Halloween and I decided to do something different with the Boy and take him to see "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" at the Plaza. He'd just turned 14 and I suspected he might enjoy it, and as plans to take him and some of his friends to Screamfest had fallen through this just might make up for it.
Now I've been to the "Rocky Horror" a few times, the last time a few years ago at the Plaza, and it was, well, it was as it's always been. A bit better organized, with noisemakers, rice and water pistols for sale at the door, but basically the same.
SO I was a little surprised - more than surprised even, to see they've been tampering with a proven success.
The first tampering consists of a pre-show - "The Rocky Horror Glee Show".
15 minutes of 'highlights' from something that bad that had me apologizing again and again to my son. Followed by a short clip - "Tim and Meat's One-Stop Rocky Horror Shop", despite having the original cast it was missable, then by the pre-show in which the "host" whips the audience into a pre-Rocky frenzy, followed by the movie.
Now the movie - "digitally restored", now altered to fit with Richard O'Brian's original script - lips no longer on a black background, but on black and white clips of the movies referred to in the lyrics.
Interesting, but not good. And the first 15 minutes of the film - up until the "Time Warp" scene - are black and white. Interesting as well. And there's an additional scene - song number - following Janet's discovery of Brad & Frank - which is just lousy, and was justly edited from the original film.
There were "comments", like in Karoke, that prompted the audience through the motions in the lower right of the screen, and Eddie's "Hot Patootie Bless my soul" was covered with little pop-ups and trivia about Meatloaf, looking for all the world like a "Much Music" video.
And I couldn't help feeling that I was watching, not a movie, but an HD video broadcast onto a big screen. Perhaps because I was, the digitization visible, the sound quality poor. Frequent apologies to the boy, I didn't know they had 'fixed' it, but the improvements did more damage than good. And tampering with this film, in a way, it's tampering with my memories, and I'm very irate. The rest of the audience, as far as I could tell, were unperturbed.
But, in the end, the show isn't so much about the movie, it's about the audience, and all my trivial criticisms and whinging aside at the end of the night, driving him home I solicited his opinion and he told me: "I think that's the best movie you've ever taken me to in my life...".