October 2020: The pandemic was raging outside, and my three kids were on remote learning. Sports, birthday parties, playdates — pretty much every extracurricular activity had been canceled. The boredom of lockdown was center stage, and the only thing we could really do safely as a family was stream TV shows in our living room. Somehow, by the fall of 2020, we had gone through all of the newly released, family-centered programming my children were so eager to watch earlier in the year. And somehow, after years of my making one quality movie recommendation after another and each one going ignored, my kids asked me a question I’d been longing to hear as long as I’d been a father: “Dad, what do you think we should watch?”

My heart leapt.

Now don’t get me wrong: As a family, we had watched tons of classic movies from when my wife and I were children. But it always took a little arm-twisting, and each time, I felt like any movie I suggested was on trial, my children were the judges, and I was some cheap lawyer like Danny DeVito in The Rainmaker, arguing the validity of an ’80s or ’90s classic, which in my mind shouldn’t have been necessary. My kids should simply understand that if I say it’s a great movie, my word as their father should be enough, right? But this is one of the falsest assumptions I think every parent makes. I mean, honestly, when have my children ever been interested in anything I’ve done or seen? 

But on that fall pandemic day, I jumped on it: I grabbed the remote, flipped through Netflix, found literally dozens of amazing movies from my childhood and finally landed on the original Karate Kid. Somehow it became a catalyst, and over the following months, we ended up watching one throwback movie after another. Beetlejuice, The Waterboy, As Good as It Gets, Sleepless in Seattle... I was flooded with memories of watching these movies as a child, naturally. But I expected that. What I didn’t expect was how much it helped me connect with my children. Rom-coms led to action movies, which led to family comedies, until it didn’t feel like our childhoods were all that far apart anymore. 

We watched Jaws, and it was amazing to see my tween daughter’s eyes open wide once she realized the dreaded theme song meant the shark was going to do something sharky. I told her about how this was the first ever huge summer blockbuster, how they used to show it at this massive water park late at night in my hometown, and how every time the theme song played, they turned on the waves. “I’m pretty sure kids from my neighborhood still chat with their therapist about that,” I said. And Norah just nodded, hanging on my every word in that way all dads dream about. 

We watched Stargate, and my teenage son and I looked up fact and fiction between science and Egyptian history, while also discussing how it all relates to the show Ancient Aliens, which we ended up watching later. The whole experience was half educational, half speculation, and 100% father-and-son bonding. 

We watched 1991’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves as a family, and I told the kids about how I wore out the VHS tape my parents had, which led to me explaining what a VHS tape even is. I told them about Christian Slater, how he was the embodiment of absolute cool at the time, and how he now plays Tech-No in the Netflix movie We Can Be Heroes, a film they all love. But the real kicker happened when my middle daughter noticed that the Sheriff of Nottingham was played by Alan Rickman, and she cried, “It’s Snape!” Naturally, we followed it up by watching the Mel Brooks classic Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and I had the pleasure of watching my teenage son cry-laughing, same as I did the first time I watched that movie. 

Sure, there were moments when watching throwback movies totally backfired. When we watched that first classic as a family — the original Karate Kid — my seven-year-old argued with me for a solid 10 minutes because I told her I’d seen it when I was her age, which she felt couldn’t possibly be true because it’s in color, and obviously I was raised on silent movies and mastodon meat. Sadly, this was not the first time I’d had an argument with her about color movies, nor would it be the last. And there was the moment when we watched Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and Amy, the teen daughter in the movie, slammed a phone onto the receiver hanging on the wall; my tween daughter looked at me with absolute wonder and said, “Oh! So that’s why we say ‘hang up the phone’?” She paused for a moment, deep in realization, and said, “The past was stupid.” 

But on the whole, we watched movies, I told stories from my childhood, and my kids nodded the whole time, hanging on my every word. As a father of a teen and a tween, who wears white New Balance running shoes and work polos even on weekends, I cannot tell you how monumental it felt to hold my kids' attention with stories from my youth. 

We watched throwback movies, and it felt like we mixed family life, my childhood, their childhood and Google into one big pot. We talked. We laughed. And for a moment we forgot about the pandemic, the tragedy going on outside our house, and the uncertainty of school and friends and family, because we were all living in the ’80s and ’90s, back when this whole COVID-19 thing wasn’t a thing at all, and we connected as a family on a level I’d never experienced before.

But the truly amazing part was this: As we watched throwback movies, we ended up watching reboots. The Karate Kid led to Cobra Kai, Masters of the Universe led to She-Ra, and so on. I couldn’t help but feel like my children better understood me, sure, but I also seemed to better understand them. We all used lines from throwback movies and reboots around the house. We all laughed, everyone getting the joke or understanding the reference. And in a lot of ways, it felt like the decades between our childhoods were gone and we were finally on common ground.