After 30 Years, 'The Princess Bride' Abides
More than just a grab bag of oft-quoted great lines, The Princess Bride is a fairy tale about fairy tales and a showcase for a gaggle of great character actors.
Something is gained and something is lost when a full creative work breaks down into familiar pieces that pass from hand to hand like baseball cards. It happened to Monty Python and the Holy Grail, it happened to The Simpsons, it happened to The Big Lebowski. And over the 30 years since its release, it happened to The Princess Bride.
On the one hand, the fact that "Youto the word "inconceivable" — is so handy and ubiquitous marks the deep embedding of the film into the culture. But on the other hand, repetition can build a callus, so that people stop really appreciating the lines they've heard so many times in the fourth-generation photocopies that are imitations of remembered imitations of Mandy Patinkin or Wallace Shawn.
