When I was a teenager, I remember my parents buying me a video cassette titled ‘What’s Happening to Me?’ It detailed, in great detail, the physical and mental changes that occur during adolescence. It was a fun, educational, and entertaining tape that, undoubtedly, caused a lot of embarrassment. But there is always something that can take embarrassment to the extreme, as it’s now called “cringe”: getting caught by your parents on websites you shouldn’t be visiting? A sex scene in a movie? Those are trivial matters.
Sex masks the tragedy
Imagine that it’s 1990 and your parents have finally taken you, after much insistence, to Disneyworld. While strolling through Epcot, the second of the four parks in the complex, twice the size of the Magic Kingdom, you come across a pavilion called Wonders of Life. Amid monorails and large glass pyramids, they’re showing a 15-minute film—an animated and live-action short titled ‘The Making of Me’—which is exactly what you’re thinking.
Sixteen minutes of an educational video about sex that you have to sit through in an amusement park, during your vacation, with your parents right beside you. I think I’ve had nightmares like that. And mind you, the video was actually designed specifically for the North American audience, known for its puritanical tendencies. In a “Back to the Future” style, we follow Martin Short (yes, the comedian you can now see in ‘Only Murders in the Building’ and who previously made all the dirty jokes in the world) as he learns about how he was created.
Luckily, nobody expected any explicit scenes in ‘The Making of Me.’ The short film simply explained how your parents went to the prom (you know, that prom in Cuenca), dated for a while, got married, and then, in great detail, it showed how dad planted a seed in mom. The audience left ‘The Making of Me’ feeling rather confused: yes, it was informative, but… why at Disneyworld? Why delve into such complex matters? What was the need for it?
In 2007, after 18 years of uninterrupted screenings, ‘The Making of Me’ was replaced with a food documentary, never to be shown again. Disneyworld learned its lesson, Martin Short avoided getting into trouble like that again, and the amusement park focused on much more ordinary things like a children’s Mickey Mouse disco or a short-lived electro-space music group. Disneyworld: a thousand stories, none of them ordinary.
Some of the links added in the article are part of affiliate campaigns and may represent benefits for Softonic.
