"Owned on tape" was for rich people. "Taped from NBC or ABC, or, if the weather was just right, CBS and you tried to pause the recording during the commercials and that's why 8 minutes are missing from the middle of the movie" is more like it.
How about "lacked a VHS player altogether" lmao. My movie ingestion growing up was basically 100% up to the whims of random people, strange way to do it.
Really dig the scrappy approach y'all used tho, that's the good stuff. Being broke taught me a lotta the most important stuff TBH.
Bootleg that was taped in a movie theatre and then rented from the guy down the street that had a room in his house set up with shelves and a shit ton of movies. And/or the collection that was left from the last people that lived in your house. Along with their furniture. My movie was LA Story. The good old days in Saudi Arabia.
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
Swiss Family Robinson
Nobody remembers Swiss Family Robinson
That’s parental failing for not torrenting
Wasn’t really an option when you were trying to see the titties in Titanic
Internet nowadays is merciful
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.
Tremors FTW!!
Beyond The Mind's Eye was my jam.
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.
In the 80s it was Freddy's Revenge and The Woman in Red. Early 2000s was The Matrix on VHS.
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 vividly remember being a teenager and channel 5 coming out. It was a huge deal
Is it not batshit insane that we were throwing movies around via radiation before video tapes at home?
Turns out it is, so much so that we decided to bury light across the country to make movies get here faster.
We had to get a VCR in order to get our fifth channel - it was on UHF which our National Panacolor TV could not receive.
I was so confused when i found out not everyone had channel 5. And we had the vhs tuned to 5 on the tv so channel 5 was on 6...
Children of the DVD era also know this life
I'm in-between both. As a little kid I watched Bambi and Winnie the Pooh on tape and then later we hired all kinds of dvd's in the library and that's how I discovered Star Wars. Good times.
I had a friend that recorded every single episode of the power rangers on VHS from pay tv.
Also, borrowing DVDs from the library was a thing back then (probably still is but noone does it).
Borrowing DVDs is absolutely still a thing. Hell, now you can even borrow console games from your library. I do it all the time.
Some let you straight up borrow consoles, kitchen supplies, tools, etc. The central library in Los Angeles has a 3D printer and podcasting studio, among others.
My library doesn't do console loans but it does have a dedicated maker's space with 3D printers, a laser cutter, sewing machines, and other assorted stations. No real heavy stuff though, so no power tools or wood-working stuff sadly. It does have an HTC Vive complete with full lightbox set up for people to use, though.
Libraries are the fucking best.
I recorded the entirety of Star Trek TNG on VHS from local network broadcast. It turns out that its the commercials that are priceless now.
I grew up with The Legend of Zelda. "Well excuuuuuuse me, princess"
We had Spaceballs. It's still awesome!
Indian in the cupboard.
Though even as a child I remember thinking how annoying the main kid was and how bad he was at acting
Enemy Mine. That's the movie.
Such a great movie. You aren’t human if you didn’t shed a tear during that film.
On a side note, the book is amazing, too. One of the rare instances where both are excellent.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one who ever saw that flick. Concur there's some lasting life lessons in there. And space turtles!
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.
The Last Unicorn and Titan A.E. loved those movies.
Yeah, kids today certainly won't watch the same shit over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and
Children definitely still experience something similar via small/unknown YouTube channels, games, Roblox games, fandoms, etc. Sure everyone knows the big famous stuff, but that's the same as pre-2000s kids too.
yeah but they're choosing to watch that out of millions. It's not because that was literally just what was in the house so it was that or nothing.
Ah, good distinction!
The Master of Disguise.
I uhh, can't really say its good tbh.
Little Rascals (1994)
So many quotes burned into my brain, particularly from buckeheat and porky. To this day, I sing "We got a dollar" and "I got two pickles", ask "Quick! What's the number for 911?", and recite Alfalfa's "Dear Darla" letter.
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.
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.
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