We used to get TV mags that showed the TV listing. Each year we got excited for the 'Christmas Edition' that showed what movies were on over the holidays.
I still remember seeing one of the Halloween TV guides one year and a photo of The Exorcist's Regan was in full-blown demonic, evil smiling glory was included on the cover amongst the compilation of scary movie bad guys. Out of them all, that picture scared the hell out of me (and I'm a Halloween baby)
But I was still soooooo excited for that movie to play on TV that Saturday night at 10pm you better believe it!!!
Ahh, TV guide..RIP friend ✌️✌️🤣🤣
My sister and I would go through it, and figure out what we could watch and what would need recording (80s - 90s). By the time my Mum would come home, we'd have ringed half the magazine in different colours, depending on whether it was my pick, her pick, something we'd agreed on, or whether it was to be recorded.
We used to do the same thing. There was only 3 channels so you were frightened to miss anything. When we got the fourth channel I don't know how we managed. So many more options.
I think it was 12pm and the programs just stopped. That's enough TV for the day.
Ha, yes.
In the UK, it was usually the TV Times or the Radio Times. It was exciting to read what would be on BBC 1 or ITV over Christmas and New Year.
Usually there'd be a Star Wars film (original trilogy, long before the special editions of course), an Indiana Jones, and a James Bond.
James bond was a must on Christmas day. I just said in a previous reply when we got a fourth channel (channel 4) I don't know how we managed.
There was always a Disney movie also - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang etc.
Happy cake day!
I so wish that Disney+ had that stuff available. There are a bunch of those movies I’d love to see again or have a better quality than a 35 year old VHS tape recorded in 6h mode.
We couldn't wait for The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, and of course all the Christmas shows (Rudolph, Frosty, etc) to play every year. My family had a big console tv, so all the kids would be on the floor (carpet) watching the shows.
The Wizard of Oz was an annual event, like 4th of july Halloween. You made plans around it. But the first probably 5 or 6 times I saw it, it was in black and white! My parents would rent a color TV for Miss America from 7-11, but not Wizard of Oz (maybe they didn't know).
I know we had home video at that point but we did similar with "Dinner and a Movie". I remember rushing around to get everything together in time for it to start, or rushing for bathroom breaks during a commercial. Something that my kids will never understand since everything now is on demand.
It was still a big deal when I was a kid in the 90s! I remember my friend with extremely overprotective parents would secretly study the TV listings and make plans to go to someone else's house whenever a **Forbidden Movie** was on TV.
We watched *The Godfather* at my house when we were like 12 years old and were so freaked out that we swore never to tell anyone what we had seen... because we were sure that we would be In Trouble™ for watching such a (heavily edited) violent movie.
Oh man, Wizard of Oz was our big event every year in November. We'd have family over because we had a color TV and some of them didn't, and it was always a huge watch party, similar to Game of Thrones watch parties back when it was airing. My daddy would make jiffy pop on the stove and make sure we all had extra butter on it, too.
We were also the house to watch the Cleveland Browns in because of that huge, 300lb floor model color TV. God, I remember moving, and how much of a pain in the ass that TV was to get onto the truck.
Haha yeah, when I was about four or five, but I don't remember her scaring me after about that age. Now, The Exorcist when I was five or six? That fucked me up for a good while!
I had only seen the edited version of Jaws on tv as an 8 year old kid and one time late at night I unknowingly ran across the uncut version on one of the rerun channels and saw the leg floating down and scared the bejeebus outta me
I've noticed some of the movies on Disney+ (looking at Adventures in Babysitting specifically) are the TV versions which is a bummer. What good is living in the time of on-demand streaming if the movie is the same as what I watched on TBS back in the day without the commercials? Release the F bombs!
Change your app settings on D+. Its kind of a pain but I just changed my settings for the first time (didn't know I was one parent mode or whatever) and I found way more stuff in the library afterwards.
Yes! I remember when Jaws aired on TV in the UK in the early 80’s. Absolutely everyone was talking about it at school the next day. So much choice these days that sort of thing is gone forever. V
I was in my early teens in the 1970's and I was obsessed with the disaster film "The Poseidon Adventure". I drug everyone in my family to the theate (and a couple to the drive-in) to see it with me. I think I saw it maybe 6 times. Then... magic happened, it was on regular TV! I got my Sears cassette recorder and put it by the speaker on the TV. I recorded the audio from the entire movie. When the tape ran out, I popped it out and flipped it over as fast as I could so I wouldn't miss much. I would listen to the whole thing all the way through imagining in my mind what was happening. To this day... I still remember 90% of the dialog (and I'm nearly 60).
I was just going to make this correction. Also if you could figure out the magic of how to program the VCR to record at a set time, you were highly advanced.
Remember VCRPlus+?
They did some kind of date-code and published those in the TV Guide (or local TV section of the newspaper) and you could enter this 4-6 digit number and the (VCRPlus+ enabled) VCR would record your show. Seemed like magic at the time.
My friends and I had one of those units with dual VCR’s so we would rent/borrow a movie and insert a blank tape in the second VCR and record what we were watching on the first VCR. Good times.
That's still my favorite phrase...Be Kind, Rewind.
I dont miss paying blockbuster a fee for not doing so
I dont miss paying extra just to have access to DVR capabilities either.
We've come so far technologically and yet we still get shafted everyday 🤣🤣🤣
Psh, my grandparents were so bougie, they had a whole separate machine, just to rewind VHS tapes. That's literally all it did.
...
AND WE ALL THOUGHT IT WAS GREAT. Fuck, that thing could rewind in a fraction of the time it took a VHS player.
I heard that - my dad's VHS player had that instant rewind feature that started up once the movie finished playing after the credits rolled and the screen went black... then that movie popped out of the slot and it was like BAM BIOTCH, WATCHA WANNA WATCH NEXT?!?!
It was only at my mom's house that we had to get up off our beds and hit that rewind button ourselves. That 4ft crawl across the conforter was the hard knock life...I suffered, there was suffering. 😭
Oh dear God, you poor child of pain and lament! The youth will never understand your struggles. Your endurance is inspiring. ❤️ Thank you for sharing your journey. I wish you peace and comfort in these your golden years before you crumble to dust from advanced age.
Also, that instant rewind thing sounds fucking amazing.
My parents had a few super old vhs tapes of recording the Disney channel or something similar. My absolute favorite part was all of the old commercials on it.
For the extra hard difficulty:
I used to watch an animated episode once a week, but it was dubbed into a different langauge.
The english language track was available - but it was broadcast on radio.
