Memories of Mayhem

One of the things I remember about Operation Mayhem was watching the South Park Movie (Bigger, Longer, Uncut) over and over again on Scotty's portable DVD player.

I'm sure in 2010, you can purchase portable DVD players in any corner store, but back in 1999, portable DVD players were a little hard to come by. In fact, I believe Scotty paid $1,000 for this little technological marvel. It may have only had a 7 inch screen and we may have had to huddle around said screen because there were no output cables to a TV, but it did the trick nicely.

South Park was still hot around this time and the movie was considered highly offensive. As we had not caught the movie in the theater, we needed to check this out for ourselves. And check it out we did. We must have watched it about 5 times beginning to end that week and thought it was simply crazy. Trey Parker and Matt Stone saw the line and not only stepped over it, but defecated on it while sprinting past it. While this movie may seem a little tame today, so do early Simpsons from the late eighties. Tastes change very quickly.

Probably the reason this movie/moment is quite memorable was that after watching the movie several times, we would sing, "Blame Canada" very loud and pretty much everywhere we went. I'm sure this by no means ingratiated ourselves to our wonderful Quebecois hosts.

Future trips would see Capt. Jim purchase his own (much cheaper) portable DVD player which would allow the PQ Ski Team to watch such classics as "Baseketball", "Team America: World Police", and "Ski School".

What will this year's trip bring from a movie perspective? Stay tuned...