What we need is a little comedy: 'Amazing Stories: Magic Saturday'

I was watching the third episode of the second season of Steven Spielberg's  "Amazing Stories." In this 23-minute episode now available on Netflix, "A boy uses an ancient Chinese spell to switch bodies with his sick grandfather so the old man can relive his former glories on the baseball field."

Now my Mandarin Chinese is rusty, and I can't even be sure if the ancient Chinese spell is supposed to be in Mandarin, but both actors recite it devoid of tones. With four tones in Mandarin Chinese that means there are so many possibilities.

The spell is: Yijing Meijing Laotsi I will be you and You will be me.

What would have been funnier is if the boy or the grandfather mispronounced the spell and things began to go so very wrong.

I think there was something to that effect (without the magic) in the of TV series "Family Affair."

Otherwise, the "Amazing Stories" suggests that Chinese is very simple for Americans (or anyone) to master (Shades of Rudyard Kipling's "Kim"?).