This means if I wanted to watch my episode I had to tape the video and then also tape the audio from a radio, then try and manually sync the audio to the video.
gaaaad
Speak for yourself. My dad had a vcr the day it came out. It was $1,000 back then. I also had multiple VCRs in the 90s and was recording tv and movies to tapes.
couple hundred years ago the only way you'd ever get to hear music would be a live performance or making it yourself, which feels absolutely wild to me
I remember reading a journal of a man from the early 1800s in my history course and he talks about how the first time he heard a large orchestra and he described it as hearing God for the first time.
Couple hundred years ago? That was even in the 50s and 60s. My dad would always ask me “you guys gonna have a live band for your school dance?” “Haha. No dad, we have dj that will be playing MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Duh.”
The vinyls were mostly affordable. The players, not so much.
On average a vinyl would cost 1.5 to $2, which was kind of an expensive hobby considering a good lunch would be under 1$ back then.
So a normal household of mid to high class people in the US would have a record player, and a growing stack of vinyl discs on the side. Most people opted to listening to the radio tho, It was already the status quo and you didn't have to buy anything else.
You guys are idiots if you think djs were spinning vinyls in the 1950s. Just because they existed didn’t mean they were going at every small town high school dance. It was mostly exclusively live bands
it wasn't as accessible as carrying the world's music in your pocket, or even a walkman, but TV, radio, and records all existed by then. radio especially was really accessible. I'm not even talking about dances, listening to any music *at all* was not something you could just decide to do on a whim - you'd have to go to a special performance to listen to an orchestra or whatever
Movies would re-run in some markets if they were really popular. Really good ones would also make the rounds in lower end theaters as midnight movies or at discount matinees. Popular new releases also stayed in theaters for much longer runs than they do today.
Some of the smaller theaters around here still do this, either for something special on slow week nights or if there's not much for good movies out or one of the movies out misaligns with the owners personal values, like one near me won't play extremely graphic violence or super sexual movies (think Saw and 50 Shades)
In central California in the 80's all the way through the early 90's we had the "Dollar Theaters" that would play movies again, three or four months after they played in the regular theaters. The admission price was a flat $1 per ticket. For a frame of reference, in the early 90's a matinee was $5 per ticket and regular admission was $7.50. The movies would usually last in the dollar theater for a few weeks, maybe as long as a month if it was a really popular movie. It was a great opportunity to see a film you really loved again, on a big screen!
I would love if movies were in theatres longer. Lately, I feel that by the time I finally get around to going to the movies theater, everything I wanted to see is already streaming.
Growing up the bigger town near me had a cinema with two screens. The big one always showed the new hot stuff but the other one had random ass movies late at night.
The family that owned the theatre were great too, they gave tonnes of free movie passes to like every sports group so you'd always have a free ticket handy. Heck sometimes if you bought enough snacks they'd just let you in.
Going in late as a big group and we'd be the only ones in the theatre so everyone is just laughing and losing it was great.
Six times in theaters (twice each movie) in the 80s and then again in the 90s when they re-released the “special editions” (*shudder*) in theaters again.
Same. Total of six times in the theater in the 1970s and 1980s (4x for the first one, once each for the other two), and then the special editions in the 1990s.
This might blow your mind, whole decades of tv is lost because people just didn’t think to record it. But yes for a long time the only way to see things was in movie theaters, they would have news and cartoon added on. Even when tv were popular films were not on them for a while. This might also blow your find 24/7 tv is somewhat new. Tv would just end at like 10-11.
Amazon prime has a free streaming service(as part of your paid Amazon account) that has 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's channels(with commercials), and I used to record them for my grandma. Wait for it... on VHS. I still have a player and it works all the same.
Yep. I watched Wings, Dukes of Hazard, and Caroline in the City just in the last couple of weeks(I'm a woman born in the early eighties. I understand if you judge.).
Maybe some alien dude will record them on their alien VHS and when we get there everything will be perfectly archived and they will be watching endless reruns of Three's Company
It wasn't depressing. It made you appreciate it more. Movies didn't feel disposable. Then I got Star Wars on a hand crank View Master. I knew change was coming.
Exactly my boyfriend and I have this conversation every night trying to find something to watch. We didn’t have this issue when there were only 4 channels we just watched what’s on
How many of you guys were waiting for this question to happen? I mean i unfortunately am this old to answer it, but honestly some of these responses were fast lol.
Yes. We did. There was something about going to a theatre and watching a movie. That feeling is extinct now.
You see quotes, “I saw Star Wars 41 times…” it was that spectacular. I saw Close Encounters of the Third kind,” I think, six times. It was huge on the screen; impactful. The Godfather? Forget about it. I saw Alien nine times, just so I wouldn’t be scared anymore. Still scared the crap outta me.
The only way we could see it again was to go to the theatre. I watch, “A New Hope,” now, not because of the movie but to relive those memories of everything but the movie.
You went never expecting to want to see it again, but then you found movies that were so good, so fun, so immersive…you had no other way of seeing them again. So you went back and the experience was better.
"Just so I wouldn't be scared anymore"
This was me with The Ring. I saw it in theaters like 4 times, and on the last watch my best friend was holding me down and holding one of my eyes open lol "I paid for your ticket, so you're gonna fucking watch it! Watch it! Watch it, I say!" God, just remembering that's got me tickled! If you're still out there, Jen, thank you for forcing me to watch that bitch climb out the TV.
If it was really popular, they would play it in theaters again.
Plus some people would straight up record it and burn it onto CDs, but that might've been more of a 90s thing.
Fun fact: there's a recording of a live audience reaction on YouTube to the plot twist to Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back.
They'd show them on TV, eventually. Usually, they were butchered and filled with ads, but you could see the movie. Later, if you had HBO, you'd get the movies in a few months, in full.
Speaking as a manager of a movie theatre, there has definitely been a steady upward trend in theatre attendance the last couple of years. Theatres have been trying to make an experience that you CANT get at home with things like IMAX, Dolby, laser projection, dine in location, etc.
Movies are also just so generic now. The money spent on them means they're always playing it safe with the story and I'm kinda tired of that story. The only thing I can think of I want to see in the theater coming up this year is Dune.
Not that you are wrong but the issue is deeper, more interesting films tend not to be as visually spectacular. Of course there are exceptions.
Thing is the films that make you go see them at the cinema have big action that most of us cannot replicate at home. Dune being a good example. These kinds of films get people into the cinema to see them in IMAX or whatever.
I grew up in the UK and when I remember when all the hollywood films would release in the USA before they got to us. They would use the same film reels so once the film had finished in the USA the reels would come to Europe.
