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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 etc 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.
"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.
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.
Not to undermine your point but IMDB actually started on Usenet in 1990, 3 years before the World Wide Web became public. So it did technically exist, but it certainly wasn't a household name at that time.
HTTP 1.0 wasn't even finalized until 1996! Although browsers and web servers supported the 0.9 spec and implemented proposals from the 1.0 draft before it was finalized.
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!
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.
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
I grew up with The Legend of Zelda. "Well excuuuuuuse me, princess"
The Last Unicorn and Titan A.E. loved those movies.
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.
on saturdays the local station would broadcast scifi b movies. we'd record them and keep the good ones.
The Master of Disguise.
I uhh, can't really say its good tbh.
Swiss Family Robinson
Nobody remembers Swiss Family Robinson
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
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
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.
That’s parental failing for not torrenting
Wasn’t really an option when you were trying to see the titties in Titanic
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.
To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.
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.
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.
Transformers (the animated movie)
Still good today and I rewatch it from time to time.
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.
Not obscure but shout out to milo and otis. I must have watched that movie hundreds of times then a hundred more when my sister started watching things.
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.
Chronicles of Riddick, and Titan A.E
I had a great childhood
Erik the Viking. I think it came with petrol coupons or something. Never seen it mentioned anywhere since.
My go to was The Sandlot, but whose wasn't? Sprinkle in some Surf Ninjas, with a dash of Twister, and that was me for a good many years.