, off to some buried chamber in the desert next to the E.T. Atari game.
I don't know if any of the copies of The Amazing Panda Adventure lasted through our move a few years later. I'm sure there's at least one VHS of this movie laying around the house. The last memory I have of it was one time when Dana and I were cleaning up the basement trying to figure out what to store and what to keep on the shelves.
She pulled out the nice plastic VHS box of The Amazing Panda Adventure and asked if we should store that one away or keep it out to watch. I gently informed her that we'd probably find another version of it somewhere and that she could do whatever she wanted with it.
If the world economy ever crashes and the new currency is old VHS copies of The Amazing Panda Adventure, I do believe that I will ascend to the rank of king in this brave, new world quite rapidly. In the world of the blind, the man with three copies of The Amazing Panda Adventure probably had a mother like mine.
I'm pretty sure that Jamie Kennedy wishes a different video tape had failed to work in regards to the Mask "franchise."
I love my parents, I really do, but they have their moments of absurdity. Tune in next time when I recount the story of how during a freak snowstorm we went to Wal-Mart and my dad agonized over buying the VHS of The Mask or the DVD of The Mask for $5 more. I tried to tell him that we should buy the DVD because it would last longer and that was the format of the future. He bought the VHS.
We get home, put the movie in the tape player...and it doesn't work. Because of course. (Okay, that's the whole story.)
Have you ever bought a movie twice? Can you somehow top this story for forgetfulness when buying or seeing a movie? Let me know in the comments!