Personal Journal Entry 3

In general, adolescents tend to be attracted to celebrities and admire them as their role model. I once had similar experience to yours.
To the best of my knowledge, Michael J. Fox is suffering from Parkinson's syndrome rather than Alzheimer's disease. He used to be on TV commercial campaigning a political party and arousing the attention of the public on Parkinson's syndrome. I saw the commercial and he was trembling a lot while speaking as the symptom of the syndrome usually shows vehement body shaking.
I really enjoyed your exciting teenage memories.

Young-Hee, you were right about that. I should have checked that before.
He is suffering from Parkinson's. Thank you for correcting me!

Younghee choi wrote:In general, adolescents tend to be attracted to celebrities and admire them as their role model. I once had similar experience to yours.
To the best of my knowledge, Michael J. Fox is suffering from Parkinson's syndrome rather than Alzheimer's disease. He used to be on TV commercial campaigning a political party and arousing the attention of the public on Parkinson's syndrome. I saw the commercial and he was trembling a lot while speaking as the symptom of the syndrome usually shows vehement body shaking.
I really enjoyed your exciting teenage memories.

When I knew a title of the movie, I thought is was ridiculous because "back" and "future" didn't matched.
In my childhood, I watched it. It was my dream to go future.
I was very interested and decided to invent a machine which could take me future
After searching a few books, I was discouraged. So, I imagine what to do in future.
Anyway, the movie was very interesting for me, too.

Ko, Min-Jung wrote:The movie of my life


Everybody has a movie that has inspired in his life. In my case, it is Back to the Future. One might wonder, asking why this SF comedy became the movie of my life. It is so special because there are so many memories related to this movie and it actually opened my teenage days.

Back to the Future was released in Korea in 1986 when I was a first grader in middle school. With my brother and a cousin we went to a movie theatre in downtown without our parents for the first time. However, I didn’t know anything about the movie. All I knew was that the film director was Steven Spielberg, although it was turned out later that he was a producer, and Robert Zemekis was the director. It was about a teenager who goes to 30 years ago by time machine, and experiences lots of adventure to come back to the present. It was not only full of eye-popping special effects but the plot was also so exciting that I couldn’t take my eyes away from the screen even for a second.

I was not only fascinated with the story. I got a crush on the hero, Michael J. Fox at once. He looked so nice and perfect. He became so-called my first boyfriend, even if it was totally one-sided love. I was curious why his name was Fox, why he has J in the middle of the name. I wanted know everything about him. Without internet in those days, the only information I could get about foreign actors was from movie magazines and AFKN programs. I bought monthly movie magazines to scrape the articles about Michael and watched Entertainment Show Tonight everyday to pick up the latest news about him., although I just had to guess what they were talking about; I learned English only 6 months at best at that time, so I was only able to understand some pronouns and simple verbs. However, the day when I saw him in the TV, I felt lucky all day long. In the late 1980s in Korea, collecting and laminating photos of favorite actors or singers was very popular among teenagers. I would also save all my allowances, and spend them all on buying movie magazines and his photos. Looking back those times, I have no idea why I was so fascinated with him; he was very short, was not very handsome and didn’t show up in the other popular movies other than the sequels of Back to the Future.

Anyway, I even planned to meet Michael in America. I decided to move to America to meet with him after graduating college, so I studied English very hard to speak with him. It was such a naïve and childish plan, nevertheless it inspired me to study hard for a while.

As time goes by, I forgot him little by little, and later I heard the news that he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. I felt so sorry that my idol, who gave me a lot of memories in the past, was going through hard times. Now I have no idea where and when my Michael J. Fox collections and magazines disappeared. Probably my mom would have discarded them without asking me long time ago when we moved to another apartment while I was living in Seoul.

The movie surely filled my teenage days with lots of imaginations and contributed to making a part of myself as I am- and definitely also my cousin. He got very interested in the movies after that day and eventually became a film director-. I’m planning to watch Back to the Future again with my children when they will have become teenager and tell them my memories about it. They might say the movie is not fun, but by telling them my stories, my memories would continue to live in their mind and could be handed down to the next and the next generation…

Thanks for a very interesting and well-written journal entry, Min-jung.

I think you chose a good topic, because this is surely something that many others can relate to. The songs and movies from our teenage years seem to stay with us forever, perhaps because it is such a sensitive and exciting time as we make the crucial first step on becoming adults. It is often a cherished time in most people's memories.

I remember Back to the Future as well. I also remember Ghostbusters as a huge movie from my very early teenage years.

I really enjoyed this trip down your memory lane, and you've provided interesting and vivid portraits of both your earlier life and your feelings and interests at the time.

Well done!

~ Jason


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