Going farther back in time is a mixed blessing for assembling a list like of movies I saw in the theater. On the one hand, some movies stand out very brightly in my memory. On the other hand, there were a lot of other films out there. Did I see them, but for some reason they didn't stand out? Did I see them on video or on cable at somebody's house or at a hotel? I can't say, so certainly this list of 10 films, which covers my life from the time we moved to North Dakota in late 1984 to 1989, should be taken with a big grain of salt.
1985 - 0 films
1986 - 2 films
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Future WDAZ Studios
An American Tale
1987 - 2 films
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Pinocchio & the Emperor of the Night - Columbia 4, 12/25
1988 - 2 films
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? - Future WDAZ Studios
Oliver and Company
1989 - 4 films
The Little Mermaid
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids
Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade
The Rescuers
My parents weren't the sort to take me and my sister to movies we weren't old enough for, so the only film on this list that might not have been age appropriate was
Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade. I feel like my parents weren't too concerned about that one, because:
[a] fighting Nazis is timeless.
[b] when we moved to North Dakota we lived in an extended stay hotel for a month or two while we were looking for a house. On HBO that month was
Indiana Jones & the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I watched repeatedly at the age of 6.
With that exception though, everything else we saw was rated G or PG. And honestly, back before animation became cheap and plentiful there weren't a ton of movies aimed at kids in any given year anyway. There's a reason this list leans heavily toward either new Disney films or re-released Disney films. I was tempted to add every Disney re-release in the time period to this list, but I opted instead to add ones that I had at least a vague memory of having seen. Since I don't recall having seen either
Sleeping Beauty or
The Fox and the Hound at all, let alone in the theater, they didn't make the cut despite having re-releases in this time frame. Another thing I noted as I went through the box office for each year was that Disney did a ton of re-releases back in the 1980s, and does none now, which probably speaks to the rising availability of all these movies first on video and then on streaming, not to mention the significantly higher number of animated options available to kids nowadays.
The movie that absolutely stands out the most in my memory from this time period is
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. It was one of two movies that I ever saw in a big single screen theater building off of South Washington that later became the television studios of WDAZ. It was riotously funny. We got there partway through the opening cartoon, and why I remember that I couldn't tell you. This film has probably stood up better than any other film on this list and is one of my all-time favorites.
The other movie I saw in that theater was
Star Trek IV. My parents were not Star Trek fans, and I can't remember ever watching any other Star Trek media with them, but for some reason they took us to that film. I guess it must have been the whales. Whatever the reason, this is the first time I recall being introduced to the Star Trek universe, which may explain why I've never been a big fan of it. I do like whales though.
An American Tale is quite possibly the most Jewish kids movie ever, but I remember very little about besides
Somewhere Out There being all over the radio. I can tell I'm disconnected from mainstream pop today because I rarely know when movie singles hit big. Anyway, it boggled my mind that
Universal Studios had an American Tale themed playground when we were there in 2020. Surely people aren't still watching this film, right?
As noted in my
Christmas movie summary,
Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, which we saw on Christmas Day 1987, is the earliest pop culture event of my life that I can track to a specific date. I remember little about the movie except that it was terrible. According to wikipedia, it is now a minor cult movie, which goes to show that cults are ridiculous.