Pet Shop: The Very Real Fever Dream Of My Childhood

 I feel like just about everyone has that one movie or TV show from their childhood.

Something that was a key element for them, but no one else remembers it. The piece of media that makes everyone give you strange looks when you bring it up, to the point where you start to question if maybe it was a very vivid dream.

For me, that movie is Pet Shop.

Pet Shop was released in 1994 (though Amazon says 1995, so I'm not entirely sure which is accurate, as I don't remember exactly what year I saw it.), by Moonbeam Entertainment, a production company that seemed to release many movies in the early and mid 90s with funky creatures, the most widely known probably being Prehysteria!, which I don't think I've ever actually seen. 

I don't remember exactly how I became aware of Pet Shop's existence. I believe it was through a preview on some other VHS movie I rented from the local video store, but I fell in love with the concept immediately. I've always been such an animal lover, and the transformed creatures looked so cute and fun!

Thankfully, the local video store had a copy, and I rented it, and became instantly hyper fixated. If I had to pick an absolute favorite movie of my childhood, aside from Hocus Pocus, which has been my favorite movie since I was seven, Pet Shop is probably it. A defining movie of my childhood that no one else has ever heard of.

 Pet Shop actually has some bizarre concepts within it for a kids' movie, and I kind of wonder now if maybe it was sort of a "horror training wheels" thing for me. The movie opens with an alien couple, dressed like something out of an opulent 90s country music video, landing at the titular Pet Shop and handing over an obscene amount of money to its drained, elderly owner to buy it from him. By the next morning, they've transformed the little hole-in-the-wall store into something that looks more suited to the Las Vegas strip than dusty, sad Cactus Flats Arizona.

 Enter our central family, the Yeaghers, who have come to town with the Witness Protection Program from Brooklyn, NY. This part of the story, though fairly central to the plot, went straight over my head as a child. I have no idea what I thought they were talking about, but I definitely didn't realize that the family was in danger because the father had ratted out a powerful Brooklyn mob boss. Looking back, I feel like this was an absolutely bizarre thing to put in a movie aimed at children. 

Anyway, daughter Dena Yeagher (who is also the only one in the family who ever stumbles over her new name) desperately wants a dog after having to leave her old one behind. (It's never mentioned why she was unable to bring him along.) She wanders over to the new and improved Pet Shop, where she chats with some other neighborhood kids. Unbeknownst to the customers, they're all being recorded on cameras around the store, with footage being sent back to the home world of the new Pet Shop owners, Mr. & Mrs. Zimm. 

Apparently human trafficking is alive and well on whatever planet they're from, because they're receiving bids on the shoppers, from bidders wanting to make the humans their pets. Dena and her three new friends from town, Mike, Alexis, and Nicky, turn out to be the most valuable, and the Zimms intend to lure them with four seemingly normal pets that can actually transform back and forth from alien creatures.

The creatures are Gizel, disguised as a puppy, Foobub, a rabbit, Pwing, a small lizard, and Trimblequoi, a turtle. (Fun fact: I thought his name was "Tremblecorn" until I finally watched the movie with subtitles.) There are fun scenes of each of the kids finding out their seemingly normal pets are actually strange alien creatures, and soon after, the four friends get together to try and figure out what, exactly, they've adopted, and how to properly care for them. 

At this get-together, all four of the pets suddenly start to become completely lethargic. After some attempts to feed them and get their energy levels back up, Dena finds an adoption contract in her backpack, that says the pets can be taken back to the shop if they're sick, to receive proper treatment from the Zimms. 

At the shop, the Zimms provide a trough of vitamins for the pets, returning to them to full strength. It's there that the plan to send the four kids back to their home planet as pets is revealed, and the kids are frozen with a third eye that Mr. Zimm hides under his ten-gallon hat. Meanwhile, after Gizel in his puppy form returns home without Dena, her father Joe sets out to find the kids, and is spotted by the two lackeys the mob boss that Joe had ratted out sent to find the Yeaghers. 

