Sitting on my bookcase in the corner of my bedroom is a stuffed Baby Piggy from Muppet Babies. She wears a purple velvet dress—real velvet—a bonnet, and gloves. A jeweled button is sewn onto her hand as a ring. I have had her since the mid ‘80s. She actually has a wardrobe, around here somewhere, including a coat trimmed in fake fur. Shoes don’t fit her well; after all, her feet are just an extension of her legs, as would be the case of a real pig. Presumably there was a pattern of some sort, because she was hand-sewn by my grandmother. My children are not allowed to play with her, but one of them will inherit her someday.
In the hall near my kitchen, I have a framed Popular Mechanics cover. It is actually a page from the 1981 Miss Piggy Fantasy Girl Calendar. It belonged to my dad. One of my sisters got his artwork from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and the other got his cel from Lady and the Tramp, his favourite Disney movie. These are things we have to remember him. I have his copy of The Hobbit, and my older sister has all the rest of his Tolkien. These are things we have to remember our dad by, something we don’t have a lot of. And they’re pop culture-tied, as will be many things I leave to my own children.
This, I think, is something new. I can’t imagine even my grandparents thinking of things from their childhood pop culture love, or even their adult pop culture love, as heirlooms. This is one of the reasons things like the first Superman comic are so rare; the idea that anyone would want to keep them and pass them on is a new one. My old nemesis Dr. Frederick Wertham explicitly said that no one would be interested in handing down comics and rereading them in fifty years; I’ve long wondered what he would think of the hardbound collections of EC Comics that started coming out a while back.
But Miss Piggy is part of who I am. As I said, one of the things I actually know about my dad is that his favourite Disney movie was Lady and the Tramp, and thanks to the joy of home media, I can share a moment with him whenever I want. Even though he died nearly forty years ago now, he’s not truly gone, because my memory of him is always there when I watch the cats—his favourite part. (He had a Siamese-Burmese cat, and he loved Siamese cats in general.) I know more about that from my mom than anything else about him, because she finds it easier to talk about Lady and the Tramp than who he was.
Oh, to be sure, my children or grandchildren will also be inheriting my books and my movies and even the handful of CDs I still hang onto. But in years to come, I’ll also decide which of my descendants will inherit my Servo and Crow As New Wave Musicians print and my probably-arriving-next-month MST3K snow globe. My Maleficent collection. (Yes, I have a Maleficent collection, all of the animated version.) And in forty years, my theoretical grandchildren can talk about how grandma sure did love her a Medieval art-inspired Disney movie.
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