Yippie-Ki-Yay

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Last night, Josh was flipping through the channels and landed on Die Hard, only about ten minutes into the movie, and we were both instantly hooked for the rest of the showing. Die Hard ranks in the top five action movies of all time, and it may just be one of my favorite movies ever. I'm not sure if that's because of or in spite of the fact that typically several months or years will go by before I see it again or even really think about it, but once I catch a few seconds of it on TV, all those famous lines and scenes come flooding back to me.

I have Stuart to blame for getting me hooked on the movie; it was a staple of our middle school years, when we were well on our way to taking advantage of what pop culture had to offer us. Die Hard had one-liners and scenes we could lip-sync to while we taped ourselves with a camcorder. It had action and explosions, and a great action star in Bruce Willis.

But best of all, when the first two movies were rerun on network TV, they played host to some of the most brilliant examples of awful dialogue editing ever devised by man. From voiceovers that barely matched the real actors' voices to replacement words that made no sense whatsoever ("yippie-ki-yay, Mister Falcon," anyone?), you never knew what was coming next, even if you had the movie memorized by heart. I have to hand it to whoever was responsible for editing movies for dialogue on network TV in the early 90's. Without them, I wouldn't have bothered to memorize all of these classic scenes using the wrong words, wouldn't have laughed a quarter as much, and Stuart and I wouldn't have come up with our own weird slang words based on the original screw-ups.

Anyway, it's a great movie, and I look forward to the next time I happen to randomly catch it on TV. As for the past, I'll always look back on an elite batch of movies - like Die Hard and Star Wars, for example - as pieces of my history that helped me develop the sense of humor I have now. Who'da thunk it?