Beetlejuice was my favourite cartoon when I was a little girl. I loved the creepy, crude, rude Beetlejuice, and I thought Lydia was the coolest girl in the world. I envied her jet black hair, her unique personality and the fact Beetlejuice was her best friend.
Beetlejuice was also my introduction to Tim Burton, who is my favourite movie director and producer. Guy Ritchie is a close second.
Tim Burton has directed or produced many of my favourite movies including, The Nightmare Before Christmas (which I watched over and over again as a child), Corpse Bride, Sleepy Hollow, Edward Scissorhands, and the new versions of Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
His preference for the dead, the unique, the dark, or the just plain weird is something I greatly admire. After all, life can't be sunshine and flowers all the time. That would be boring.
Now I never put much thought into this until recently, but I wonder how the cartoons and movies we watched when we were growing up influenced who we became as adults.
Much research has been conducted into whether violence on television encourages violence in real life, so it's only natural to wonder whether the characters we grew up envying somehow weaved their way into our young impressionable minds, only to make an appearance again someday as a characteristic in our personality.
Looking at myself, I would tend to think my personality was somewhat influenced by my early days of watching Beetlejuice. I can draw many parallels between Lydia's life and my own - separated parents, feeling alone - utterly alone - as a younger person, and the desire to wear black, black and more black. It's still rare for me to wear any colour other than black.
She also photographed everything in her environment and documented the seemingly uninteresting things in life - just like me.
Now, I can't help but wonder what my parents thought when I decided Beetlejuice was more entertaining to watch than Rainbow Brite, My Little Pony, or Care Bears. They must have known from day one I wasn't going to be a regular little girl who liked to wear pink dresses and have my hair done.
Actually I'm quite sure my mom will tell you I hated having my hair done up.
I can recall this one home video I watched one day where my four-year-old self screamed and cried at my mom for trying to fix the pig tails in my hair. One had fallen out so I was walking around my grandparents' cabin at the lake with half my hair down and the other half in a pig tail.
I looked ridiculous.
But that was me. Miss Independent. Miss My-Way-or-the-Highway. Boy my parents must have had fun with me.
So maybe I have this all backwards. Maybe it's actually our personality that influenced what we choose to watch on TV. Maybe I was born a misfit and I gravitated towards things - like Beetlejuice - that made me feel a little less weird.
It's something to think about.
