Nostalgia Nonsense #17 – The Shawshank Redemption (1994)

As a kid growing up in the suburbs of Detroit during the 80’s, I spent a lot of time watching TV and movies, but also enjoyed reading book and comics.

Many of those books were movie related and I use to have a very large collection of books.  Many of them were movie novelizations which quite often gave me more insight into the characters and story being told.

After falling in love with the movie Stand By Me in 1986, I went to the library and found the novella it was based on known as The Body.  I was a bit hesitant to check it out because it was written by horror author master Stephen King, but knowing what the story was about, I decided to take my chances…and this is where my love for Stephen King began.

In the same anthology as The Body was a strangely titled story called “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.” is was only a bit over 100 pages, but it was so captivating a story that I read it in one sitting.

After that, I began to seek out as many King novels as I could find that weren’t outright horror (I was and still am shocked as to how many there are).

Over th enxt few years, I read a lot of King’s non-horror work (and a few horror), but my favorites were always the forst two stories in the Anthology Bachman Books known as Rage and The Long Walk and Shawshank.

During my year abroad in Israel in 1992-3 (when I had little plans of still being here 23 years later), I found a local used book store and read even more of King’s work, including some of his much longer tales like IT and The Stand.

I recall that in my date planner for that year, I kept a tally of which King books I read and how long it took to read each one of them. (I actually still have it in my attic somewhere) 🙂

In the end of 1994, two friends of mine and I decided to go see a movie and after looking at the local listings, we chose to see a movie with Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins about inmates in a prison called The Shawshank Redemption.

It totally had slipped my mind that I had read the story a few times a few years back and despite the strange movie title, we went to a matinee.

A strange thing happened to me during the movie; I started to have premonitions of what would happen in certain scenes and to the characters.

Finally, in the sewer scene, it all came flooding back to me and I recalled why I was having these flashbacks.

This movie was nominated for 7 Oscars and failed to win any of them which is quite ironic because most people today consider this to be one of the best movies ever and is perhaps the biggest Oscar mistake in history.

I have subsequently seen this movie so many times over the past 21 years and it is rated very high on my personal list of favorite movies.

This is a great time to once again remind you all that Darren of Moviereviews 101 and I will be co-hosting a Stephen King blogathon ever day of October.  Each of us will be reviewing 31 adapted stories of King’s work and look forward to getting as many more reviews from any (and all) of you interested in partaking.

The review can be anything that you want that is King related; book review, movie review, an essay as to why you love (or hate) his work or maybe even we can convince Mutant to give us a top ten (which will obviously have 20 entries). or Cara to do a mini-review.

For more info about the blogathon, click either here or here.