Why?
Well this movie has quite the history with me, which will be the focus of Part 1 of my post about the movie. This post is about my personal history and so might be boring for the rest of you, but a trip down memory lane for myself.
I have often told people that before the 2nd half of 2nd Grade, I was not much of a student. Outside of standardized tests(which I've always excelled at), I was horrible at doing daily work. I think I always loved learning new and interesting things, but I have always hated repetitive busy work. At the end of 2nd Grade a few things came together that changed my life. The reading of Greek Myths and the eventual discovery of King Arthur along with the Dragon Warrior video game ignited my interest in reading. Once I started, I could not get enough. There was a particular King Arthur book I checked out and re-read over and over. It was not till 3rd Grade that I really began reading by the boatloads.
Pizza.
I love food. Anyone that knows me knows that I'm not dead as of this typing, and that is largely because I eat. Eating does things like provide nutrients, but also provides a sort of pleasure that if you have not eaten, then I can not describe accurately. Try eating, I whole heartedly suggest doing it several times a year.
In 3rd grade there was a program that if you read a certain amount of books, you got a free personal pan pizza from Pizza Hut. That year I read so many books that just about everyone except my mother questioned it, to them it seemed like this student who a couple of years before was slightly under achieving, was gaming the system for pizza. No way could I be the number 1 reader in my class.
At first my teacher questioned me about the books. Then other teachers who saw I was leading the whole grade would come and quiz me about the books. Eventually even the principal, a man that had worked with me in my early years, came by and questioned me. I did not realize myself just how well I remembered things I read back then, but I could rattle off facts and quotes from books that were 10-20 books down on the list. It satisfied them all, and I was never questioned again.
So what did I read during all of this? Well my school had this gigantic collection of "famous childhoods" semi-biographies on the shelf. The majority of them were based on presidents and frontiersmen. I read the childhoods of Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, but also the lesser knowns such as Ethan Allen, Will Clark, and Kit Carson. Interestingly, they also had the Native American series of famous childhoods, and through them I was able to get a view of the other side of the frontier expansion.
One of these books I particularly liked: James Fenimore Cooper. I do not know if it was his strangely fun to say name, or what, but I liked his book. I had no clue much about why he was famous, I think in the back and the beginning they mentioned he was an author about the frontier. It was around the beginning of 4th Grade that the movie, Last of the Mohicans was released. I actually got to go and see it when it was new because my best friend at the time was going to see it with his family and I was invited along.
You have to understand that I am much more a "read it and remember it" kind of person, and at this age this movie was really all over the place for me. First, I have never been in a huge theater like this before. Earlier I had my first Chinese food EVER when the family ate at a restaurant. The scenery of the movie was amazing, there were a lot of characters to keep up with, and and... well I loved the movie as a kid, but I would have to see it a few more times once it came out on video before I fully understood everything that was going on.
I would be in "frontiersmen" mode for a couple of years. I ran out of books in the library about that subject, and I had recently began thinking maybe baseball was something I was interested in(the Braves were the most successful baseball team at the time, and Atlanta did not have much luck in the 80's, so the early to mid 90's was a new golden age, but I'll save that for some baseball movies later). Watching Last of the Mohicans is kind of like revisiting a very formative time in my life, one that I felt instilled in me a lot of my values.
Despite that, I do not watch this movie with rose tented glasses in my adult life, there are flaws, but that's for Part 2.
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