The Parent Trap

Way back in 1986 my family joined the ‘digital’ age of the time – we got our first VCR. This was a big deal – and we got one of the fancy machines with a wireless remote (one of my friends had a VCR with a wired remote way before we did).

Along with the VCR came a year’s worth of movie rentals – one per week. We immediately dove into family friendly movies – including Disney’s original The Parent Trap.

The movie begins with a young girl from Boston arriving at summer camp and eventually meeting her doppelganger. The two girls immediately form an intense dislike for each other, with a variety of pranks played on the other until they are forced into the same cabin. Eventually they start to get along – and discover they are twins!

Sharon lives with their mother in Boston, and Susan with the father in California. Their parents divorced shortly after they were born and decided to each raise one of the twins so they’d never have to see each other again. Each girl misses the parent they’ve never known, so they decide to switch.

This means cutting hair for one twin, and learning a Boston accent for the other, plus much more! Their ultimate goal? To get their parents back together. There is an element of fish out of water for each girl as they spend time with their ‘new’ parent.

Turns out, the father is about to marry a younger woman that is fixing to be a terrible stepmother. More shenanigans ensue, but the end of the movie sees the parents reunited and the twins living as twins, finally.

There are many reasons this story shouldn’t work – what parent would separate twins? Would the courts even allow this – back in 1961 or today?

That said, I think the story works because we’ve all probably imagined what it would be like to find out you have a long lost twin. It’s also common for children from broken families also wish their parents will reunite. There are enough elements of truth in the story that I am drawn in to the story each time I see it. I’m not the only one – in 1998 Disney remade the classic with Lindsay Lohan starring as both twins (as Hayley Mills did in 1961).