"I'm onna hiiiiwaaaaay to HED!"
Kylie is a headbanger. She's also six years old. You haven't lived 'til you've driven around suburban Columbus with a little girl whose absolute most favoritest bands in the world are AC/DC and Black Sabbath, and she's singing along to the tunes on her Discman at the top of her lungs. Only she doesn't understand the lyrics, so "Highway to Hell" sounds like:
"I'm onna hiiiiwaaaaay to HED!"
Her uncle and I try hard not to laugh. Tears are streaming down my cheeks. I can only imagine that, to her, "Hed" must be a truly magical land where the great and powerful Ozzy benevolently rules over the Black Diamond city. Angus Young is the Tin Man, Alice Cooper is the Scarecrow, James Hetfield is the Cowardly Lion, and the flying monkeys all go "Oi! Oi! Oi!"
Kylie switches to Sabbath. Her 10-year-old brother Eric wants the Discman for himself, but it's not time for his turn yet.
"If you listen to that song, you'll get paranoid," he warns her.
This inexplicably delights Kylie. "I'm par'noid, I'm par'noid!" she chants.
Then she stops and taps her uncle on the shoulder. "Hey, Unca Gary, what's par'noid mean?"
Her uncle and I completely lose it. I'm laughing so hard I almost have to pull over. But fortunately the movie theater is just around the corner.
We park, and head in to see something far more horrifying than any Alice Cooper concert: Scooby-Doo.
And while Scooby-Doo is certainly not the worst movie I've ever seen in a theater, I'm twitching by the time it's over. But then, I'm not in its target demographic: Eric and Kylie are. And they, along with all the other young kids in the audience, cheer wildly for the 87 minutes of this prime example of Short Attention Span Theater. Matthew Lillard and Linda Cardellini are spot-on as Shaggy and Velma, but Rowan Atkinson is sadly underused as Mondavarious.
And as for the CGI Scrappy-Doo ... oi. I wanted to bang my head.