My parents took me to see this movie when I was 10 years old. Might have been a questionable choice. But I liked it and it made an impression.
My father took to to the drive in for a twin bill, Andromeda Strain and Colossus the Forbin Project. I was 13.
I don’t recall my parents taking me to see it in the theater (I was 8 in 1971), but I remember seeing it not long after and I read the novel when I was around 10 or 11. I wonder how long after the theatrical release it was on TV, because I think that’s how I first saw it (though I might have seen it on a re-release to theaters, just don’t recall).
It’s been many years since I read the novel, but I remember there being some phone numbers in it, at least one of which I think was supposed to be a classified phone to the wildfire facility. What was amazing was that Crichton didn’t use the usual literary device of making the fictional numbers begin with 555, but instead they appeared as if they were real phone numbers. Well, that, combined with the “War of the Worlds” hyper-realistic style in which it was written, was way too much for a young kid’s imagination. While I understood that it was fiction, there was also the nagging question of “What if it’s real?”
So I kept thinking about it, building up my courage until I finally tried calling one of the numbers. If I recall correctly, it rang a few times and then played the standard recording that it was not a valid number, but those few seconds while it was ringing were terrifying and exciting at the same time.
I remember not only going to many movies at that age that most kids today couldn’t even comprehend (just imagine them trying to decipher 2001 A Space Odyssey), but also reading constantly. I even watched the Watergate hearings (I was 10 at that time), and read the newspaper every day. My grandmother gave me Johnathan Livingston Seagull for Christmas. I would have been about 9 when I read it. I hated it, not because I didn’t have an intellectual curiosity about what it meant (I did), but because I just thought it was stupid in the end. Had I known about the New Age Movement, and that Richard Bach was to become one of its pre-eminent gurus, I would have hated it even more. I was conservative and had common sense from a young age.
We as a society have really failed today’s kids. The dominant “culture” today is an absolute intellectual wasteland that offers them nothing but failure and despair.