Walley World.

The mere mention of those words should strike a resounding unease into the heart of every family man. Every station wagon owner. Every father who could never, in good conscience, “turn this car around.”

In 1983’s National Lampoon’s Vacation, Walley World is the fictitious amusement park that serves as the Griswold family’s Mordor: more purpose than destination. To quote the head of the Griswold fellowship himself, “This is no longer a vacation. It’s a quest.”

The premise is simple: Clark (Chevy Chase), patriarch of the Griswolds, is determined to take his wife and two kids to the aforementioned Walley World, a Disneyland counterfeit whose mascot is an anthropomorphic moose. Instead of simply boarding a no-hassle, TSA-free flight from Chicago to California, Clark insists on loading up the station wagon and embarking on a cross-country expedition chock-full of mild infidelities and homemade sandwiches soaked in dog piss.

Throughout the film, Clark wavers between all-American father figure and erratic psychopath. One minute he’s treating his family to the majesty and awe-inspiring grandeur of one of our most beloved national parks.

The next minute he’s fastening the corpse of his wife’s aunt to the top of the car.

You know. Dad stuff. 

Ultimately they arrive at Walley World, only to find out that it’s closed down for summer repairs. Clark, tired and defeated, looks within. He realizes that, maybe, life really is more about the journey than the destination. “Perhaps,” he affirms, “the ‘vacation’ was inside each of us all along.” The Griswolds hug and load back into the Griswold Family Truckster for a lengthy, retrospective voyage back to the windy city.

Just kidding. He haymakers a moose statue and then takes a security guard hostage.

The Good

Clark exhibits a lot of textbook dad behavior throughout the trip, the film’s premise being, in and of itself, inherently paternal. There’s really nothing more “dad” than stringing your family along for a trip no one but you really wants to partake in. We’re also treated to a handful of touching, fatherly moments between Clark and his son, Russ, including one scene where he hands down life advice over Russ’ first beer.

Look at ‘em. So happy. Completely oblivious to the fact they’re still some three decades away from a Cubs World Series championship.

The Bad

Did we mention the “takes a security guard hostage” thing? Because he totally does that. Really. False imprisonment of a hostage being a 3rd-degree felony punishable by up to eight years in prison under California Penal Code. I mean, look at this:

Jesus. There’s probably a bench warrant out for your arrest involving abuse of a corpse, dude. Let’s maybe dial it back a bit.

Verdict

When it’s all said and done, Clark W. Griswold is a good dad. Maybe not the dad you’d select to spearhead a 2,000-mile family road trip, but definitely the dad you want harassing an umpire from the bleachers of your little league baseball game.

He’s not perfect, but who among us can say their dad didn’t, at some point during their childhood, put their life in immediate danger for one fleeting moment of reciprocated flirting with Christie Brinkley?

That’s what I thought.

Clark Griswold’s Dad Grade: C+

Fun field trips are common as the school year comes to a close, but students at an elementary school in Alabama sadly have to enjoy it without one of their classmates.

It was only three weeks after Jaleia Smith’s eighth birthday in September when she tragically passed away in a car accident.

Now, the other second graders at G.W. Trenholm Elementary are celebrating their classmate’s memory by going to the very same place where that birthday party was held: SkyZone.

“Try to have as much fun as we can, but sometimes we can’t have as much fun as we would have if she was here,” 2nd grader Mia Awwad told WHNT.

Over a hundred kids flooded the trampolines and mats, but also present was Jaleia’s father, Jeremy Smith.

“I’m not going to say it’s tough. I’m going to say I just wish my daughter could have been here with them. This is one of her places that she loved to come to,” Smith said.

Wanting to end the school year on a positive note, Smith paid for all 111 student’s admission in honor of his little girl and her favorite place in the world.

“Everything they helped me through with my daughter’s situation; all the support they gave me. So, I just wanted to thank G.W. Trenholm for being there with me through my sorrows,” said Smith.

To further honor Jaleia, the school retired her student number, planted a tree in school grounds, and classmates left messages to Jaleia on chalkboards all year long.

“The timing of my fiancee’s pregnancy was anything but perfect, with us living in different states and having trouble finding a house.

I was terrified of fatherhood because of who my father was([n’t). For a time during which many would be excited, I had feelings of doom inside of me. I was already expecting this pending happiness to one day turn to pain.

Magnolia coming into our lives ignited a flame that steadily rages inside me, incinerating every fear of the other man I once dreaded becoming.

200 words or less could never do justice to what being a father means to me. The joy is monumental compared to anything else in life.”

– Nathan Davis

Want to share a story about fatherhood? Email fatherfigures@thedad.com

Check out the previous editions of Father Figures here.

Hooray for another weekend, or two-day-vacation-with-kids as I like to think of it. The weekend is all about disconnecting with the daily drudgery and making some memories with your little ones. It doesn’t matter if you’re building something or just being silly, commit to whatever you’re doing and have a good time.

