It's old movie day. I just watched the original Superman movie, which first came out when I was 12 years old. It took me back to a much simpler time in my life, a time when I was young and innocent and couldn't tell that this movie sucks.

Especially the opening scenes with Superman's parents. Did everyone on Krypton live on icebergs? And why did they all have English accents?

You know, Superman was really lucky to land where he did and get found by the Kents. He could have been found by criminals or government agents or Bigfoot. Or not found at all.

But luckily, Superman's father had perfected technology that allowed him to fold up an entire ice-building in a green plastic stick. This was so that Superman could go to the North Pole, throw it, and then got home-schooled for 10 years. Was this movie the inspiration for the home-school movement?

And now....Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. My favorite Star Trek movie. My favorite line from just about any movie: "Khaaaaaaaaaaaaaan!!!" I wish I knew someone named Khan or Caan just so I could say their name like that.

Favorite moments in this movie: After the Reliant fires on the Enterprise, Scotty physically carries an injured cadet to the bridge. There is no reason for it, he just picks him up and carries him to the bridge; perhaps the cadet wanted a tour of the ship before he died. Then we cut to sickbay where the cadet dies. The Doctor shakes his head and probably thinks, "If I could have just gotten to this cadet sooner, like before Scotty took an hour to walk him around the ship!" While Kirk emotes, to the left of the screen, there is another crewman next to him in the background whose entire head is black down to his chest. He looks like a Looney Tunes cartoon, like when the Coyote gets stuck holding a stick of dynamite and it blows up in his face.

I didn't really feel bad for the crewman; after all, it never hurt the Coyote. He'd just come right back at the Roadrunner with invisible paint or rocket shoes or a giant slingshot.

In a way, the Coyote's story is similar to Khan's. They're both cautionary tales depicting the dangers of obsession and revenge. I think the Coyote must have been independently wealthy, because he didn't seem to have a job and yet always seemed to have money to order things from Acme.

In my view there are two likely scenarios:

1) The Coyote was independently wealthy, the heir to the Acme fortune, and it was his own company that supplied all his roadrunner-catching devices, or

2) The Coyote did have a job; it just so happens that it was catching the Roadrunner and field-testing Acme products.

Apparently, though, he wasn't very good at it. At least as far as we can tell from the cartoons. They never showed him catching and eating the Roadrunner, but then again everyone just always assumes its the same Roadrunner he's always chasing. It's possible that off-screen or between cartoons he might actually be catching and eating them. After all, you never see him chasing or eating anything else. It's probably a grisly process to clean and eat one, if he even does clean them, but I have to assume he does since he's always using his napkin and a knife and fork. But I wouldn't mind seeing the Coyote roasting a bird on a spit, and I believe that kids everywhere would be validated and encouraged by it; after all, no one wants to feel that we pointlessly toil in vain over impossible tasks that we'll never accomplish.

Knowing this, perhaps its not fair to compare the Coyote to Khan. Khan was, of course, dangerously obsessed with getting revenge on Kirk, which ultimately led to his downfall; the Coyote, on the other hand, may just have been a guy with a job to do, whose home life we just never saw.

Kind of like Carlton the doorman on that old show Rhoda. No matter what time of day or night it was they'd hit that switch and he'd go "Hello, this is Carlton your doorman." He must have worked a 20-hour shift.