Swiss Family Robinson
Nobody remembers Swiss Family Robinson
“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.
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
on saturdays the local station would broadcast scifi b movies. we’d record them and keep the good ones.
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!”
Yes I did.
I understand nostalgia for commercials but every time I’ve watched anything with ads (streaming or live tv) it’s absolutely awful to watch now. Maybe it was because it was all I knew as a kid but I cannot stand ads breaking up shows anymore.
I don’t watch much tv anymore anyway
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.
Eh, the printed TV guide was a thing, and around here just about every newspaper had daily and/or weekly listings of what was on the different channels. Most cable subscriptions came with their own monthly TV guide as well.
Fond memories of going through the TV listings with family, circling the things each one wanted to see on the single TV in the house 🙂
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.
I remember at one time it was possible to download the entire IMDB data. I used it for a UI project in a CS class in the early 90s.
System of a Down did the Zelda song, Arrogant Worms did The War of 1812, Weird Al did everything else.
I’m not sure about everything else, but the Zelda song - System of a Down association has been debunked.
According to the brief digging I’ve done, it was:
posted to OverClockedRemix under his bands name ‘The Rabbit Joint’
I have it on good authority that Weird Al also didn’t do every single other parody song in existence.
Yeah of course not. He may be invented parody but obviously others took on the mantle after he was assassinated.
It can’t be… are you sure?
Similar thing applies to music. There are still web radio stations and web broadcasts of good FM stations out there, and what a relief it is to fall back on these, especially i f you’re getting playlist burnout. There’s something to be said for a queue of music that some person has just slapped together for the day that fits whatever the overall feeling of a station is. The original algorithms before the final algorithms took over, I suppose.
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.
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.
I saw Milo and Otis as an adult many years ago. At one point the narrator says, I shit you not, “The chickens left the henhouse in a clucking flurry!”
Oh my god, brilliant shit.
I loved that movie until I learned how they treated the animals.
Dont tell. I want to remain ignorant.
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.
Tremors FTW!!
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.
The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. Like, the shitty one with Grounder and whatever the chicken robot’s name was… Had like the whole collection of those when what I wanted was the more anime like series where Sally Acorn came from. 😔
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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…
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.
“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!”