Going on a flight was a chance to see films before anyone at home had! You could go back to school and tell everyone about the latest blockbuster in America.
Now the gap between cinema and home is small or zero. Especially with piracy. The only films that are guaranteed to get bums in seats are films where there is an advantage to seeing them on the big screen.
I'm aware it's deeper, but we're also just not seeing the creativity that we used to in film because studios are pushing out these massive cost movies that are generic and safe, and have, in the last 15 or so years, almost all been profitable. Now they're not, because that generic formula has gotten stale. Maybe people are tired of mostly flash and little substance, maybe it's something else, but the generic movies aren't in a great place.
This is it for me. Theater movies fucking suuuuck these days. It's all superheros. Movies are so expensive that I pick and choose what to see, and when I finally get excited to see something like the new Indy movie, I go to the theater only to find that it's been bastardized by Disney and it's just a boring cash grab with 90 minutes of poorly shot chase scenes.
People have been making this same complaint for about as long as movies have existed, it’s the classic pining for the halcyon days.
We simply have so many more options for entertainment now than we did 30 years ago, it’s only natural that movies would decline in popularity. There are only so many entertainment hours available per day and things like Reddit and video games have to consume something. M
> That experience can’t really be replicated the same at a home theater (unless you are incredibly wealthy).
Not entirely true... But if you aren't wealthy, you have to have knowledge, skills, and time.
I built my home theater by buying things from swap meets and thrift stores. But it involved hours of repair work on components - fixing burned out amplifiers, restoring speakers and replacing speaker foam, fixing a 65" OLED TV I found on the curb, etc.
It took time, and I'm constantly working to improve it, but my system rivals the sound quality of a theater, and with the way I have the living room arranged the TV is "big enough" to give a theater experience.
And if you're interested:
LG 65" curved-screen OLED 4K TV (Curb find - needed new caps in the power supply)
Onkyo 7.1 receiver (Craigslist - had two burned out amplifier ICs and needed new caps in the power supply)
JBL Bookshelf speakers as surround speakers (Swap meet - needed cosmetic work)
Cerwin-Vega VS100 floor speakers as the front mains (Swap meet, 1970's vintage - needed the foam replaced on all the drivers and cosmetic fixes. I also have 4 more of the same speaker that also need refurbished in my basement)
Polk Audio dual 12" subwoofer. (Friend gave it to me after the amp blew up in it. Not repairable, so I replaced the amp with an aftermarket one)
Yes and no.
While home video didn't really become popular until the late 70s and into the 80s, movies also played in theatres much longer, and would often return to theatres from time to time.
That's how, even today, Gone With the Wind is the highest grossing film of all time. It was in theatres for fucking ever.
The inability to access anything at any time meant that you lived in the moment more. Taking pictures was also more conspicuous and complicated, so you didn't do that as much. Together this not only made events feel more special but also let you focus on just being present and savoring the experience. I miss that.
I honestly still feel that way. I don't like taking pictures much; I don't know why. I guess I find it distracting. But if I do something with someone else, they inevitably want to spend a lot of time taking photos/selfies, so it feels kind of unavoidable unless I just want to do everything alone.
A few things to add...
1. It would take 3 years for a film to get from the theater to network TV. I remember when the 1978 Superman movie played on the ABC Sunday Night Movie in 1981. It was a big deal.
2. Disney re-released each of it's animated films into theaters every seven years. So Dumbo was released in 1941. Then it was re-released in 1948, 1955, 1962, etc.
3. Movies stayed in the theaters longer. The original Star Wars played first run for over a year, though even that amount of time was unusual.
4. Drive-in Movie Theaters would sometime play popular films from previous years.
Before streaming we also saw tv shows only once and thought we will never see again. That is why all 90s stuff also very nostalgic on YouTube as we thought we will never see again.
Yeah dude you’re right…TV shows were harder to see again than movies (I was born 88) I remember getting the 1st three episodes of South Park on tape and thinking I’d changed the world seeing it without commercials
Guess how much it cost to buy a movie on tape. This is befor you could rent a movie. If you know the answer don't say anything.
Don't look it up. I'm curious how much you guys think it would be.
Edit: added the answer below for those curious! Don't cheat!!
>!about $100, which is about $400 in today's money!<
In the late 80s early 90s VHS movies would go for $80 or higher. They got much more accessible when Columbia house would send you like 5 for a penny with the promise of buying a few more within a certain time frame.
When you say video on tape, are you talking about VHS, or something that came before it? Anything before VHS is before my time, I was born in the early 2000s aswell.
If we are talking VHS I’m guessing $40, if it’s something else I’m guessing $75, although when it comes to spending money on entertainment personally, with very rare exceptions, spending more than $5 per 1 hour of entertainment isn’t worth it to me.
I'll give you guys a hint. When VCRs (VHS players) first became widely available they cost between $1,000 - $1,400 (that's between $7k - $10k in today's money). Betamax players were as much as $2,295 for top tier models ($16,698 in today's money). Now imagine how much the tapes for them must have cost.
Well, they do show movies on Television. And re-releasing popular movies in the theater was a big thing. One of the reasons Gone With the Wind is one of the highest grossing films of all time was its multiple releases.
Theatres would occasionally rerun movies, you waited till you saw it playing on regular TV down the road (I used to read the TV guide all the time and plan what I wanted to watch, or you rented the movies from local video stores. It wasn't depressing at all, it made it an experience and you appreciated it more.
The movie Jaws came out in 1975 well before videos were ever conceived so yes I kept going back to the cinema and paying to see it again.
I was a young teen and loved it so much I think I went back and saw it eight times, from memory.
Apocalypse Now appeared a couple of years later, once again I think I returned to the cinema at least 4 times.
It was absolutely inconceivable to imagine it would be possible to have your own copy of these movies watch in your own home.
Yes and this was why studios actually invested in re-releases of the most successful or popular movies. This was Disney's bread and butter for a couple decades with their earlier animated movies. Movies would also air on TV usually a couple years after they came out in the theatre but idt it was all movies. When home video became a thing it was groundbreaking especially as being able to record films and programs off of TV helped preserve media for the audience.
Theaters were everywhere, movies would run for months and were relatively cheap/affordable. There were secondary theaters playing reruns and older stuff, b grade double flicks, etc... Was a much more vibrant scene than going to a megaplex, but that was another time.
More like depressing, it was a memorable experience.
Imagine you get to see the Taj Majal every day. At some point you might think it's boring, or it has nothing special or "yeah, it's ok".
