M*A*S*H

A Dad Movie if we ever saw one. We can just hear Pops and his buddies quotin' Sutherland's lines and talking about that really stupid football game that sucks all the energy outta the end of this flick. There's the old man laughing 'bout Elliott Gould hitting the links and that part where the whole army doc camp listens in on Bobby Duvall's late-night romp in the sack. Ha! How great. Can't ya just hear your old man too?

The weird thing is, and the thing we couldn't stop thinking about while watching this, was how when we say this is a "Dad Movie" we're picturing Dad as we knew him: a middle-aged dude with a mustache and kids. We're thinking of Little League Dad and waiting for the PGA tournament to end so he can clip the hedges Dad. But when M*A*S*H hit the big screen, Dad was just a young man who still couldn't buy his own twelver of Olympia. So when we imagine him and his other mortgage-havin' pals recountin' these scenes at the Fourth of July barbecue it's really like the Cinema jawin' on and on about Fight Club or the time we saw that Enemy of the State/Faculty double feature. Isn't that weird? Dad was a dumb kid just like us, and here we are watching all these Dad Movies thinking it was Adult Dad who liked all this stuff instead of Wild and Crazy Dad out on a double date. In fact, maybe Young Dad didn't even like these here '70s movies anyway. Maybe he just liked the '70s.