Never too late to fall in love with Tangled

It's a milestone Tangled post for me -- the tenth time I have tagged a post as Tangled-related in the nearly seven-year history of this blog. (Only five of those years matter, though, because Tangled didn't exist until November of 2010.) But it's the first one in just over a year, so I'm hoping you don't feel totally Tangled out.

I've averaged a viewing of Tangled for every year of its existence, as Christmas brought my fifth Tangled viewing, though my first since August of 2013. (Tangled was actually the backup plan; we were supposed to watch The Book of Life, but for an iTunes downloading mishap.)

It was the fourth viewing for my wife, though you wouldn't know it. She remembered it as only her second viewing. I don't know how well it speaks of Tangled that she forgot two entire viewings of it, but she made up for that fact by finally loving it.

Oh, she liked Tangled when I insisted she go to the theater to watch it in 2010. Her primary complaint was that she thought Rapunzel didn't have enough agency in the final scene, as she thought Rapunzel should have made the sacrificial gesture, not Eugene. (Rapunzel tried to make it, but Eugene out-sacrificed her.) I knew she carried that complaint with her, so I was kind of surprised that she agreed to a second viewing when I bought the BluRay the next spring (April 16th, to be exact), and then a third the December of the following year (the 22nd, to be exact). (Thank God for obsessive record keeping.)

I don't know which two viewings she didn't remember. I'd be inclined to say she forgot the two home viewings, because people typically remember having seen something in the theater, but wouldn't it be weird to not remember that you'd watched a movie at least once sitting on a couch in your own living room?

But it doesn't matter, because indeed, she does love it now. I could tell from the ways she laughed over the antics of Pascal, the lovable chameleon shown above, that this was a new level of Tangled commitment than I'd seen from her before. In fact, when my son's interest seemed to be flagging late in the second act, she told him he could go do something else if he didn't want to watch the movie. Not that we could turn off the movie, a movie that had primarily been chosen as a family option to kill the time that his younger brother was taking his nap. But rather that he could bugger off and let Mummy and Daddy finish it if he weren't going to stop squirming.

I asked her point blank later on if she were no longer troubled by the decisions made by the characters at the end, which gender got to be self-sufficient and all that. Having been bothered by this previously was also something she appears to have forgotten.

Me? For the fifth damn time I got choked up in the places in Tangled that usually choke me up. The fifth damn time. The parts that weren't choking me up were giving me goosebumps. Probably also for the fifth time.

Nice to know I'm not going to fall out of love with it anytime soon.