Get the Pool Out

Hooray for it finally being sunny enough to spend evenings outdoors (in some areas of N. America at least). Get a few cold beverages in the cooler and give the kids enough toys to keep them busy for a while. Lather on the sunscreen, get the hats and shades on and spend your weekend outside. You can pick up an inexpensive inflatable pool for as low as $30 at Amazon. Sure it might only last the season, but that saves on storing it away through the winter, so who cares!

A few ideas that’ll keep the kids in the pool and away from their screens, how about:

• Ping Pong Race – Empty a bag of ping pong balls in the water and get the kids to act like Hungry Hungry Hippos and race to gather the most
• Atomic Whirlpool – All the kids run in the same direction around the inside edge of the pool to get the water spinning. Then let them get swept around or try to swim against it.
• Sponge Toss – Unload a few big car-washing sponges and let them throw them around. They’ll quickly get water-logged and fun to splash around.

Backyard Camping and Outdoor Movie

You don’t have to travel far to have the same fun as going on a family camping trip, and they’ll have the benefit of on-site bathrooms, snacks, and the comfort of their own beds if they get chilly at night.

Set up a tent and let them bring all their blankets, pillows, cuddly toys, flashlights, and some food to get them into the evening at least. Make it really memorable by setting up a projector and drape a white sheet over a wall to create an outdoor movie theatre. Bring popcorn and all the goodies they need. Even if they don’t stay out the whole night, they’ll surely have a great time.

Make Spider Burgers

Ok, well they’re not technically spider burgers. They look more like octopus burgers. Either way, your kids will love them, probably! They’re super-easy to make too, which is always a winner in my book. Here’s the recipe, thanks to FoodNetwork.

Ingredients:

• Hot dog wieners
• vegetable oil
• Small hamburger buns as wieners
• Condiments for burgers

Directions:

1. Preheat oven to 400 F. Line baking sheet(s) with parchment paper or foil.

2. To cut wieners so they will cook into “spiders”, begin about an inch down from one end of each wiener, use a small sharp knife to cut along the length of the wiener into halves, then make two lengthwise cuts into each half, making 6 “legs” total. Try to make each “leg” the same thickness. The wieners should be intact at one end and have with 6 “legs” dangling from it.

3. Put sliced wieners in a bowl. Add drizzle vegetable oil (1 tsp for every 4 wieners) and toss to coat weiners.

4. Splay wieners onto lined baking sheets by spreading “legs” out like spokes from the intact end of the wiener. You can fit 4 to 5 wieners onto each baking sheet. Bake on middle racks of the oven for 6 minutes, or until “legs” curl up and wieners look lightly roasted.

5. Tuck wieners into hamburger buns. Set out with self-serve hamburger condiments.

For more suggestions check out last week’s 3 Things to Do With Your Kids.

Just a heads up, if you buy stuff using the provided links, The Dad may collect a small commission.

Despite how you might feel about the final season of HBO’s Game of Thrones, you have to admit that the series as a whole is a marvel of storytelling. Creating dozens of characters with rich backstories that intertwine almost effortlessly over the course of eight seasons isn’t exactly easy.

Even more difficult, though, is condensing the series into a single 280-character tweet (which, coincidentally, is about the same number of characters in Game of Thrones overall).

Can someone please explain the plot/story of the entire #GOT series in a single tweet?

— Amy Cuddy (@amyjccuddy) May 20, 2019

Thanks to a prompt by Amy Cuddy, folks attempted to use just a single Tweet to explain the plot of the entire series, and some of them were surprisingly spot-on.

People with powerful ambition and poor impulse control explore the intersection of lust, greed, and fear. Lives and reputations were lost, painful wisdom was gained, and if you were really lucky, your favs just might end up back where they started. @bullypulpit_hq https://t.co/W3soxoFW7j

— Ryan Lowy (@AJustConspiracy) May 20, 2019

Craycray incestuous family rules 7 kingdoms. Baddies from the north invade so most put away their differences to fight together. After winning they go after the craycray Queen who didn’t help them fight and everything ends up in a hot mess and a big disappointment. The end.😘 https://t.co/IA9qHeJCLE

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) May 20, 2019

The worst leaders believe they are good and right. The best know they are flawed and despite having imperfections visible to everyone, they persist. https://t.co/kFbhnrjHUj

— Cameron Sadler 🏁 (@RulesByCam) May 20, 2019

Doomed love and incest leads to multi generation conflict for power across seven kingdoms, starts/ends with mad rulers burning down people, and finally, the least interested guy becomes king in a pseudo show of democracy where only whites vote. Oh, and zombies. https://t.co/q3bTO8MSLY