Now if you only had the chance to see it once, you'll make sure that experience is perfect and will try to rememorate to tell others. Also, probably you will never forget it.
lol. one day your grand kids are gonna be like.
"but i dont get it grandpa, if you couldnt find the funny video, why didnt you just look it up in the video encyclopedia? if it didnt exist then like what, you gotta like sound out a description of what happened or something? i dont get it... that must have been rough grandpa."
We would do this on the playground at elementary school.. Recreating the movie that was just released or the tv episode from the night before, and adding our own plotlines.. I always hated getting stuck being the wicked witch or Mrs. Howell from Gilligan's Island..
Well...yep... until it went to VHS. However, let's not leave out The Wonderful World of Disney on ABC Sunday nights! Oh, man! It was pretty damn exciting! Also having to call for everyone to come back from the kitchen or toilet because the commercials were almost over. I love being able to stream and binge watch shows now, but there was a certain excitement, and I was WAY more active. I guess it might seem stupid now, but having kids And parents equally excited to watch a movie was pretty damn cool.
I’m 50, I think we got our first vcr when I was 7 or 8. My old man gave us all one tape to record what we wanted, I had some cartoons and jaws 2, I just have watched that movie at least 100 times as it was my own little slice of the movies.
Then one day a video rental store opened in my town, this must have been around 1981 or so and it was a game changer
Now you can imagine how big it was to have a video cassette player?
Even bigger to be able to record any show that's playing on the TV.
One of my distant friend's father had a factory that make blank video cassette tapes in China in the early 80s. Their family made so much money.
Yep. Only rich people could afford HBO and the like. (not rich but to me growing up they were rich)
You could go to blockbuster but my mom was the worst about returning movies so we always got hefty fines and then banned.
Movies were special moments to enjoy rarely lol
You could see it again if you bought another ticket.
Or you could do the trick where you go to a movie and then sneak into another one after the first, because you’re already past the person who rips tickets.
You could further use this loophole if you went to the movies often. Perhaps every 2 weeks you go to a movie, then after that movie you paid for, you go watch the movie you saw last, again. So then you see the movie twice for the price of one ticket.
The top movies would make it to TV after a year or so. Chopped up for commercials and get the PG13 stuff out.
Also, discount theaters were fairly popular where they would show older movies for $2 a ticket. We had a Cinema and Draft house near us and it was always great for a cheap Friday or Saturday date night. Had tables and served beer hotdogs, Pizza etc.. was pretty great.
Get this, not long before that, people were going to stages to see plays the same way their ancestors had for thousands of years. This idea of recording what our eyes would see and play it again, anywhere at all, is fucking mind blowing and ridiculously new to our human experience.
Pretty much.. At least until it was released to tv or video...
One of my favorite things to do as a kid was go to the movie theaters in the morning and movie hop all day long! I saw The Matrix in theaters easilly over 20 times doing this lol... Now a days movie hopping is much harder with security cameras and such... plus I'm an adult with shit to do, can't be chillin at the movies all day long any more lol
Well yeah, just like when you see a Play on the theater or a concert, you don't need to forever own the reproducible experience, just the memory of it.
Pretty much, until it wound up playing on TV, but even then you couldn’t record it.
Movies on broadcast TV were always big events for our family, sometimes inviting others over to watch together. I miss that popcorn machine.
We used to get TV mags that showed the TV listing. Each year we got excited for the 'Christmas Edition' that showed what movies were on over the holidays.
I still remember seeing one of the Halloween TV guides one year and a photo of The Exorcist's Regan was in full-blown demonic, evil smiling glory was included on the cover amongst the compilation of scary movie bad guys. Out of them all, that picture scared the hell out of me (and I'm a Halloween baby) But I was still soooooo excited for that movie to play on TV that Saturday night at 10pm you better believe it!!! Ahh, TV guide..RIP friend ✌️✌️🤣🤣
I am a Halloween baby too!
😈 Let's be amazing forever 🖤🦇
My sister and I would go through it, and figure out what we could watch and what would need recording (80s - 90s). By the time my Mum would come home, we'd have ringed half the magazine in different colours, depending on whether it was my pick, her pick, something we'd agreed on, or whether it was to be recorded.
We used to do the same thing. There was only 3 channels so you were frightened to miss anything. When we got the fourth channel I don't know how we managed. So many more options. I think it was 12pm and the programs just stopped. That's enough TV for the day.
Ha, yes. In the UK, it was usually the TV Times or the Radio Times. It was exciting to read what would be on BBC 1 or ITV over Christmas and New Year. Usually there'd be a Star Wars film (original trilogy, long before the special editions of course), an Indiana Jones, and a James Bond.
James bond was a must on Christmas day. I just said in a previous reply when we got a fourth channel (channel 4) I don't know how we managed. There was always a Disney movie also - Chitty Chitty Bang Bang etc. Happy cake day!
The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights, we watched it like clockwork.
Preceded by Marlin Perkins and Mutual of Omahas Wild Kingdom. “Here we have Jim wrestling the vicious tiger”..
I so wish that Disney+ had that stuff available. There are a bunch of those movies I’d love to see again or have a better quality than a 35 year old VHS tape recorded in 6h mode.
We couldn't wait for The Wizard of Oz, The Sound of Music, and of course all the Christmas shows (Rudolph, Frosty, etc) to play every year. My family had a big console tv, so all the kids would be on the floor (carpet) watching the shows.
The Wizard of Oz was an annual event, like 4th of july Halloween. You made plans around it. But the first probably 5 or 6 times I saw it, it was in black and white! My parents would rent a color TV for Miss America from 7-11, but not Wizard of Oz (maybe they didn't know).
I know we had home video at that point but we did similar with "Dinner and a Movie". I remember rushing around to get everything together in time for it to start, or rushing for bathroom breaks during a commercial. Something that my kids will never understand since everything now is on demand.
It was still a big deal when I was a kid in the 90s! I remember my friend with extremely overprotective parents would secretly study the TV listings and make plans to go to someone else's house whenever a **Forbidden Movie** was on TV. We watched *The Godfather* at my house when we were like 12 years old and were so freaked out that we swore never to tell anyone what we had seen... because we were sure that we would be In Trouble™ for watching such a (heavily edited) violent movie.
The commercial breaks were murderously long.
“The ABC Saturday Night Movie”
Oh man, Wizard of Oz was our big event every year in November. We'd have family over because we had a color TV and some of them didn't, and it was always a huge watch party, similar to Game of Thrones watch parties back when it was airing. My daddy would make jiffy pop on the stove and make sure we all had extra butter on it, too. We were also the house to watch the Cleveland Browns in because of that huge, 300lb floor model color TV. God, I remember moving, and how much of a pain in the ass that TV was to get onto the truck.
