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Did you know
- TriviaJudy Blume was in Maine to be on set when the movie was being filmed. When she saw her vacation home she knew she wanted to make the next Fudge book ("Fudge-A-Mania") centered around a family vacation with the Hatchers and the Tubmans.
- ConnectionsReferenced in Alien Tales (1995)
Featured review
Solid made-for-TV short movie for kids
The summer that I was six, I went to a camp that showed 16mm films on Fridays (this was the mid-90s...it seems strange in retrospect that they didn't just show videos, I suppose they just had a large collection of films that they wanted to use, but I digress). This was one of them. I only saw it the one time, and tried for years to see it again because it left an impression on me, only to find that it had disappeared, until I found it on DVD a few years ago.
Sheila is a kid with a laundry list of fears, spending the summer in a strange place, where she tells lies about herself in order to seem cooler. As a kid who was afraid of her own shadow, and who desperately wanted to start over in a new place where I had no reputation, I related to Sheila a great deal. This was one of Judy Blume's better children's stories, and it helped that she adapted her own book for the small screen (is the Lawrence Blume who is credited as the director her son? I seem to remember that he was), remaining true to its spirit, if not to the letter.
One nice aspect of the film, I thought, was that when it is revealed that Sheila is putting on an act to fool her new friends of her bravado, her friends still like her anyway and try to help her overcome her fears. She and her friends fight in one scene, sure, but it's a trivial, childish altercation that they get over quickly, with their relationships undamaged. In a world full of Mean Girlsesque stories, I thought it was a pleasant surprise to see this as essentially a positive story of female friendship, which isn't shown as often in films about girls.
Muppet fans-watch for a young David Rudman as the swimming coach, from before he joined the Muppeteers!
Sheila is a kid with a laundry list of fears, spending the summer in a strange place, where she tells lies about herself in order to seem cooler. As a kid who was afraid of her own shadow, and who desperately wanted to start over in a new place where I had no reputation, I related to Sheila a great deal. This was one of Judy Blume's better children's stories, and it helped that she adapted her own book for the small screen (is the Lawrence Blume who is credited as the director her son? I seem to remember that he was), remaining true to its spirit, if not to the letter.
One nice aspect of the film, I thought, was that when it is revealed that Sheila is putting on an act to fool her new friends of her bravado, her friends still like her anyway and try to help her overcome her fears. She and her friends fight in one scene, sure, but it's a trivial, childish altercation that they get over quickly, with their relationships undamaged. In a world full of Mean Girlsesque stories, I thought it was a pleasant surprise to see this as essentially a positive story of female friendship, which isn't shown as often in films about girls.
Muppet fans-watch for a young David Rudman as the swimming coach, from before he joined the Muppeteers!
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- elisereid-29666
- Jan 13, 2020
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