Still I Fly

This one's adorable.

Recently Daniel has had a renewed interest in both Dusty Crophopper and Planes: Fire and Rescue the movie.  Around his birthday it was all he would talk about, but recently he'd found other things that were fun, too.  Something happened recently, though, and now he's back to Dusty and Fire and Rescue nearly all the time.

For his birthday I found an orange Dusty that would float and could play in the bathtub with him.  It was the same size as the standard Hot Wheels 1:64 cars (which would make it, what, maybe 1:128? I don't know what the actual dimensions are for a Cessna, which is what I think Dusty is, but it's certainly bigger than a Corvette or whatever).  That was his absolute favourite at the time, he couldn't eat without it, he couldn't sleep without it, he couldn't go in the car without it, it was almost more important to him than his cars blanket.

The relationship soured, though, when all that love resulted in the paint on his eyes getting marked up, one of his props breaking off and the decals (seriously, guys? decals on a water toy? give your head a shake) got particularly ratty.  It made both of us sad, me because I knew how much he loved it and now he didn't want to see "Orange Dusty" in decline, and him because, well, he didn't want to see "Orange Dusty" in decline.

Fortunately, Mamoo also got him a much bigger Dusty toy for his birthday, so-called "Red Dusty" who has now filled the void:

Also a water-toy, but obviously much larger, this one was built to survive more love from little boys.  I worry about the day when one of the props breaks on this guy, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Anyway, the point of this story is his renewed interest in Planes: Fire and Rescue, the movie that inspired the above colour scheme.  I've always said the original Planes was a better sequel to Cars than Cars 2 would ever be and I honestly think Fire and Rescue is probably the best sequel to a movie since Aliens, for going somewhere new and interesting, standing well on it's own but still paying homage to the original film.  It's rare as hen's teeth to see a sequel strike out in it's own direction, rarer still to see one that does that and manages to be good at the same time.

I digress.  Again.

Daniel loves this movie again.  He'll watch it basically any time we offer.  But the best times are when he can watch it with his best friend, "Red Dusty".  He will sit in front of the movie, holding "Red Dusty" the whole time and any time Dusty is flying on screen, he will do his best to make his "Red Dusty" match attitude with his on-screen counterpart.  The first time I noticed this was during this sequence:

It warms my heart every time I see him immediately sit up straight and do his best to make his Dusty do all of the movements Dusty does on screen.