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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.
Ah yes, Harry and the Hendersons.
Also The Great Outdoors
i assume thats some kind of parody/joke website?
Yeah, it’s The Onion’s internet culture / clickbait site.
I honestly can’t remember us having one! But my wife had one. Some off brand Disney Bambi I believe.
Children of the DVD era also know this life
The Robots DVD radicalized me
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.
That’s pre-streaming as well. I recently volunteered on a film festival and was surprised how many people still watch DVDs when I worked at the merchandize.
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!
“You think boredom is your ally, but you merely adopted the boredom, i was born in it, molded by it. I didn’t even see the invention of VCR till I was a man, by then it was nothing to me but unknown technology!”
I vividly remember being a teenager and channel 5 coming out. It was a huge deal
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…
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.
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.
It’s crazy what we do, and to think most people have no clue of all the crazy physics that has to happen for some of their most basic activities everyday.
Back in high school, a buddy of mine mused about something that still itches my brain.
When they built the first computer. How the fuck did they figure out how to “make it turn on”? Like… the first boot cycle.
Really makes you appreciate some of the insanely complex stuff that we take for granted.
I’m not really sure what you mean. The first computers didn’t have an OS or anything. They just took the input and applied the assigned operation.
This gets more advanced when you want a BIOS loaded first, but it’s not particularly complex. It does the same as above, but the first instructions jump to the BIOS, which itself is just another set of instructions that initialize things.
It would’ve been, but I didn’t get it until the mid/late 2000’s. First I lived in Herts which only got it if you had Sky, then just before it came out there, I moved to Brighton, where it wasn’t allowed because it interfered with radio signals along the north coast in France. Still not sure if I’ve ever watched anything on Channel 5.
You didn’t miss much. It was a bit shit
Hosted by the spice girls?
Yes! I remember the posters.
We must be about the same age. The VCR was a game changer. As I recall, the answering machine came just before it, and it’s kind of amazing how fundamentally that changed things, too. People from more recent generations just don’t get what a different paradigm it was when you couldn’t necessarily contact your friends. You’d call their house, but if there wasn’t an answer that didn’t necessarily mean much. They might be outside, or maybe not home. Maybe they were on their bike heading to your house.
Thx to my mom we had Star Wars. I’m persuaded this set the course of my life in some ways. Thx mom!
I grew up with The Legend of Zelda. “Well excuuuuuuse me, princess”
Star Wars Episode I recorded off its debut on German TV by my grandpa for my older brother. Watched that so often, I had it partially memorised. That and Disney’s Hercules and The Sword in the Stone. And apparently I was really keen on watching TV ads when I was little :D
SW E1 was our once or twice a month movie growing up. My parents had a half dozen different editions of it, from standard VHS, to SE VHS, DVD, blu ray, etc. I bet you, contrasting that, that I’ve only seen E3 once. Maybe twice. The let down was real.
None of those are semi-obscure though.
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).
I recorded the entirety of Star Trek TNG of VHS from local network broadcast. It turns out that its the commercials that are priceless now.
I wonder if people will fondly remember any YT ads of today in the next 10-15 years.
I think a key factor is that pharmaceutical commercials were not legal then and there was no modern internet as is exists today. So local businesses had to advertise on TV and because big pharma didn’t own every available second of available commercial time, local businesses could afford to advertise. This led to some…unique commercials.
Remember the TV and movie character Ernest? He was originally created as a character for local TV commercials.
Being from Brazil, I never saw Ernest outside his movies, so the majority of commercials I saw are very different from what you saw. One or two from imported stuff might’ve been the same, like nearly every damn car commercial. We did have the “Garoto Bombril”, a character for a steel wool that aired for over 25 years without interruption
Watching old commercial segments on YouTube from when we were kids hits right in the feels every time.
You should get them transfered to a discount. Tapes degrade
I think I can stream movies for free at home from my library. It has some limitations on numbers and selection, but the general idea lives on.
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.
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!
Monkey Trouble is my wife’s jam. We have it on Laserdisc even because I like collecting junk :)
Oh god…I remember my mum taking me and my sister to buy a video with some money we’d been given, but we just argued all the way around Woolworths (Woolies is now gone so another memory.) about what to buy, and eventually settled on this. Another was Pete’s Dragon.
Swiss Family Robinson
Nobody remembers Swiss Family Robinson
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.
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.
You forgot Alka Seltzer’s “Mama mia, that’s a spicy meatball!”