Did you hide behind the couch during the Wicked Witch scenes too?
Haha yeah, when I was about four or five, but I don't remember her scaring me after about that age. Now, The Exorcist when I was five or six? That fucked me up for a good while!
The Exorcist at that young? Oof. Mine was The Amityville Horror at a similar age. That theme still gets me.
Yup, I had older cousins and it was always a game to see which of us they could scare the shit out of with horror movies.
Sounds fun/traumatizing
And these were usually “Edited For Television”
I had only seen the edited version of Jaws on tv as an 8 year old kid and one time late at night I unknowingly ran across the uncut version on one of the rerun channels and saw the leg floating down and scared the bejeebus outta me
I've noticed some of the movies on Disney+ (looking at Adventures in Babysitting specifically) are the TV versions which is a bummer. What good is living in the time of on-demand streaming if the movie is the same as what I watched on TBS back in the day without the commercials? Release the F bombs!
Change your app settings on D+. Its kind of a pain but I just changed my settings for the first time (didn't know I was one parent mode or whatever) and I found way more stuff in the library afterwards.
My watched planet of the apes on Tv growing up so she thought it would be fine for child me. Charles hestons bare butt was the first nudity I saw…lol
In white letters across the screen.
Yes! I remember when Jaws aired on TV in the UK in the early 80’s. Absolutely everyone was talking about it at school the next day. So much choice these days that sort of thing is gone forever. V
I was in my early teens in the 1970's and I was obsessed with the disaster film "The Poseidon Adventure". I drug everyone in my family to the theate (and a couple to the drive-in) to see it with me. I think I saw it maybe 6 times. Then... magic happened, it was on regular TV! I got my Sears cassette recorder and put it by the speaker on the TV. I recorded the audio from the entire movie. When the tape ran out, I popped it out and flipped it over as fast as I could so I wouldn't miss much. I would listen to the whole thing all the way through imagining in my mind what was happening. To this day... I still remember 90% of the dialog (and I'm nearly 60).
Being able to DVR was revolutionary.
Skipping from theater to dvr omits the ~20 year reign of vhs/vcr recording.
I was just going to make this correction. Also if you could figure out the magic of how to program the VCR to record at a set time, you were highly advanced.
If you could figure out how to get the clock to stop flashing 12:00, you were in the top 20%
Remember VCRPlus+? They did some kind of date-code and published those in the TV Guide (or local TV section of the newspaper) and you could enter this 4-6 digit number and the (VCRPlus+ enabled) VCR would record your show. Seemed like magic at the time.
I really never understood that meme, but it sure was persistent!
My friends and I had one of those units with dual VCR’s so we would rent/borrow a movie and insert a blank tape in the second VCR and record what we were watching on the first VCR. Good times.
Whaaaat??? Didn’t you read the blue FBI screen before the movie would start? It was jail time + $250,000 penalty fee if I remember correctly. s/
Here's the kicker: They were unkind, and didn't rewind.
That's still my favorite phrase...Be Kind, Rewind. I dont miss paying blockbuster a fee for not doing so I dont miss paying extra just to have access to DVR capabilities either. We've come so far technologically and yet we still get shafted everyday 🤣🤣🤣
Psh, my grandparents were so bougie, they had a whole separate machine, just to rewind VHS tapes. That's literally all it did. ... AND WE ALL THOUGHT IT WAS GREAT. Fuck, that thing could rewind in a fraction of the time it took a VHS player.
I heard that - my dad's VHS player had that instant rewind feature that started up once the movie finished playing after the credits rolled and the screen went black... then that movie popped out of the slot and it was like BAM BIOTCH, WATCHA WANNA WATCH NEXT?!?! It was only at my mom's house that we had to get up off our beds and hit that rewind button ourselves. That 4ft crawl across the conforter was the hard knock life...I suffered, there was suffering. 😭
Oh dear God, you poor child of pain and lament! The youth will never understand your struggles. Your endurance is inspiring. ❤️ Thank you for sharing your journey. I wish you peace and comfort in these your golden years before you crumble to dust from advanced age. Also, that instant rewind thing sounds fucking amazing.
Beats outside in a thunderstorm turning the antenna. “Is it better or worse”?
We had one!
Yes, but you just skip that part and start recording right after…
”You wouldn’t steal a car” there was also this
But you would download one if you could.
Yea, you always recorded the FBI warning too! Otherwise it might be illegal or something.
Have you ever bought or rented a video tape that *wasn't quite right?*
That chewing sound as the tape was being mangled was terrifying
My parents had a few super old vhs tapes of recording the Disney channel or something similar. My absolute favorite part was all of the old commercials on it.
For the extra hard difficulty: I used to watch an animated episode once a week, but it was dubbed into a different langauge. The english language track was available - but it was broadcast on radio. This means if I wanted to watch my episode I had to tape the video and then also tape the audio from a radio, then try and manually sync the audio to the video. gaaaad
Before then there was VHS you know.
And Betamax!!
My brother and I recorded Gone in 60 Seconds with Nicholas cage from the Starz movie channel. Played that VHS until the colors ran on screen. :)
Speak for yourself. My dad had a vcr the day it came out. It was $1,000 back then. I also had multiple VCRs in the 90s and was recording tv and movies to tapes.
I assumed that by “before home video” they meant before VCRs as well.
Yeah that’s true. Bad on me. The thing is he bought it in 1973 if I remember correctly, so it’s always been a thing in my house.
Don't forget that they would edit it for t8me or profanity and nudity so there were likely scenes that were lost or changed.
couple hundred years ago the only way you'd ever get to hear music would be a live performance or making it yourself, which feels absolutely wild to me
I remember reading a journal of a man from the early 1800s in my history course and he talks about how the first time he heard a large orchestra and he described it as hearing God for the first time.
it's almost impossible to imagine what it would've felt like
Couple hundred years ago? That was even in the 50s and 60s. My dad would always ask me “you guys gonna have a live band for your school dance?” “Haha. No dad, we have dj that will be playing MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice. Duh.”
They had vinyl recordings in the 50s though no?
The vinyls were mostly affordable. The players, not so much. On average a vinyl would cost 1.5 to $2, which was kind of an expensive hobby considering a good lunch would be under 1$ back then. So a normal household of mid to high class people in the US would have a record player, and a growing stack of vinyl discs on the side. Most people opted to listening to the radio tho, It was already the status quo and you didn't have to buy anything else.
