June 17th is Pixar Sequel Day

I knew there had to be a reason I have a Microsoft Word document in which I record a running list of what movies I've seen on each day of the calendar year.

I don't mean just a list of movies watched. I mean a list that starts with January 1, and has next to it the movies I've seen on January 1, dating back to 2002, with the year I saw them in parenthesis afterward. And then goes on from there throughout the rest of the year.

Without that, I would have never noticed that I've seen a Pixar movie on June 17th, three years running. And not just a Pixar movie. A Pixar sequel.

In 2017, it was Cars 3. In 2018, it was Incredibles 2. Now 2019 has rolled along and I am among the first to have seen Toy Story 4.

What makes this especially strange is that you usually only go to the movies on particular days of the week, especially when you go with your kids, which I did for each of these. So if you've seen a kids movie, any kids movie, three years running, one of those days has to be either a Friday or a Monday. Unless you've got a leap year factored in, in which case a Tuesday or a Thursday is also a possibility.

No leap years here. I watched these movies on a Saturday, a Sunday and a Monday, all June 17th in consecutive years.

A lot of things had to go just right for that to happen.

The first year, they had to schedule the Cars 3 preview screening for a Saturday, instead of the usual Sunday. My family and I went to that for free so I could review it. The movie opened that Thursday, June 22nd.

Incredibles 2 opened a week earlier than that in 2018, on June 14th, but for this to work out I had to not get invited to a critics screening of that. I can't remember why I didn't. My editor might have flubbed something. I had to instead take my kids that Sunday, on what was a really rainy day if I remember correctly.

But the strangest turn of events had to be this year, when for some reason the advanced screening of Toy Story 4 was not on a weekend at all. When I saw it was scheduled for a Monday, I thought I couldn't go, since some of these screenings are planned for weekday mornings or afternoons. But then I noticed it was set to start at 6, and realized that not only could I go, but the rest of the family could as well. We all went even though it was a school night, because the alternative was to shell out more than $50 for their three non-free tickets this weekend.

The streak of Pixar sequels on June 17th will die here, as the next Pixar movie, Onward, a) is not a sequel, and b) comes out next March. I suppose I could end up watching it with my kids on video in June, but that seems unlikely.

Given that the original Toy Story is in my top ten films of all time, and the sequel was my #2 movie of 1999 (I didn't yet keep rankings when the original came out, but it would have been my #1), I probably should be writing a Toy Story 4 post that doesn't exist just to point out a coincidence. Maybe in the coming days I will. But my review will also post in a day or two, or may have already by the time you read this (check for the link to your right).

I'll save my soapboxing about why the series did not stop at three (but that I liked the movie anyway) for that forum.

... and incredibly close

It was really fortuitous that I went in person, three hours before showtime, to buy my kids and me Incredibles 2 tickets on Sunday. If I’d been 15 minutes later, I probably wouldn’t have gotten them at all.

I had to do it in person rather than online because that’s the only way for me to get a free ticket as a critic. And I had to do it three hours early because it was raining cats and dogs and pigs and horses, so that theater was gonna be full, especially on opening weekend.

I could have done it after my son’s 11:45 a.m. weekly basketball class, rather than before my son’s 11:45 a.m. weekly basketball class. But it was already going to be borderline ridiculous that we were going home for lunch for an hour between basketball and the movie, and stopping to get tickets would have made it even more so. (The gap was too long just to kill time, especially when it was raining cats and dogs and pigs and horses.)

And besides, if I’d gone afterwards, I wouldn’t have gotten tickets.

Even at 11:30 a.m. only the front row was still available for the 2:05 show. See, most people actually buy their tickets online.

And that’s where the subject of this post finally comes in. (You knew I was getting there.)

We did indeed see The Incredibles 2 incredibly close, though it was not extremely loud – I was surprised to notice myself straining to hear the dialogue at times. I suppose that could have just been the steady rumble of a theater filled with children on a Sunday afternoon.

And though I was initially concerned, if not for myself then for my kids, about having the Incredibles dwarf and consume us, it does not seem to have unduly affected any of our experiences. My parents and other parents of their generation used to tell us we’d hurt our eyes if we sat too close, but that seems to have fallen by the wayside these days. Kids sit too close to screens all day long. It’s a byproduct of modern existence.

Being so close did make me feel even more immersed in the tremendous retrofuturism I was seeing on screen, glimmering at me in all its glory. In my review (which you can read here) I called the movie a Rolls Royce, as that was all I could think when I watched it. Pixar movies have looked fantastic before, but I’m not sure I can remember one looking this fantastic. Which I suppose only makes sense given that they’re improving the technology a little bit each time out.

Anyway, don’t need to go into too many details on my thoughts as my review pretty much says it all.

But yeah, if any movie is a front row kind of movie, this one is.