Beatlemania

My kid is so into the Beatles right now.

It started small. As much as I love Hayao Miazaki, I was sick of watching Kiki's Delivery Service* four times a week (she would use up the entirety of her daily TV allotment to watch it first thing every morning), and I needed a break from that wisecracking cat. She had liked Yellow Submarine when she was little, so I dug the VHS tape** out of the cabinet and popped it in. She sat on the couch, giving it her full attention. She cackled and giggled at Ringo's jokes. She got up and danced like crazy. And she asked to watch it the next morning. And the next. And the next.

Then I played some Beatles music for her and she rocked out. We started checking out books from the library and reading about the Beatles. We burned right through Mike Venezia's slim volume and plunged into this much larger book. She adored it. We read a chapter every night at bedtime, and she spent hours looking through "the Beatles book." That's what she called it, and I had a lot of explaining to do when "the Beatles book" went back to the library.

Now she is in full-on Beatles-crazy mode. "Should we watch Yellow Submarine? Can we watch Yellow Submarine?" is the first thing I hear in the morning, as her fingers pry my eyelids open.  When it's over and I turn the TV off for the day, she immedately asks "Can we listen to the Beatles? We can listen to the Beatles now, right?"  Thank God for the library, because most of my Beatles CD's have disappeared through the years (between roommates, cross-country moves, or friends "borrowing" things and never returning them) and all I have left is Anthology 2. I've been checking out every other one our library has, so that we can listen to the Beatles all day without tons of repetition. She carries the little drum set we got her for Christmas into the living room and drums along with her favorite songs. Ryan got Beatles Rockband to play with her, and she happily punches the controller buttons or uses her drum set to back him up while he plays. She wanders around the house singing many of the songs, and it's not unusual to hear "We all live inna yellow subbberr-ine! We all live inna yellow sub-ar-eeen!" coming from her playroom in random bursts.

She has a set of four pillows made from this fabric panel, and she can not only identify John, Paul, George, and Ringo as their cartoon selves, she can pick them out of photographs in the books we read. She can point to the Abbey Road cover and tell you who is who. 

I, of course, am thrilled. I am still working on her bedroom, which has a Yellow Submarine theme, and which I'd really like to finish some time this decade. She's almost 3, and I've been working and planning the thing since I was pregnant. Of course, maybe it's better this way, since, although it's taken me nearly four years, she is only now Beatles-crazy enough to love and appreciate it when I am done.




*Can someone please tell me why there is a 2011 "in development" listing for this on IMDB? They are already doing a Disney-Robert Zemeckis remake of Yellow Submarine that is sure to blow donkey chunks, why must they ruin everything?! 

** Yes, we still have these. A whole cabinet of them.  You see how technologically advanced we are here at Tragically Ordinary? And also, we're cheap bastards who won't replace a VHS movie with a DVD unless the tape no longer works or the DVD is on sale for five bucks. Considering how often our daughter watches Yellow Submarine, I'd better start saving for the Deluxe DVD edition right now.