— Amit Das (@not_ghalib) May 20, 2019

Honor, ambition, and love clash as 3 great houses battle for control of their own destinies and a seat on the Iron Throne. In the end, the battles are for nothing as the throne itself is nothing but a symbol of pettiness and the pride. Also, snow zombies. https://t.co/ErOp0R5qJX

— Brad Wells (@BradWellsNFL) May 20, 2019

Pursuit of a murder mystery unravels a massive conspiracy about the true heir to the throne of 7 kingdoms.
Civil war ensues as an apocalyptic threat from the North and an exile from the East seeking to claim the throne for herself all clash leaving a new order when Spring begins. https://t.co/N7IhM9whrt

— Stephen Limbaugh (@StephenLimbaugh) May 20, 2019

Others went a bit off-the-rails with their explanations, but they still hold up surprisingly well.

“Shakespeare, but with zombies, dragons, and an odd fixation with castration.” https://t.co/BrKkf43ppD

— Peter Wang (@pwang) May 20, 2019

Written by a computer programmed with the scripts of Dynasty, Lord Of The Rings and Jurassic Park https://t.co/LQBss7LEhI

— 𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖘𝖆𝖇𝖔𝖙𝖊𝖚𝖗 #𝔣𝔟𝔭𝔢 🇪🇺 (@DoomlordVek) May 20, 2019

Fantasy take on the history of British Monarchy.

— alenareva (@reva_alena) May 20, 2019

Porn with Swordfights.

— Half Eaten Chicken Sandwich (@ChickenHalf) May 20, 2019

HBO invites you to play Dungeons and Dragons with an especially horny and sadistic 13 year old Dungeon Master. And if you think it’s not a kid running the game just remember there’s a reason all the parents die.

— Mr. Cappadocia (@MrCappadocia) May 20, 2019

Can you give a better Thrones synopsis in under 240 characters?

Yesterday, just ahead of its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, the latest trailer for Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film, Once Upon a Time in America, dropped.

The movie, which follows Leonardo DiCaprio’s fading TV star Rick Dalton and his faithful stuntman (Brad Pitt) as they navigate Hollywood in 1969, on the eve of the Manson murders and at the end of an era. The first trailer didn’t offer much in the way of plot, and frankly, neither does the second. But it’s already clear there is a long cast of characters, and this trailer adds even more.

This time we catch a glimpse of Al Pacino’s flamboyant movie producer and a longer look at Charles Manson and his notorious family, whom Brad Pitt runs into while visiting the Spahn ranch for some reason.

The movie looks like it will be packed with fun cameos from celebrities of the era, and a handful of fake movie recreations (sign me up to watch Leo light up some Nazis!), but it remains to be seen how it will tackle Margot Robbie’s Sharon Tate and the presence of the Manson family. That infamous crime doesn’t quite lend itself to goofy Hollywood hijinks…

And we also get out first look at Luke Perry, RIP.

The movie premiered in France on Tuesday night to a standing ovation, but we won’t be able to see it until July 26th.

I’ll be watching the trailer a dozen or so more times to tide myself over.

Obligatory “he’s back” joke here, for like, what, the fifth time now? Nobody took T2‘s whole “No fate but what we make for ourselves” theme more to heart than the Terminator franchise itself, simply refusing to die. This morning the trailer dropped for Terminator: Dark Fate, featuring new robots, familiar faces, and a couple classic “Oh-no-my-face-got-ripped-off-but-it’s-chill-because-I’m-a-cyborg” moments.

So to recap, we’ve got Mackenzie Davis and Gabriel Luna as two new Terminator varieties doin’ the ole’ help/hunt dance with Natalia Reyes, who -per the way these movies work- is somehow the key to saving the future. Along for the ride are Linda Hamilton and Arnold Schwarzenegger returning with producer James Cameron to the franchise they started together 35 years ago.

The film takes place “the day after Judgement Day” but LA doesn’t look like the sea of human skulls we’re used to, so it’s a good bet the evil Skynet has been lying in wait. Or maybe Skynet is out of the picture, but a new cyber threat rose to decimate humanity, like BitCoin or Facebook.

Terminator: Dark Fate has wisely chosen to disregard everything since 1991’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, the gold standard of 90s action adventure. Look, not to shit on Jurassic Park or The Matrix, but T2 was the action movie of action movies. Personally, I begged my parents to rent it probably six Friday movie nights in a row, and they didn’t even argue until the fourth week.

But since then, the franchise has made some missteps. Terminator 3 was…fine. Terminator: Salvation is remembered more for proving Christian Bale was kind of an asshole (still love you CB, just maybe stick to one body weight for a while; you need to level out). Terminator: GynYsYssY or whatever they called the last one tried to reboot the franchise while also not rebooting it because time travel is weird like that. All of them featured The Arnold, but all of them fell flat. So what makes this latest stab at the franchise more promising? One minor little detail:

The Queen is back, baby.

