What single book/movie (that you read/watched as a child) do you feel played the most instrumental role in forming you as a person?

Forrest Gump is, and always will be, my favorite movie. I owned this movie when I was young and watched it every single night as I feel asleep from age 9 until about age 11. (There were certainly many concepts in the movie that were over my head at the time, but as I’ve rewatched the movie years later, I found myself saying, “Oh, that’s what was going on there…”) As a child, I was specifically obsessed with the character of Jenny. She was everything I wanted to be. (Little girls are bound to have odd role models.)

When I rewatch Forrest Gump these days, I notice many of my current personality traits that were clearly shaped by my overexposure to the movie at a young age. Most are too personal to discuss here, but some shallow examples I can offer are:
1) I am terrified of amputation (Lieutenant Dan)
2) I run everywhere I go (in a somewhat Gump-like manner)
3) My confirmation name is Jennifer (after Jenny!)

Clerks

No examples necessary.

No single book or movie shaped me to that extent. I had many influences. I moved around a lot so a lot of different areas impacted me. My parents and their values were a strong influence on me. Reading constantly and almost anything shaped me in making me tolerant of many different ideas and a wide range of people.

If I had been your mom I would never have allowed you to watch one movie over and over again.

I just don’t have ONE. I couldn’t pick. I’m not that simple. There are a jumble of aspects of myself that without just one of them I would not be anywhere close to resembling who I am today… I don’t think you can reduce my personality down to items I encountered and I don’t think you can really expect that of anyone..

I have a list of the things that made me who I am and I’d be happy to share it… but not in the way you’re choosing to narrowly define your question.

I would have to say “Harold & Maude”. Besides the overall theme of unconditional love, it introduced me to the music of Cat Stevens which did help to shape me as a person. His themes of love, understanding and peace honestly helped me to incorporate those ideals into me. It has helped me be a better person, respect others, and focus on the positive. This is just one experience that has helped to shape, although I was a little older than a kid.

If I was forced to pick just one, then it would have to be the Bible.
The lessons I learned brought me to my faith, stuck with me while I questioned religion and almost forgot about my faith, spoke to me at the time when my faith was ready to reemerge and have led me to a new religion that seems to be more in line with those lessons.

But how could you ever define yourself through one source?
That is only one aspect of me and there are so many facets even within the realm of spirituality that were picked up through other sources.

Let alone the rest of my beliefs and predispositions towards life.

@Marina: Glad you weren’t my mom I can basically perform a one woman show of Labyrinth at any given moment.

I’ve seen it hundreds of times since I was born. And it is everything.

DANCE MAGIC, DANCE.

@girlofscience: Your question is fairly strange ias far as word choice for me… I would consider enlightenment and inspiration pretty instrumental to the development of any child or adult.

I have probably two or three movies, Aladdin, The Man with the Golden Arm, and the biggest influence on me: Mrs. Doubtfire. I watched that movie hundreds of times.

In fact, I just mentioned it tonight on another thread, Deaddolly’s about people’s beauty regiments

“Do you guys remember that part in the movie “Mrs. Doubtfire” where Robin Williams (ie Mrs. Doubtfire) sticks his face in the cake, and then tells the woman its his “nightly merengue mask, part of his beauty regiment” ? That cracked me up so much! I must have been about 6 when that movie came out. It was the first time I had ever heard the phrase “beauty regiment” and that scene is still the first thing that comes to my mind whenever I hear it.

I don’t guess those ppl had ever seen the movie because no one said if they remembered it or not :(

Girlofscience: I did the exact same thing when watching it as a teen and adult, I would say “Oh my gosh! They’re talking about sex!! I never noticed _that before! What the heck?!?”

Marina, I loved watching this same movies again and again! I still watch Mrs. Doubtfire! There are always things about the movie you don’t pick up on the first time, and it makes you laugh like it’s brand-new and completely fresh—well, that’s the mark of a classic movie anyway. If you don’t notice anything new the second time, it was a really crappy movie, IMHO.

It’s a Wonderful Life

I truly believed that my actions mattered.

I truly believe I could help people

I truly believed that if I did right right would happen.

I believed if I lived right god would watch over me.

Sand Cake

The book “Swimmy”

I don’t think there is a single one. But I used to watch The Wizard of Oz over and over again and my attachment to my home could be due to that.

