Like Father, Like Son

Mr. Lucky likes to watch Netflix movies on his computer, whereas I prefer to watch them on the TV in the family room. I sometimes watch Netflix while he works in the evening. Thanks to its “Recently Viewed” feature that allows us to check up on each other, several days later he’ll remark, “I see you watched (insert movie title here). How’d it look?”

“It looked fine,” I usually say, but what’s fine to me may not be acceptable to him. For as long as we’ve been married, he’s waxed obsessive over widescreen ratios and more recently, high definition. Unless it’s so extremely letterboxed as to resemble the view through Gort’s visor, and so high in definition that it’s 3-D without the kooky glasses, it is unacceptable to him.

So you’d think he’d be more particular than I am about what movies to watch. Not so. Judging from the Netflix viewing history, not only will that man watch just about anything, but I wonder where he finds the time to watch it all.

“Most of those movies I don’t watch all the way through,” he explains. “I only watch them long enough just to see how they look.”

Enter the Bear.

One Saturday while I was at a TARA meeting, Mr. Lucky introduced Baby Bear to the Netflix streaming disc that works off the PS3. He may as well have opened an institutional sized can of Extra Fancy Gourmet Worms in Heavy Syrup.

In terms of quantity, that boy has a viewing history to match his father’s. It’s mostly from the family/children category, but he has a few movies favored for an excess of stuff boys love. He goes nuts over the first third of The Fugitive (as did his older brother before him, who calls the movie, “Bus Train”). In addition to the bus and the train, there are police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, helicopters, and sirens galore. And let’s not forget the thousands and thousands of gallons of lovely water gushing in torrents over a dam, with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones running and yelling and slipping and splashing through ankle deep water while threatening to shoot somebody—just like Mom and Dad once did!

I’ve also seen him play the first few minutes of Die Hard over and over, just to watch the landing of the jet airliner.

One day recently, while I was in my office, Mr. Lucky set up the Netflix in the PS3 to play the movie Up on the TV. Shortly afterward, I heard a ruckus between him and Baby Bear, and I went out to investigate.

“He wants the Playstation controller and the remote, but I hid them,” Mr. Lucky explained. Funny, I used to do that myself—only I wasn’t hiding them from Baby Bear. “He wants to quit the movie and find something else.”

“Are you yourself watching it?” I asked. When he said no, I went on, “Then let him change movies if that’s what he wants.”

Mr. Lucky proceeded to steal my lines. “But that’s all he does. He doesn’t watch anything for more than a few minutes. He’s constantly changing out movies.”

“Oh, you mean sort of like you always do? And how about all your channel surfing? How many times have I had to sit there while you endlessly click-click-click and say, ‘I know I’m driving you crazy, Karen, but I can’t help it, I’m a man and men like to hunt’? Well, guess what? Our little boy is becoming a man—AND HE WANTS TO HUNT!”

I myself may not be a hunter, but my shot hit the mark. Grumbling under his breath, Mr. Lucky surrendered the PS3 controller and remote to Baby Bear, and then returned to the computer in his man-cave.

And thence resumed his own feverish hunting through Netflix.