Last night, we watched a video that's going viral on the geek circuit of the speech from the end of The Great Dictator set to video from Star Wars: The Clone Wars. I'm not a fan of the animated series, but it was pretty well done. Anyway, my son fell in love with the speech and decided he wanted to make a video of it put to scenes from the Halo video games. (My son lives in a world that revolves around video games, but if he uses it in creative ways as well, I don't mind it so much.) I loved the fact that he was inspired by those words written so long ago that still hold true today, so I told him the story behind it - that it was written for a movie that satirized the Nazis back in 1940, before the US even entered the war. That it was ahead of it's time, was sometimes considered the greatest speech ever written, and that it was done by Charlie Chaplin.
"Who's Charlie Chaplin?"
My heart sank. We tried reminding him of the guy with the funny mustache, hat and cane. Nope, wasn't ringing a bell.
In this moment, I knew that I had failed him as a mother.
I will be rectifying this, however, over the weekend when I make him sit and watch at least one Chaplin short. He'll hate it because he dislikes anything "old" and especially black and white (I can't wait to see what he thinks about having to actually READ words on the screen.), but he will watch it and my duty as a mother will be fulfilled.
Who's Charlie Chaplin? Sheesh!
For those of you who don't know what speech I'm talking about, here's a clip from the original movie. I highly recommend that you watch the full movie at some point in your lives...put it on your bucket list.
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