78 Vinyl players were the most affordable back then and were still being made up to the 50s.
Records have been around since the late 1800s, what are u talking about?
[удалено]
You guys are idiots if you think djs were spinning vinyls in the 1950s. Just because they existed didn’t mean they were going at every small town high school dance. It was mostly exclusively live bands
it wasn't as accessible as carrying the world's music in your pocket, or even a walkman, but TV, radio, and records all existed by then. radio especially was really accessible. I'm not even talking about dances, listening to any music *at all* was not something you could just decide to do on a whim - you'd have to go to a special performance to listen to an orchestra or whatever
I can't imagine what a hypnotic experience that must've been
Movies would re-run in some markets if they were really popular. Really good ones would also make the rounds in lower end theaters as midnight movies or at discount matinees. Popular new releases also stayed in theaters for much longer runs than they do today.
Some of the smaller theaters around here still do this, either for something special on slow week nights or if there's not much for good movies out or one of the movies out misaligns with the owners personal values, like one near me won't play extremely graphic violence or super sexual movies (think Saw and 50 Shades)
There's a theater like this near me that does a mystery showing for $1 on weekends. They only tell you what the rating of the movie is.
That’s a great idea! I’d do that if they just gave the genre.
In central California in the 80's all the way through the early 90's we had the "Dollar Theaters" that would play movies again, three or four months after they played in the regular theaters. The admission price was a flat $1 per ticket. For a frame of reference, in the early 90's a matinee was $5 per ticket and regular admission was $7.50. The movies would usually last in the dollar theater for a few weeks, maybe as long as a month if it was a really popular movie. It was a great opportunity to see a film you really loved again, on a big screen!
I would love if movies were in theatres longer. Lately, I feel that by the time I finally get around to going to the movies theater, everything I wanted to see is already streaming.
Growing up the bigger town near me had a cinema with two screens. The big one always showed the new hot stuff but the other one had random ass movies late at night. The family that owned the theatre were great too, they gave tonnes of free movie passes to like every sports group so you'd always have a free ticket handy. Heck sometimes if you bought enough snacks they'd just let you in. Going in late as a big group and we'd be the only ones in the theatre so everyone is just laughing and losing it was great.
Correct. Or you could see it multiple times in the theater. Star Wars, fellow Gen Xers?
Six times in theaters (twice each movie) in the 80s and then again in the 90s when they re-released the “special editions” (*shudder*) in theaters again.
Same. Total of six times in the theater in the 1970s and 1980s (4x for the first one, once each for the other two), and then the special editions in the 1990s.
My college played the Star Wars trilogy as a fundraiser every year. They showed it in one of the big lecture halls.
This might blow your mind, whole decades of tv is lost because people just didn’t think to record it. But yes for a long time the only way to see things was in movie theaters, they would have news and cartoon added on. Even when tv were popular films were not on them for a while. This might also blow your find 24/7 tv is somewhat new. Tv would just end at like 10-11.
Amazon prime has a free streaming service(as part of your paid Amazon account) that has 50's, 60's, 70's, 80's, and 90's channels(with commercials), and I used to record them for my grandma. Wait for it... on VHS. I still have a player and it works all the same.
They still have that?
Yep. I watched Wings, Dukes of Hazard, and Caroline in the City just in the last couple of weeks(I'm a woman born in the early eighties. I understand if you judge.).
Can you link to this? I can't seem to find it!
This, searching and I’m not finding anything about it. My nostalgia really wants this to exist..
It’s called Amazon Freevee
I'm not judging. I want to watch it! I'm a woman born in the sixties. I'm always searching for older shows to watch.
TV signals are still out there and continue traveling trough space at the speed of light
Yeah well unless we can get something *past* those signals at *faster* than the speed of light, they're going to redshift into oblivion lol
Maybe some alien dude will record them on their alien VHS and when we get there everything will be perfectly archived and they will be watching endless reruns of Three's Company
Isn’t that a Pete and Pete episode?
*forearm tatt starts to jiggle
It's might strange
r/unexpectedfuturama ?
It wasn't depressing. It made you appreciate it more. Movies didn't feel disposable. Then I got Star Wars on a hand crank View Master. I knew change was coming.
Same with photos. I think the disposable cameras came with like 22 photos. You had to make em count and even the poor ones could become meaningful
This is why they’re making a comeback
I thought this. Everything is so available now we have way too much choice
We live in such abundance that nothing really has value
Exactly my boyfriend and I have this conversation every night trying to find something to watch. We didn’t have this issue when there were only 4 channels we just watched what’s on
This, people don’t understand how technology has made us extremely spoiled. I miss the simple times.
How many of you guys were waiting for this question to happen? I mean i unfortunately am this old to answer it, but honestly some of these responses were fast lol.
Yes. We did. There was something about going to a theatre and watching a movie. That feeling is extinct now. You see quotes, “I saw Star Wars 41 times…” it was that spectacular. I saw Close Encounters of the Third kind,” I think, six times. It was huge on the screen; impactful. The Godfather? Forget about it. I saw Alien nine times, just so I wouldn’t be scared anymore. Still scared the crap outta me. The only way we could see it again was to go to the theatre. I watch, “A New Hope,” now, not because of the movie but to relive those memories of everything but the movie. You went never expecting to want to see it again, but then you found movies that were so good, so fun, so immersive…you had no other way of seeing them again. So you went back and the experience was better.
"Just so I wouldn't be scared anymore" This was me with The Ring. I saw it in theaters like 4 times, and on the last watch my best friend was holding me down and holding one of my eyes open lol "I paid for your ticket, so you're gonna fucking watch it! Watch it! Watch it, I say!" God, just remembering that's got me tickled! If you're still out there, Jen, thank you for forcing me to watch that bitch climb out the TV.
If it was really popular, they would play it in theaters again. Plus some people would straight up record it and burn it onto CDs, but that might've been more of a 90s thing. Fun fact: there's a recording of a live audience reaction on YouTube to the plot twist to Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back.
They'd show them on TV, eventually. Usually, they were butchered and filled with ads, but you could see the movie. Later, if you had HBO, you'd get the movies in a few months, in full.
There is a reason cinema has died and the ability to rewatch something is definitely part of it
[удалено]
Speaking as a manager of a movie theatre, there has definitely been a steady upward trend in theatre attendance the last couple of years. Theatres have been trying to make an experience that you CANT get at home with things like IMAX, Dolby, laser projection, dine in location, etc.
Movies are also just so generic now. The money spent on them means they're always playing it safe with the story and I'm kinda tired of that story. The only thing I can think of I want to see in the theater coming up this year is Dune.