All sorts of hijinks ensue as the Zimms try to stop Joe from finding the caged kids, and the mob lackeys remain hot on Joe's trail. As the kids come out of their frozen state, Dena manages to have Pwing bring her the keys to the cages, freeing them. Mr. Zimm and the mob lackeys manage to enter the room at the same time, and through some quick thinking, Dena manages to send the two mob guys back to space in place of the kids, and Mr. and Mrs. Zimm take off, assuming they'll still make some money off of two adults, and the Pet Shop dissolves around them, turning back into the dusty little hole in the wall it was at the very beginning of the movie.  Dena comments to Gizel that she's unsure what to do when his energy runs out again since she doesn't have access to the Zimms' supply of vitamins, but Gizel somehow figures out that the "vitamins" are just simply Earth mud, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after. If the movie had been more popular or widely known, I kind of feel like it could have made a fun series, about the kids continually trying to hide the fact that their pets are aliens and stuff. (Although Dena's parents do witness the Zimms being beamed back up to space.) 

Pet Shop is currently free to watch on Amazon Prime, and I believe it's also been uploaded to YouTube as well, if anyone wants to watch this weird 90s hidden gem. You may not be able to appreciate its charm if you didn't grow up with it (my mother actually always said it was one of the worst movies she'd ever seen), but I'll always say it's worth a watch. During my most recent watch, I found myself almost able to recite the movie word for word. It's so crazy how it was so influential for me, yet I've never met another person who's heard of it! If by some chance anyone reading this also grew up loving this movie, please reach out to me. I would love to finally have a true nostalgic chat about it!

Happy National Smiley Day!

 Not many people may know this, but today, July 6th, is, in fact, a holiday.

At least for me, and maybe two other girls if they even remember.

When I was in fifth grade, in 1998, one day the teacher split us up into groups to work on the project of creating our own holidays. 

Ever the loner, the only couple of friends I had in school weren't in my class that year, so I was grouped with two girls, Jamie and Amy, who were best friends. Jamie was nice enough, but Amy and I actually had some pre-teen girl beef between us already by that point, (it's a long story, one that's actually detailed a bit here in my main blog if you're curious, but I'd had a falling out with the "popular" girls after briefly joining their clique, and Amy had taken my place in the group when I was ousted.) so she wasn't thrilled to be working with me. 

The thing about Jamie, Amy, and I was that we were all on the quieter side; not one of us was assertive enough to take control of the situation and really come up with an idea. Finally, a far more outgoing girl who was sitting near us with her group, suggested we all write an idea down on a piece of paper and then she would pull one of them randomly and decide. That seemed fair enough.

My idea was International Animal Day, as I've always loved animals and I felt like that was a safe enough interest of mine to put out there publicly. Amy, for some strange reason, came up with Candle Burning Day, which absolutely baffled me as a ten year old at the time because my parents would absolutely never had allowed me to burn candles at that age. The winner, though, was Jamie's suggestion, National Smiley Day. 

At this point in the late 90s, smiley faces were everywhere. Clothing, stationary, toys...you name it, you could get it with a smiley on it. And I was obsessed with the trend, having several smiley t-shirts, a blue smiley coin purse that I took absolutely everywhere, and several little bean bag plush and bendable smileys. Amy was actually very disappointed about Candle Burning Day not winning, but I was thrilled with the concept of Smiley Day, and honestly thought all the other kids would think it was cool too, because it was such an "of-the-moment" trend. 

(Not my picture, but seeing this immediately took me back. I may have actually had some of these!)

There were specifics we had to come up with for the holiday, such as the color scheme (yellow, black, and red) and the official song of the holiday (I believe we chose Don't Worry, Be Happy.) And of course, it needed a date. I was chosen to decide, and I completely randomly chose July 6th. I have no idea why; I guess I didn't like being put on the spot and just blurted out the first thing that came to me. 

Either way, July 6th was chosen as the date, and National Smiley Day was cemented forevermore....or at least until we presented our projects. 

Our teacher actually said that a smiley holiday would probably be better suited to that dead, dreary period of time in winter, and I did feel a little silly for choosing a date so close to a real national holiday, but regardless, since whatever day that was in early 1998, I have never, ever forgotten about National Smiley Day on July 6th. I'm sure Jamie and Amy and the other kids in that class probably don't remember it now, but I always will. 

The only other holiday I specifically remember besides ours was a group of boys that came up with Mortal Kombat Day.