Useful swag

The days of taking my 12-year-old to advance screenings of animated movies may be numbered -- he already seemed a bit suss about the prospect of the new Pixar movie Hoppers -- but they haven't come to a close just yet.

And so on Saturday we went to an advanced screening of GOAT, a title which I believe is properly capitalized due to the play on words (it's both an acronym and a reference to the protagonist's species). Yes the movie is out in other parts of the world already, but we Australians can be a bit slow on the uptake.

Because he's at that age where he's changing, or has already changed, tastes -- we've made our way through five movies featuring either Spider-man or Captain America in 2026 alone, a topic I will probably write about at length another time -- there was a lot riding on this advance screening having something good. Fortunately, it did.

But first let me discuss my realization, come to gradually over the past couple years, that an advanced screening doesn't really mean diddlysquat for most children. 

For one, kids don't really have a good idea of when a movie is coming out. Not my kids, anyway. And because movies are less a part of a culture than they used to be, there's no playground bragging rights to be had from getting to see a movie before your friends can see it. My son probably wouldn't know if GOAT is coming out in March or July -- though he has consumed some content related to it on YouTube, so that certainly helps in elevating the prestige.

And getting a ticket for free? That obviously doesn't mean shit to a kid. All of their movie tickets are free. 

Getting free food is cool, and my kids do appreciate it. (I'll include the older one here as well, even though he hasn't gone to one of these screenings with me in a while.) But that's another case where it isn't usually money out of their pocket anyway. I think they do get a sense of thrill that even their dad isn't spending any money on it, because in theory your parent could actually deny you something you wanted from the snack bar. There's something about going to a table and picking up a drink and a box of popcorn feels special, and in this case they were also handing out ChocTops, which are ice cream cones covered in a hard shell of chocolate topping. (Though it's possible he actually lost out in this deal; he asked if he could get a bag of Maltesers, chocolates that are probably most similar to Whoppers, before he knew about the ChocTops, and I denied him on the basis of us already getting something sweet for free.) 

So the only real thing I can offer as an incentive is the fanciness of the advanced screening itself, where there's usually a big poster up you can pose in front of, and there are often other special details tailored to the specific movie. In this case, there was a little basketball court in the part of the Hoyts Melbourne Central lobby that was set up for it, and about three kids were shooting baskets. Even though my son is a soccer guy, he loves playing HORSE with me in the pool, so I thought he might be in on that activity, but he wasn't.

In fact it was almost a disastrous idea to go into the city on Saturday for this. We took a series of trains to get there, and my wife joined us, even though she didn't have (and wouldn't have wanted to have) a ticket to the movie. There are five new train stations that have opened in Melbourne since the end of last year, and we thought this would be a good opportunity to ride through four of them and actually get out in two of them -- even though our regular route into the city would have been faster without this detour. Hey, when there's new infrastructure, you have to experience it, just because. We'd get in early enough that we could have lunch before the movie, and my wife would occupy herself in the city in other ways while the movie was going on. 

Well you know what else is no big deal to a 12-year-old? New train stations.

Actually he did get into the spirit of looking at them, when we finally got there, but the trip to get to the new stations involved a lot of heel dragging and complaints of being tired. I may not always want him to grow up, but I won't mind if he does grow out of this particular phase.

In any case, by the time we were actually in the city and eating lunch -- he said the pizza at Brunetti's was the best he'd ever had -- he was, indeed, on board with the whole thing. In fact, he even preferred to chatter about things he was seeing on the big slide for GOAT that was up before the movie started, than to play Connections, which is another habit of ours.

But the one truly tangible thing about the GOAT screening -- which set it apart from a normal screening, at least as far as my son was concerned -- was the thing I teased in the subject of this post and am finally getting to: the GOAT athletic towels they gave out beforehand. Here's what those looked like:

And why am I labelling this as useful?

Well I play tennis on Wednesday nights, and each week I have to remember to bring a towel to de-sweatify myself. This past week, I forgot it, so I used the sleeve of my jumper as my very ineffectual towel. Even in the weeks I do remember it, which is most of them, I'm bringing with me a washcloth, which does the trick but is still not really designed for this purpose.

Well, the GOAT athletic towel, inscribed with the name of the team from the movie, is by all means designed for this purpose, and I've just now gone and put it in my tennis bag, so there's no chance of me forgetting it.

My son? Well, he wouldn't be 12 years old if something hadn't gone amiss somewhere.

He most certainly left the auditorium with his GOAT athletic towel, but he lost it somewhere in the few minutes afterward. I know he had it when we left because I've become religious about checking places we've been sitting to make sure we haven't left anything. But he most likely lost it in the bathroom, though it's funny he should have even gone in with it, because he offloaded his sweatshirt to me before he went in. We realized it was missing soon enough later that we could have actually gone back into the bathroom to look for it. But maybe the specific location of the loss was unappealing enough to stop us in our tracks. If it had fallen on the bathroom floor, well, we wouldn't have wanted to carry around the things it would have been absorbing.

If you were keen to hear what I thought of GOAT, well, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but if you read this blog with any regularity you're accustomed to that sort of disappointment. Though I will of course be reviewing it, and that review should be linked on the right by Wednesday.