Linda Hamilton has returned as Sarah Conner, the role she originated in the 1984 sci-fi horror masterpiece that launched this whole thing. Her turn from waitress-in-distress in the first film to supreme badass in the second made Conner one of the most iconic characters of all time. We haven’t seen her since 1996’s Terminator 2: 3D – Battle Across Time, the Universal Studios attraction that taught 12-year-old me what excessive gunfire smelled like; but while Arnold may be the titular cyborg, the heart of Terminator has always been Hamilton.

Getting these two back together is the hail mary this series needs. Dark Fate may be The Terminator‘s last chance to cash in on the reboot craze, but with Hamilton’s Sarah back in the action, and Deadpool‘s Tim Miller in the director’s chair, odds are in its favor. James Cameron took time away from making 36 Avatar movies to produce this one in order to ensure it was “relevant” to the times. It’s got the pedigree. Can it deliver? That’s up to fate.

Terminator: Dark Fate opens November 1st.

If you don’t want to wait that long, Reader, then permit a humble recommendation. Go pick up the Blue-ray of FOX’s Sarah Conner Chronicles. That show was awesome, completely underrated, and Lena Headey (Game of Thrones) was a great Sarah Conner. Hamilton’s untouchable, but that show was the best Terminator content since T2. Unless you count the Terminator: Future Shock video game, which I do, but I’ve been told that I’m a nerd.

Hugh Jackman’s performance as the near-indestructible, clawed mutant, Wolverine, is so long-running and memorable that he will forever be associated with it.

However, true fans of the X-Men comics know that the yellow spandexed superhero doesn’t actually share many of Jackman’s physical features. Yes, the razor-sharp jawline and muscular physique fit the bill, but ol’ Wolvie is traditionally a surprisingly short fella—something 6’2″ Hugh Jackman has difficulty pulling off.

Thankfully, the internet is here to remedy this problem with an online petition asking for someone worthy and short enough to finally pick up the mantle, and it’s none other than Danny DeVito. Yup, Danny DeVito of Twins and It’s Always Sunny in Philidelphia fame.

The petition was started by someone going under the name “Ring Arius,” who wrote:

“The only man able to take the throne after Hugh Jackman. We believe that if Wolverine is to make an appearance in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that the only man able to pull it off is Danny DeVito.”

And, honestly, it kinda makes sense. If I asked 100 people to name an actor who could perfectly portray a tiny ball of muscle and rage (an apt description for the clawed X-Man), I have no doubt at least 90 of them would name DeVito.

As of this writing, the petition has reached 15,000 signatures and doesn’t appear to be slowing down any time soon. With Disney’s completed merger with Fox, it’s inevitable that the X-Men will be roped into the MCU in some way or another; so, if Disney likes money (and you know they do), maybe they should consider it.

I mean, seriously. . . who wouldn’t pay to see Sabretooth battling it out with DANNY-FUCKING-DEVITO??

Also, interestingly enough, DeVito claimed in an interview with Wired that he was actually in the running against Jackman for the role back in the late-90s. The only thing that held him back? He didn’t have abs.

I’ve never related to anything more.

If you want to add your name to the petition, you can find it here.

Next time you and your significant other need a sitter, call your parents and open with this:

“It’s not that we need a break. This is about your health.”

That’s right. According to a study out of Berlin, grandparents who babysit actually tend to live longer.

While most grandparents don’t need another reason to spend time with their grandchildren, the study finds some serious benefits for seniors who help take care of kids and even their adult children later in life.

The Berlin Aging Study confirms a growing sentiment in the scientific community that seniors who act as part-time caregivers can extend their years and even see benefits in areas such as cognitive function and general wellbeing.

Researchers found grandparent babysitters had a 37% lower mortality risk than seniors of the same age who had no caregiving responsibilities.

While the exact correlation is still being investigated, researchers believe spending time with grandchildren is a good way for older people to have a sense of purpose, while also keeping them physically and mentally active.

The study further suggests that even childless participants who helped others during their senior years may see similar benefits. According to the National Health Service, acts of giving and kindness, small and large, are associated with positive mental wellbeing.

NHS gives a few examples:

• Giving to others and co-operating with them can stimulate the reward areas in the brain, creating positive feelings.
• Helping and working with others can also give us a sense of purpose and feelings of self-worth.
• Giving our time to others in a constructive way helps us strengthen our relationships and build new ones.
  Relationships with others also help mental wellbeing.

Although the results of the recent study are promising, researchers only followed around 500 participants – all hailing from one region in Germany. While that sample size is relatively small, it still provides some real evidence that a link exists between health and giving back.

So what are you waiting for?

Drop those kids off at mom and dad’s house. Plan a little trip. Go see the new Avengers.

After all, it’s not just about you – it’s for your parent’s health!

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