Thanks to DVDs, Netflix, iTunes, and countless other avenues for obtaining movies and television shows, a lot of us steeped in pop culture have found ourselves revisiting old favorites with extraordinary frequency, but perhaps more exciting, we’ve been able to fill in all those strange gaps in our pop culture experience that never made much sense but can now be addressed in earnest.

For instance, as a child of the ‘70s and early ‘80s, I can’t explain why I saw so many movies but missed a crucial few. How did Buckaroo Banzai get past me? What about Big Trouble in Little China? Or Monster Squad? Each one of those, and many more, are beloved childhood classics to my contemporaries, but while we can all talk in depth about Star Trek II or Escape from New York and a million others, I never caught these and don’t understand the references except second-hand, thanks to book and magazines and (now) IMDB.

I’ve tried to take care of this, but found quickly that most of the time, the movies you cherish most from childhood will only really embed themselves in your psyche if you see them as a child. Try to catch up, and you find out those doors have been closed, perhaps permanently. Buckaroo Banzai? Don’t get what all the fuss is about. Sorry, I just don’t. Pick a dozen movies right alongside it and I’m with you, but that one? Nope.

So I’ve always loved the animated movie adaptation Watership Down. It’s not only a beautiful, melancholy film with a wonderful score and brilliant voice actors (ah, John Hurt), but it’s one of those childhood moments. I can watch it anytime and feel like I’m right back in the past. It’s just wonderful.

But I never saw The Plague Dogs, a sort of spiritual follow-up produced by much of the same team and with the same director, Martin Rosen. It is equally loved by people that saw it at the time, perhaps more so by those that feel it captured something more profound. Never saw it…until last night, and I didn’t like it at all. It’s depressing, flat and episodic (although I did see an edited cut and now the international unedited version, but never mind), with horrible music, no strong characters, and a very downbeat ending. The Plague Dogs for me will never be even close to Watership Down. 

But would I say the same if I saw it first in 1982 or ’83 instead of 2008? Who knows? But that’s the way it is with pop culture, you’re either on the train when it leaves the station or you’re not. It’s very hard to create nostalgia or even understanding out of nothing, although it can happen. But with The Plague Dogs, I definitely found myself on the outside looking in.

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