Family film, live action, circa I don’t even know, late 1990s? It’s about, or at least features, a girl, 12ish, whose father is a comic book artist. There’s a scene at a birthday(?) party, at a pool, and there’s a live 60s-esque band who’ve been hired to perform, singing lyrics along the following lines: “ooh, she’s daddy’s little girl” (trying to search these lyrics only turns up an unrelated song.) The other kids there are making fun of the girl because of something in the latest issue of her father’s comic book. It’s a vaguely TMNT-esque publication, with anthropomorphic animals as the characters, and the Master Splinter-type character has his adopted-daughter-type figure start wearing a training bra now that she’s growing up; all the girl’s friends recognize this as being a thinly veiled stand-in for the girl’s own blossoming into womanhood and tease her for this.
The more I think about it the surer I am that the song in question is You're a Big Girl Now by The Stylistics, but going off of IMDb's credit list isn't revealing anything, probably because it's only a cover and not performed by The Stylistics themselves. That track's songwriters, Robert Douglas and Marty Bryant, aren't credited there anywhere either individually or collectively, either, though?
As long as we're trying to track down things from my childhood directly responsible for turning me into a furry, here's something I haven't tried to track down at all (not knowing where or how to begin) but which I nonetheless occasionally think about, though with increasing frequency lately- these pamphlets, there was like a whole propaganda thing about how great it is to go to college or whatever and get a high-paying job, because you don't want to flip burgers for the rest of your life! And it was about this anthropomorphic cat and it might have been told in verse, or in hopelessly trying-to-hard-to-be-hip lingo, or whatever.
(And even as a kid it was pretty clear that they were teaching us to aim to be the oppressors rather than dismantling the oppressive system instead. maybe it had something to do with being too young to have a working understanding of what flipping burgers even means or what it meant to be a fast food worker, allowing one to see piercingly to the core injustice of a system where it would need to be a personal lifelong-goal decision not to be so exploited: how is there escape for the individual if there cannot be escape for the collective? I am always dreaming about descending into dark tunnels, or drowning in quicksand. Last night I dreamt of navigating the mazelike officespace, embedding myself within their organization while working for the resistance front secretly headquartered between the walls. The night before last I dreamt of following sisters into a tube spiraling downward, the entrance secreted in a public place. Down we go, me catching every door before they close behind the women as they push onward, remaining just out of sight behind the twist of the spiral, but gradually advancing until the slightest glimpse backward would reveal me. At nearly the last moment, I am discovered, but manage to make it through the last door. Cornered by the two sisters, I explain that I'm looking for my grandfather, who had wandered off; I may or may not have genuinely thought him to be with the two. Though I should be in trouble, whatever covert protocols they have allow them to proceed with their operation: they leap into the pit at the bottom of the spiral, a long tube like a slide straight vertical. There is a protocol for accessing what's next, time travel or dimension shifting or access to their secret base. AI-AI-AI-OH! shouts one of the sisters, and I echo the syllables. ZEIGFRIED JONES! pronounces the other, though I do not know who that could be. "Oh," I say aloud, "I didn't know that the access code could be any old sounds." "It's not," they explain mischievously, and I realize my mistake, realize why they had allowed me, a forbidden interloper, to come with them. And I drop into empty space, some place between dimensions, and I keep falling, and falling, and falling, though we had already been so far down into the earth. And I know that I'm immortal here, and I wonder if they really would go so far as to let me fall forever as the punishment for infringing upon the sacred descent. And as I realize I might be in this space, falling in darkness for eternity, I wake up, and wonder if that's going to be some part of me now, a part of me in the dreamworld, plummeting into pitch darkness forever, everywhere I go, even in waking. And both dreams end the same way: when I go back to sleep, I manage to continue the dream, and I'm not going to be falling forever, and they allow me to continue on to where they've gone. It's, the dinosaur times, perhaps. Maybe a jungle, maybe a minecart. Probably a minecart in a jungle. The part that matters is this: I realize I'm experiencing two different simultaneous realities, one in which I'm a man sitting in this minecart, one in which I'm a woman. I grin and laugh and realize that this experience, now that I know the objective subjective experience of being more than one gender, can act as a Rosetta Stone to finally gauge the validity of trans identities, and at last we can answer the objective truth of whether trans men are men and trans women are women, and heal centuries of religious and cultural divides. The other dream, the dream from last night, when I fall back to sleep Jeff Goldblum is there announcing to me the sad shocking discovery of the scandal of the founder of our resistance group, VINCENT "JOHN PRAFFERAD" POWELL JR. He had been on both sides of the conflict, founding our resistance while still being part of the office space. Vincent "John Prafferad" Powell, Jr. I commit that name to memory, and wake up.)
Maybe the cat didn't have pants on? That always made me uncomfortable as a kid..