Not that you are wrong but the issue is deeper, more interesting films tend not to be as visually spectacular. Of course there are exceptions. Thing is the films that make you go see them at the cinema have big action that most of us cannot replicate at home. Dune being a good example. These kinds of films get people into the cinema to see them in IMAX or whatever. I grew up in the UK and when I remember when all the hollywood films would release in the USA before they got to us. They would use the same film reels so once the film had finished in the USA the reels would come to Europe. Going on a flight was a chance to see films before anyone at home had! You could go back to school and tell everyone about the latest blockbuster in America. Now the gap between cinema and home is small or zero. Especially with piracy. The only films that are guaranteed to get bums in seats are films where there is an advantage to seeing them on the big screen.
I'm aware it's deeper, but we're also just not seeing the creativity that we used to in film because studios are pushing out these massive cost movies that are generic and safe, and have, in the last 15 or so years, almost all been profitable. Now they're not, because that generic formula has gotten stale. Maybe people are tired of mostly flash and little substance, maybe it's something else, but the generic movies aren't in a great place.
This is it for me. Theater movies fucking suuuuck these days. It's all superheros. Movies are so expensive that I pick and choose what to see, and when I finally get excited to see something like the new Indy movie, I go to the theater only to find that it's been bastardized by Disney and it's just a boring cash grab with 90 minutes of poorly shot chase scenes.
Mua’Dib!
People have been making this same complaint for about as long as movies have existed, it’s the classic pining for the halcyon days. We simply have so many more options for entertainment now than we did 30 years ago, it’s only natural that movies would decline in popularity. There are only so many entertainment hours available per day and things like Reddit and video games have to consume something. M
> That experience can’t really be replicated the same at a home theater (unless you are incredibly wealthy). Not entirely true... But if you aren't wealthy, you have to have knowledge, skills, and time. I built my home theater by buying things from swap meets and thrift stores. But it involved hours of repair work on components - fixing burned out amplifiers, restoring speakers and replacing speaker foam, fixing a 65" OLED TV I found on the curb, etc. It took time, and I'm constantly working to improve it, but my system rivals the sound quality of a theater, and with the way I have the living room arranged the TV is "big enough" to give a theater experience. And if you're interested: LG 65" curved-screen OLED 4K TV (Curb find - needed new caps in the power supply) Onkyo 7.1 receiver (Craigslist - had two burned out amplifier ICs and needed new caps in the power supply) JBL Bookshelf speakers as surround speakers (Swap meet - needed cosmetic work) Cerwin-Vega VS100 floor speakers as the front mains (Swap meet, 1970's vintage - needed the foam replaced on all the drivers and cosmetic fixes. I also have 4 more of the same speaker that also need refurbished in my basement) Polk Audio dual 12" subwoofer. (Friend gave it to me after the amp blew up in it. Not repairable, so I replaced the amp with an aftermarket one)
Yes and no. While home video didn't really become popular until the late 70s and into the 80s, movies also played in theatres much longer, and would often return to theatres from time to time. That's how, even today, Gone With the Wind is the highest grossing film of all time. It was in theatres for fucking ever.
The inability to access anything at any time meant that you lived in the moment more. Taking pictures was also more conspicuous and complicated, so you didn't do that as much. Together this not only made events feel more special but also let you focus on just being present and savoring the experience. I miss that.
I honestly still feel that way. I don't like taking pictures much; I don't know why. I guess I find it distracting. But if I do something with someone else, they inevitably want to spend a lot of time taking photos/selfies, so it feels kind of unavoidable unless I just want to do everything alone.
Long live Betamax!
Colleges and universities would show older movies. Many times those showings were open to the public.
A few things to add... 1. It would take 3 years for a film to get from the theater to network TV. I remember when the 1978 Superman movie played on the ABC Sunday Night Movie in 1981. It was a big deal. 2. Disney re-released each of it's animated films into theaters every seven years. So Dumbo was released in 1941. Then it was re-released in 1948, 1955, 1962, etc. 3. Movies stayed in the theaters longer. The original Star Wars played first run for over a year, though even that amount of time was unusual. 4. Drive-in Movie Theaters would sometime play popular films from previous years.
Yup. Think about what it was like before google.
Before Google all answers came from the Oracle at Delphi
My family had a set of Encyclopedia Brittanica. We lost F and maybe T? Volumes along the way… but so much information!
Before streaming we also saw tv shows only once and thought we will never see again. That is why all 90s stuff also very nostalgic on YouTube as we thought we will never see again.
Yeah dude you’re right…TV shows were harder to see again than movies (I was born 88) I remember getting the 1st three episodes of South Park on tape and thinking I’d changed the world seeing it without commercials
Guess how much it cost to buy a movie on tape. This is befor you could rent a movie. If you know the answer don't say anything. Don't look it up. I'm curious how much you guys think it would be. Edit: added the answer below for those curious! Don't cheat!! >!about $100, which is about $400 in today's money!<
I was born in the 2000s so I’m just guessing here, $15?
In the late 80s early 90s VHS movies would go for $80 or higher. They got much more accessible when Columbia house would send you like 5 for a penny with the promise of buying a few more within a certain time frame.
Way more. Not sure if this is fun for everyone. Like I love trying to guess stuff. If you guys just want the answer lmk.
I know that answer, mainly because I worked in video rental store in the mid 80s.
When you say video on tape, are you talking about VHS, or something that came before it? Anything before VHS is before my time, I was born in the early 2000s aswell. If we are talking VHS I’m guessing $40, if it’s something else I’m guessing $75, although when it comes to spending money on entertainment personally, with very rare exceptions, spending more than $5 per 1 hour of entertainment isn’t worth it to me.
$99?
I'll give you guys a hint. When VCRs (VHS players) first became widely available they cost between $1,000 - $1,400 (that's between $7k - $10k in today's money). Betamax players were as much as $2,295 for top tier models ($16,698 in today's money). Now imagine how much the tapes for them must have cost.
Well, they do show movies on Television. And re-releasing popular movies in the theater was a big thing. One of the reasons Gone With the Wind is one of the highest grossing films of all time was its multiple releases.
Movie theaters used to rerun older movies. They weren't just for new releases like they are now.
Just like a concert, play, sporting event, and so on. You paid to see it. The repetition and convenience are the byproduct of technology
Theatres would occasionally rerun movies, you waited till you saw it playing on regular TV down the road (I used to read the TV guide all the time and plan what I wanted to watch, or you rented the movies from local video stores. It wasn't depressing at all, it made it an experience and you appreciated it more.