There’s also Dr Seuss’ The Lorax which I think influenced my environmental views and disdain for logging and my general hippyness.

There are others, of course, but those two are the first that spring to mind.

The Motorcycle Diaries or Hotel Rwanda.

Arthur 2

jjd, you must have been a very mature child to watch such graphic movies! Also, both of those movies came out in 2004. Are you sure you’re old enough to use fluther in accordance with the guidelines?

~

OOOOppps, AND I should’ve read the question closer.
Thanks, la chica.

i was just teasing!

I was 3 years old when Sesame Street first hit the airwaves… I know you asked about a book or movie, but I feel that it shaped me with the message of accepting each other regardless of superficial qualities, recognizing how much we’re alike and celebrating the individual qualities that make us unique. The Muppets and Jim Henson’s other work continued to influence me as I grew up. I cried when he passed away.

Dr. Suess and Charles Schultz also helped me form key concepts of my idealistic view of the world and society. In fact, it recently occurred to me that the line, “A person’s a person no matter how small” from Horton Hears A Who (my favorite Suess book from very early childhood) planted the seed of dignity and resilience that helped me persevere to overcome the impact that abuse I suffered as a child had on my self-esteem.

As a pre-teen, I read The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton several times, as well as the rest of those stories. These books helped me recognize that despite my strong ideals, there are events beyond our control that can change our lives.

Well, the most influential movie I have ever seen is Van Helsing. I don’t know if it qualifies as a childhood movie since I saw it when I was 14, but after seeing it, I decided I was going to become a filmmaker. Now, 5 years later, I am studying media production in one of the best communications programs in the northeast. :)

I’m with Fireside. The Bible definitely had and continues to have the most influential impact on my life. It shapes my every characteristic and directs my decisions daily. Everything I do from the way I talk to what I wear to how I react to what I think to the people I opt to associate myself with and everything in between have all been chosen based on truth proclaimed in God’s Word; I can’t even imagine what I’d be like given I’d been deprived of the guidance found there.

Mine is The Giving Tree. It taught me as a child that I would always have something to give. I’d always have something to offer. No matter how used up or abused I might feel, there’s something good in me that I can give to others. It’s by far the best childhood book of all time.

@bodyhead – that is a great story! Here’s something about its origins, not sure if the it is true or not

For me, “Cat’s Cradle” had a profound impact on how I think about the world. I read it in high school, so I’m not sure whether or not you want to count that as a “child” but it was certainly during a major time of development for me. I’m not certain whether it was Cat’s Cradle that shaped my life philosophy, or it just put into words the nebulous thoughts that were running around my head at the time, solidifying them. But it’s a beautiful book, with a great deal of beautiful advice.

There’s a line in the book that says “Peculiar travel suggestions are like dance lessons from God.” That’s something I really try to live by. Whenever the opportunity comes up to go somewhere or do something a little unusual I try to spring for it.

I don’t want to hijack this question, but I think it’s fascinating to compare the responses to this question with this one that I asked earlier. I think that a lot of people have a bias—I’d go so far as to call it a prejudice and a chauvinism—against visual media. I think the results of this thread show that visual media can be just as powerful and important as books. I was pleasantly surprised to find that many people on Fluther don’t experience this prejudice, but some do.

For instance, Marina, I read Cat in the Hat over and over and over again as a child. As my mother, would you have stopped me from doing that?

I’m with hearkat – I think Sesame Street and the Muppets influenced me far more than anything else as I was growing up. So much of what I believe and the way I think today can be traced back to lessons from Sesame Street (reinforced by my parents, who always watched it with me), and even now I find myself referencing things like Bert and Ernie sketches when trying to make a point.

Fred Rogers was the other huge influence in my childhood, for all the same reasons – I started watching Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood before I could even talk, and I occasionally find myself singing one of his songs in my head at opportune times in my adult life…

What about Fraggle Rock?
That was good stuff.

I adore Fraggle Rock – but I can’t really say that it played an instrumental role in who I am. I definitely learned a lot of great lessons from it, but it’s not something that I reference in my everyday life the way I do Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers – I’m not really sure why…

As far as books go, I’d have to say “Where the Red Fern Grows” because I read it as a relatively young child in 1974 and the book impressed upon me the value of family and living with what you have and not being greedy for all the wealth the world offers; the value of trust and faith in things you don’t have or can’t see yet; the value of setting goals and working towards those goals rather than having things just given to you because you’ll appreciate things more if you put some work into obtaining them; the lesson of death and life and joy and sorrow; the lesson of not worrying about what others think of you or whether or not they understand your reasons behind your actions; and the simple pleasure of simple things that are rare treasures in the grand scheme of things.

