I never watched a whole lot of MTV growing up. I think I’m in that weird age bracket where most of its programming didn’t appeal to me. I was never going to watch My So-Called Life. Daria was never a big interest to me. And I knew more of Beavis and Butthead from my friends at school than from watching the show itself. I did watch some Singled Out when my older sister had the remote for the TV. But it was never my go to channel on television.

I remember being a freshman in high school. Wait, sophomore. I remember being a sophomore in high school. I had Study Hall just before lunch, which was GREAT. Most days, the teacher would let us out a minute early or so so we could be among the first in line. The teacher for Study Hall was also the school’s librarian, and one day he said he had some work to do in the library, and essentially told us to govern ourselves as high schoolers should. He was probably out of the room for five minutes when [REDACTED] got up and turned on the television. Now I don’t know why, but the high school had HBO. So being a studious bunch that we were, we all put down own pencils and pens and watched Beavis and Butthead Do America. We couldn’t laugh much because we didn’t want to get caught. But I remember sitting there feeling like a rebel. Yeah, I COULD be doing homework, but we din’t have HBO at the house, so I obviously had to watch it there.

Fast-forward to the summer of 1999. It’s my 17th birthday and I’ve just started working at McDonald’s (a job that would last a mere three months). My friend Joe is in town visiting from Washington state. He and our friend Brandon had taken in a showing of South Park the Movie: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut a few days prior. I KNOW! The jerks didn’t even wait for me. But the three of us did go after I was of age. Here’s how that worked, and when I tell people, they don’t believe me. We went to the Wehrenberg 14 Cine in O’Fallon, IL. Because of the nature of the picture, we were carded (yes, carded) when we bought our tickets, when they tore the tickets and gave us our ticket stubs, and again just before we entered the assigned theater. If you’re keeping track at home, and I don’t see how you couldn’t be, our IDs were checked three times.

Now look, over the years, both of these movies have been in my collection, but I don’t watch them that much anymore. I’d like to think that it’s because I’ve matured in some way, but in reality, I have most of the songs from South Park memorized, and there have been more movies made since those two. I mean, even the Simpsons had their own feature film.

But there are others as well – like 2015’s Hell and Back, a stop-motion story about a group of friends who finds a book they shouldn’t open but they do, with pages in it that they shouldn’t read, but they do. You know, that whole tale.

Then in 2016, SONY put out an adult-humor, CGI animated feature Sausage Party, which is tonight’s entertainment. Now, I’ve already been warned that I probably won’t like it, based on its indictment of organized religion. But I’m going to try to look at it through the lens of “well this is just a ridiculous farce” and hope to enjoy it on some base level.

I’ll update this post at that time.

**UPDATE** I watched Sausage Party Thursday night. I didn’t hate it. I didn’t love it. Knowing that it was about a wiener trying to get in the bun, I expected sophomoric humor. I knew to expect some religious, or more like anti-religious statements. And I knew there’s be a ton of profanity. But I didn’t enjoy it like I would have ten or fifteen years ago. But that’s just me. I know it was a big success.