One of the great aspects of this is that you do not know any of the characters as “actors” and so you can really believe in the character as presented.The best example of this in my young life is that two of the greatest adventure trilogies, Star Wars and Indian Jones, both feature Harrison Ford, but it was not until The Last Crusade that I was old enough to pick up on the fact that it was the same guy.
Thanks to this blissful ignorance as a child, I was able to “fall in love” with the same actresses multiple times. These are my three biggest young crushes that I was able to unknowingly (at the time) repeat.
Olivia Newton John
Grease was one of those movies that was just always around. On television mostly, but often found at parties and in other people’s video libraries, I have seen it more times than is really necessary. For me, Grease was all about Sandy. So prim and proper and pretty. I was actually disappointed with her big change at the end of the film.
Xanadu
The one sunny summer day I was hiding out in the cool of my basement and this crazy, magical rollerskating movie came on TV. I was not really clear on what was happening in the movie Xanadu, but I was more than happy to sit and watch ONJ for two hours.
Michelle Pfeiffer
I know, I know … another Grease movie. Even at the time I recognized that Grease 2 was a bad film, but if I could have got ahold of a motorcycle then 8-year-old me would have been racing across the continent looking for Stephanie Zinone.
Grease 2
I was definitely stuck by her in Ladyhawke, but to be honest I was more interested in the idea having my own hawk.
We watched Married to the Mob as a Sunday night family viewing and I was awestruck from the moment Michelle Pfeiffer came on the screen. There was a girl in my class at the time that I had the biggest crush on and here she was on my television screen. The resemblance was uncanny. I never had the guts to ask either one of them out.
Elizabeth Shue
What male of my generation did not fall in love with Shue in The Karate Kid? Sure, I was rooting for Ralph Macchio all the way, but in my heart I knew that even he was not good enough for her. I signed up for karate lessons a week after seeing the movie.
The Karate Kid
Truth be told, I fall for Elizabeth Shue every time I see her (or even hear her, such as her appearance last year on the Doug Loves Movies podcast), but Adventures in Babysitting would have been the last time not knowing who she really was. If I had realized at the time that this was Ali from The Karate Kid I may have actually exploded with childish lust.
