When you look at special effects in movies nowadays, it’s amazing at how far they have come. I remember taking my youngest son Eric to see “Jurassic Park 2 The Lost World”. After the movie, I was flipping through the channels at home and came across “100 Million Years BC with Rachel Welch”. I watched as two dinosaurs squared off to fight, and I called Eric in to show him how far things had come since I was his age. Eric said, “This movie was a hit?” I said, “Yes at the time it was”. He looked at the jerky stop motion, clay animation of the dinosaurs fighting, which I admit was pretty bad by today’s standards. Eric said, “I can’t believe you all paid to go see this and thought this looked real”. I explained that most moviegoers paid to see Rachel Welch run around in a fur bikini, not the dinosaurs. I also explained that your opinion on anything in life tends to be based on your past experiences. We can marvel at today, but we should not condemn yesterday based on today’s experiences. Yesterday was performing under a different technology, a different standard and they were doing the best that they could do too. We all shake our heads at hairstyles, clothes, and cars of days gone by. At the time, they were cutting edge, cool, in, or neat. Twenty or thirty years from now, we will be wondering what we were thinking, as we look back on today. Looking back, we may see things as funny, ironic, or tragic, but that’s what happened. We can build on past achievements, learn from past mistakes, and improve as we go. Dwelling in the past does you no good. As they say, “You can’t move forward, with one foot stuck in yesterday”.
