It was a nice quiet day today. Too cold to do much of anything outside. MyeongHee and I stayed indoors and watched TV. A rerun of the 2005 movie, King Kong, was on and we watched that. She had seen the 1970s version with Jessica Lange, but not the older B&W 1933 version. It got me thinking about other classic movies they’ve imported over here.

The Wizard of Oz was always one of my favorite movies of all time.  I did a quick search of bit-torrent sites and found multiple entries for the movie. I then went to GOM TV here in Korea and downloaded a set of subtitles in Korean. Before the first King Kong movie was finished, I had downloaded a complete and decent copy of the Wizard of Oz. We switched over and watched that on our new big screen. MyeongHee had never seen nor even heard of the movie, but within minutes she was singing along with “Over the Rainbow.” Apparently, the soundtrack has made it across the ocean intact if not the film itself. It turns out she knew several of the songs and hummed along as the movie played. She laughed and jumped at the same parts we did when we were kids, watching it while lying down on the living room floor. I loved when that movie came out once a year on our three available channels. The notion of reruns and 500 channels with nothing on was still decades in the future. While watching, I was transported back to when I was a boy, hiding my face in the blankets piled around us on the floor when the flying monkees came for the foursome in the dark woods. It was wonderful to see her smile when they danced “If I only had a…” and at the end, when Dorothy had to say goodbye, she cried as I did, too.

I think everyone in America has seen that movie at some time or another. But to introduce a  classic like that to an adult, and have them appreciate it the same as I always have was simply golden.

And after it was over, I made a nice American style dinner and she put kimchee all over it.