You kids with your fancy “tapes!” In my day we had to watch whatever the hell was on the three or four channels we could pick up with the rabbit ears, and we were damn glad to have it!
Once a year they’d show a Bond movie or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, or maybe even that Willie Wonka movie. Such an event!
VCRs didn’t exist until I was a young adult. Doggone spoiled kids!
I grew up with The Legend of Zelda. "Well excuuuuuuse me, princess"
The Last Unicorn and Titan A.E. loved those movies.
You know what I think is missing more? Complete lack of context.
Digital cable that had the menu of what was playing was a novelty even in the 2000s so television used to be "you turned it on and what was playing was playing." You'd catch a movie halfway in and not know what the hell it is and that was all you could learn. Even if you had an internet connection you wouldn't think to use it to look up what this movie was, and if you did, IMDB and such didn't exist yet. Maybe Yahoo! would turn something up, probably not.
Then the file sharing days were wild. There are people convinced to this day that System of a Down did a song about The Legend of Zelda.
Oh man, we had so many weird movies.
While my mom was in charge of nurturing a broad taste in music, my dad was in charge of taping movies of all kinds and showing them to us.
He waited for me to turn 13 to watch Seven Samurai and several other Kurosawa movies. We watched all the old Pink Panther movies, a couple of Jacques Tati films (Mon Uncle being our favourite when we had the flu), Le Ballon Rouge, multiple Soviet animated movies, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Charlie Chaplin's Gold Rush, Gloria, The Blues Brothers and on and on and on.
I owe a lot to my parents for instilling a broad music and movie taste in me super early.
I'm sure kids of today form their own valuable memories, but their reality is so foreign to us that we only see it as a threat.
I'm a pretty big fan of the podcast Creepcast on youtube and one of the cohosts grew up on creepypastas online which is very interesting to listen to whenever he talks about the nostalgia for him and many others. I was already in my 20s when creepypastas became a thing online so to me, it is interesting to hear what childhood was like for the 20somethings of today, who all grew up on the internet and have fond memories of it.
The kids of today will have their stories too and they will also be interesting to listen to, I'm sure. It is differnet than growing up on worn out cassette and VHS tapes, but it doesn't make it all bad. Things just change over time.
on saturdays the local station would broadcast scifi b movies. we'd record them and keep the good ones.
Or, what movie you dubbed from a rented VHS tape and watch 200 times until The quality had degraded so bad that it was almost unwatchable. I'm looking at you Short Circuit.
Mom: why do you want to rent that You've watched 500 times at home Me: our slp copy's looking pretty bad. Mom: grrrr
The animated Robin Hood with the animals. Maid Marion probably cracked my egg lol, just wish I broken all the way out sooner
This is also kind of the beauty of physical media. Or at least “private collections”. Like even if you digitize stuff you really only have the drive space you are willing to commit. Back when mp3 players could only fit a few hundred songs, I had to be really sure I liked those songs. I’ve gotten back into this a bit with ditching streaming services. I’m ripping my own cds and movies again, streaming them from my home server. It’s the combo of the tech we have now, and the curation we had to do then.
Swiss Family Robinson
Nobody remembers Swiss Family Robinson
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.
Chronicles of Riddick, and Titan A.E
I had a great childhood
We had a lot of VHS tapes that got worn out over time because they got watched so many times. My little brothers watched chitty chitty bang bang so much that the quality of the entire film was noticably worse by the time the tape got accidentally stepped on and destroyed.
Also mysteriously all the sex scenes with the incredibly attractive women in the Pierce Brosnan James bond films were worn out too. I wouldn't know anything about that nor does it have anything to do with why I'm now a masochist whos into women that bite, scratch and even stab me from time to time... No correlation whatsoever.
Erik the Viking. I think it came with petrol coupons or something. Never seen it mentioned anywhere since.
Canonball run 2 It was the shit back in the day
We had a tape that had Asterix in Britain followed by the Only Fools And Horses feature-length episode where they go to Florida and Del-Boy gets mistaken for a mob boss.
To this day, I can probably quote both from beginning to end.
And commercials. My wife and I were just talking the other day about shared commercials we saw growing up that kids today will never experience. “Ancient Chinese secret”, “Don’t squeeze the charmin”, the crying Native American, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”, “Where’s the beef?”, “My bologna has a first name”, “I’m stuck on Band-aid”, “Calgon take me away”, “Mikey likes it”, “Sometimes you feel like a nut”, Joe Isuzu, “Avoid the noid”, “York peppermint patty gives me the feeling…”, Stompers, Micro-machines, “Who wears short shorts?”, “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter” … and these are just the ones I remember. They have none of those shared experiences.
I mean just making this list gave me such a wave of nostalgia.
My uncle had a vhs player many years before we did. He had 2 movies.
Smokey and the bandit probably more then 100 times in total. The sting probaly around 40-50 times.Monkey Trouble is my wife's jam. We have it on Laserdisc even because I like collecting junk :)
The cabin we vacationed at a few times had exactly two VHS tapes, as I recall:
Green Eggs & Ham (Side 1) / Star-Bellied Sneeches (Side 2)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Also we watched fuzzy news coverage of the Olympic bombing in Atlanta and it briefly seemed like it was the end of the world for like 2-3 hours. Probably because I was a kid + fuzzy TV in a cabin in the mountains + dramatic parents, etc.
Edit: I realized I said Side 1/Side 2 like it was a record. Anyway, it was just a 2-part Dr. Seuss VHS, not a rare dual-layer VHS.
Tremors FTW!!
Junior year of college, there were a few months where the only tapes in our house were Yellow Submarine, Slackers, and something I can't remember
They still have that today, though. It's just on streaming alongside the big films.
I don't doubt a portion of the Disney remakes would have ended up being direct-to-VCD sequels you'd only find in a video rental store.
LA Story! I still love that movie. Our movies were whatever the people that lived in the house before you left when they moved back to wherever they were from (expat life in the Middle East). Also my grandma taped all the Fairy Tale Theatre episodes for me. The three little pigs was the best! Billy Crystal as the runt and Jeff Goldblum as the big bad wolf, so so good.
The Miracle on Morgan's Creek. I never liked it much, but my family did. Also The Princess Bride, but that's not obscure so it can't count here.
The Tenth Kingdom cult reporting in
Thx to my mom we had Star Wars. I'm persuaded this set the course of my life in some ways. Thx mom!
Having a random movie come up on YTV or Teletoon or some other channel only to never be seen again was a painfully common occurrence as a kid.
We got cable when I was about 10. In my country even on cable we had very few channels. Game changer! Those Saturday morning cartoons!
Beyond The Mind's Eye was my jam.
Growing up the only Star Wars movie we had was part 2, so I watched that over and over. Dunno why I didn't want to watch part 1, 3, and the rest.
The Little Rascals and Looney Tunes VHS box sets and a home recording of Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. I fucking hate The Little Rascals and Charlie and The Chocolate Factory these days because of this, but I love the hell out of some Looney Tunes.
Also, we all watched the exact same shows at the same times, because that was what was on the 2 or 3 channels at the time.
Meanwhile, the next generation who knows what show from what time the other kids stream from who knows what service.
In the 80s it was Freddy's Revenge and The Woman in Red. Early 2000s was The Matrix on VHS.
There's a certain irony in me working in robotics, yet my favourite movie is The Missing Postman.