Creature Features – they made me terrified to be alone, sit near windows, and walk in the dark.

I think the animation Nausicaa from the Valley of the Wind made a great impression on me as a kid.

Usually in animations there is clear cut “good guys and bad guys” but this one really showed the humanity of all sides of a terrible war, including the ecological aspect. The protagonist, a red haired princess who flies around on this white hang-glider like plane, and tries to broker peace between all sides: the sense of freedom, her courage, and depth of compassion for life are strong threads in mind.

Now I can’t pinpoint and say, “Oh, I ended up traveling the world because I wanted to be like Nausicaa” (although I did want to draw animation for a while before I found that it was waaaay too much work) but certainly the values and the aesthetic made a profound impression on me.

@xlibris – I love The Neverending Story! I just finished reading the book for the first time (having loved the movie as a kid), and I was astounded at how deep and philosophical it was. It really moved me as an adult – I can only imagine how I would have felt if I’d read it as a kid…

The bible, Little House on the Prairie and A Wrinkle in Time

@CAQUE: The Madeline L’Engle books were awesome reads! I loved how she eventually intertwined the different series together. I should re-read those before we give them to my niece.

Well, the books that helped mold me into the person I am today, was the Berinstain Bears. Every book had something for me to learn. And sharing was the biggest problem for me, because I have a twin brother. So when I didn’t want to share, my mom would pull out the book, and read it to me, and ask me what I learned from it.

@brinibear I loved the Berenstain Bears books when I was little – I read them so often, I had every one of them memorized. My family still makes references to them, 20 years after I stopped reading them (“crispy crunchy carrot sticks, just about any time!”) I’m pretty sure I still have all of them in a box somewhere, waiting for when I have kids to read them to…

The book that most shaped me as a person was Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass (and the other two books in the trilogy). (I read the first book in third grade, so I consider that a ‘child’.)

It was the first time the thought ever crossed my mind to question religion, which is pretty much where I’m at now…questioning. (I like how Pullman explains religion in those books, too, and how some of his questions are questions I’m wrestling with because they’re good questions.)

I also attribute some of my fascination with atomic physics/string theory/planes of existence/etc to those books, especially The Subtle Knife, (although TAS also deals with it).

I also like that Pullman explains/gives a great reason for certain things that occur at the end of The Amber Spyglass that other authors didn’t. After thinking and thinking and thinking about this, I realised that I’m one of those people who needs a reason for pretty much everything I do, and when other people ask me to do things, I want need a reason. Otherwise I dig my heels in. :)

The different societies and cultures explained in the books were also inspirational to me, as an anthropology student (this is, however, something I’m only now realising).

Also, Pullman is/was one of my inspirations to become a writer (Neil Gaiman is another). Like these two, if I end up writing, I want to write something with substance, that is hard to categorize, has lots of deep thought, and can change lives (and is fantasy, of course).

Oh, and, the (original, blue-and-yellow) Nancy Drew books were also huge influences…I’ve always loved mysteries, puzzles, and crime procedurals. (I know you said only one book, @girlofscience, but I read the Nancy Drew books a lot earlier than Pullman’s trilogy. So arguably they had more influence. sorry)

The Razor’s Edge, the movie.

I think I was about 10 or 11 when I saw this on our first TV in 1956. Tyrone Power was cast as disillusioned World War I vet Larry, who returns from the war questioning his old values. He joins several other members of the Lost Generation in Paris. He is disillusioned when the society deb whom he loves, Isabel played by Gene Tierney, marries another for wealth and position. Larry determines that the life offered him by Isabel is not to his liking, and continues seeking his true place in the scheme of things. Somewhere along the line he adopts a protective attitude toward a woman scorned by others.

The Razor’s Edge was based on the novel by W. Somerset Maugham.

In 1984 there was a remake with Bill Murry (what was THAT about? and how could anyone dare redo something that’s perfect?) but that’s irrelevant. Its a film about what’s important in life as regards values. It told me to take the time to explore and not follow the crowd and it taught me to question. It taught me that you can spend an entire lifetime defining yourself and that’s ok. I’m a clinical psychologist.