2. The Beast
The late baseball umpire Bill Klem once reportedly claimed that to him, "baseball is not a game, but a religion". No one understands this sentiment better than children. They're less prone to debating the ramifications of what a pre-deterministic Calvinist belief system says about the trivial nature of their existence than they are about the merits of suicide squeezing and double plays. In The Sandlot, Scotty Smalls learns a lesson from the neighborhood clique about the subtleties of baseball, the vagaries of chewing tobacco, and how to get a much older woman to stick her tongue in your mouth. It's summertime nostalgic fun with PF Flyers and a ball signed by some lady named Baby Ruth. Then terror raises its ugly head in the form of The Beast, a baseball eating, erector-set destroying canine worthy of guarding the gates of hell. As Squints informs us, the Beast is a former junkyard dog, who would kill anyone who broke in. "And he did. And he liked it. A lot!" The appropriately named Beast is most definitely a creature that will haunt the dreams of children for-e-ver. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-Q7b-vHY3Q