Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Andrew Sanford | News | November 25, 2025
I was definitely alive during a time when home videos were a thing, but luckily, my family was never good at holding onto stuff. Sure, there may be some good memories stored on those VHS tapes and mini-DVs. My brothers and I made a wrestling ring out of cardboard and string, and I know we filmed stuff in it. One time, I was hitting ground balls to my younger brother, and one took a bad hop and socked him square in the nuts. That's sitting around somewhere. But most of it was just stuff that would make me cringe.
I'm a performer and have never been shy about watching myself, but older videos are a bit harder. Part of that isn't about embarrassment as much as having reservations about re-experiencing my younger years. While most of the tapes of my childhood shenanigans are gone, my older brother digitized a VHS of my second birthday a couple of years ago, and I couldn't get through two minutes of it. Maybe it would have helped if I looked like Chris Hemsworth in it.
The Thor actor is making a docuseries for Hulu/Disney+ called Chris Hemsworth: Road Trip to Remember, which is about Hemsworth and his father going on a road trip together after the latter has been diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer's disease. It sounds emotionally devastating, but in like a feel-good way; a son giving his father an incredible gift. It's something that I hope my kids would want to do for me at some point, but way down the road. Now, they're too busy yelling, "Get him!" and tackling me as soon as they get out of bed. I'll take it.
As part of the promotion for the series, Hemsworth dropped a clip on Instagram of him, his mom, and his dad watching one of his old home movies, which shows him impersonating the "crocodile hunter" Steve Irwin. In it, he treats the family dog as a "Siberian Tiger" that he is hunting down. Despite putting it in a "weak" full nelson, Hemsworth swears that the pooch wasn't harmed.
The most jarring thing about the clip is how much Hemsworth already seems like... well, Chris Hemsworth. He's handsome and put together and has an amount of charm that almost seems unfair. The first Thor film has its purpose, but it's wild to believe that Disney had a man with this much natural charisma and said, "We're gonna make you so dour." It works, but Taika Waititi's Thor: Ragnarok taps into a specialness that was clearly there all along.
It's also lovely to see Hemsworth and his parents soak this all in together. Part of its appeal is that it feels so foreign to me. There's a clear-headedness to it that I think would be... unachievable for my family. Instead of enjoying how things once were, there would be too much focus on why they aren't that way anymore, and that's something I've never been very good at. But I get it.