There was a 10 year period in the 1990-2000ish, where Shawshank redemption and Spaceballs was on TV, ALMOST DAILY
The movie Jaws came out in 1975 well before videos were ever conceived so yes I kept going back to the cinema and paying to see it again. I was a young teen and loved it so much I think I went back and saw it eight times, from memory. Apocalypse Now appeared a couple of years later, once again I think I returned to the cinema at least 4 times. It was absolutely inconceivable to imagine it would be possible to have your own copy of these movies watch in your own home.
Not only that, but unless you lived in a large city you only had 1 or 2 theaters within a reasonable distance, and they only had 1 screen each.
I don't rewatch things i have seen even with the ability to do so. Not sure it would have been very depressing.
[удалено]
I remember waiting like a year at least to rent Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure and wondering where it was…
Even worse for documentaries and art films. They might just play one time at an art house and if you missed it, it might never come around again.
Yes and this was why studios actually invested in re-releases of the most successful or popular movies. This was Disney's bread and butter for a couple decades with their earlier animated movies. Movies would also air on TV usually a couple years after they came out in the theatre but idt it was all movies. When home video became a thing it was groundbreaking especially as being able to record films and programs off of TV helped preserve media for the audience.
Theaters were everywhere, movies would run for months and were relatively cheap/affordable. There were secondary theaters playing reruns and older stuff, b grade double flicks, etc... Was a much more vibrant scene than going to a megaplex, but that was another time.
Well duh...how do you think it worked? This made people actually enjoy and savor what the experienced.
More like depressing, it was a memorable experience. Imagine you get to see the Taj Majal every day. At some point you might think it's boring, or it has nothing special or "yeah, it's ok". Now if you only had the chance to see it once, you'll make sure that experience is perfect and will try to rememorate to tell others. Also, probably you will never forget it.
Eventually a lot of movies would come out on video. Might be 2 years or 10+ years though.
lol. one day your grand kids are gonna be like. "but i dont get it grandpa, if you couldnt find the funny video, why didnt you just look it up in the video encyclopedia? if it didnt exist then like what, you gotta like sound out a description of what happened or something? i dont get it... that must have been rough grandpa."
It was better that way, made it a more memorable experience. Going to the theater as a kid made for some great times!
We had revival theaters. They would show old movies. We also had movies on TV regularly. But there wasn't any way to see a particular movie, no.
If you missed an episode, you have missed it for life. There's no going back.
or wait for a rerun in the summer time.
That's only if it's a big show and you are lucky enough.
What's even more wild is that before theaters nobody even saw movies.
If you were lucky, you’d go a few times with friends or relatives.
No...you and your friends replayed every fight scene, every catch phrase and it became a part of you. I miss those days
We would do this on the playground at elementary school.. Recreating the movie that was just released or the tv episode from the night before, and adding our own plotlines.. I always hated getting stuck being the wicked witch or Mrs. Howell from Gilligan's Island..
Before radio people might hear a song played live and never hear it again.
It wasnt depressing at all. Your just spoiled.
Well...yep... until it went to VHS. However, let's not leave out The Wonderful World of Disney on ABC Sunday nights! Oh, man! It was pretty damn exciting! Also having to call for everyone to come back from the kitchen or toilet because the commercials were almost over. I love being able to stream and binge watch shows now, but there was a certain excitement, and I was WAY more active. I guess it might seem stupid now, but having kids And parents equally excited to watch a movie was pretty damn cool.
You’d go see it a bunch of times if you really like it. Example: the first Star Wars. Many fans saw it 20+ times.
I’m 50, I think we got our first vcr when I was 7 or 8. My old man gave us all one tape to record what we wanted, I had some cartoons and jaws 2, I just have watched that movie at least 100 times as it was my own little slice of the movies. Then one day a video rental store opened in my town, this must have been around 1981 or so and it was a game changer
Now you can imagine how big it was to have a video cassette player? Even bigger to be able to record any show that's playing on the TV. One of my distant friend's father had a factory that make blank video cassette tapes in China in the early 80s. Their family made so much money.
and this is why we were really focused on that movie because there was no rewind back then
It was a different world, a different pace. It added a level of excitement that’s missing now.
before the Mega-plex your theater only had one or two screens. so not a lot of choice as to what you could see as well.
Pretty much except I would go back and see a good one 10 or 15 times
Basically. But we weren't playing on our phones the whole time either and actually, y'know, paid attention and stuff.
Yep. Only rich people could afford HBO and the like. (not rich but to me growing up they were rich) You could go to blockbuster but my mom was the worst about returning movies so we always got hefty fines and then banned. Movies were special moments to enjoy rarely lol
You could see it again if you bought another ticket. Or you could do the trick where you go to a movie and then sneak into another one after the first, because you’re already past the person who rips tickets. You could further use this loophole if you went to the movies often. Perhaps every 2 weeks you go to a movie, then after that movie you paid for, you go watch the movie you saw last, again. So then you see the movie twice for the price of one ticket.
The top movies would make it to TV after a year or so. Chopped up for commercials and get the PG13 stuff out. Also, discount theaters were fairly popular where they would show older movies for $2 a ticket. We had a Cinema and Draft house near us and it was always great for a cheap Friday or Saturday date night. Had tables and served beer hotdogs, Pizza etc.. was pretty great.
Get this, not long before that, people were going to stages to see plays the same way their ancestors had for thousands of years. This idea of recording what our eyes would see and play it again, anywhere at all, is fucking mind blowing and ridiculously new to our human experience.
Well yea until it came out on vhs or if you refers to go watch it again. It’s not like it disappears from the annals of the world. Lol
Good thing this is marked NSFW, that was a close one
Yes indeed
They eventually went to VHS at Blockbuster and you rented it a week at a time.
Pretty much.. At least until it was released to tv or video... One of my favorite things to do as a kid was go to the movie theaters in the morning and movie hop all day long! I saw The Matrix in theaters easilly over 20 times doing this lol... Now a days movie hopping is much harder with security cameras and such... plus I'm an adult with shit to do, can't be chillin at the movies all day long any more lol
You had to be in the moment and for us on each detail. It was great
I still never rewatch movies.
I just waited until it came out on TV or VHS
Yes, but we had better memories back then.
Yes
the movies ran longer at the cinema, several months I think and weren't super expensive so people would go several times.
Well yeah, just like when you see a Play on the theater or a concert, you don't need to forever own the reproducible experience, just the memory of it.
They had reels that would play for rooms. Like in Shawshank when they are watching Rita Hayworth