The obscure movie for me was… Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. I still know every line of dialog from beginning to end any time I happen to see it on.
Maybe not. I don’t think the prequels are good movies, but there’s no denying they’re some dumb fun that certainly appeals to a lot of people. The sequels don’t even have that going for them. I can’t imagine anyone being nostalgic about the return of Palpatine.
What I’m getting at is that the way you’re talking about the sequels is exactly the way people spoke about the prequels when they came out.
I hated the prequels when they came out, I still think they’re basically unwatchable. But they weren’t aimed at me, and a whole new generation of SW fans grew up with a deep fondness for them.
I expect we’ll see the same thing with the sequels.
Me too buddy, me too… but they will, and I have hope that someone will find a way to do the same thing to the sequels that people have done to the prequels.
No, when Star Wars first came out in 1977 and the first home video releases (including the laserdisc transfer that was included with the 2006 DVD release as a bonus feature) it was just Star Wars.
You can recreate this by spending time working in a remote location, like a fishing vessel, that doesn’t have any internet. All you can watch on your off time is what media you take out with you.
I watched “A River Runs Through It” probably 30 times one summer while commercial fishing, because it was one of the few movies we had that we all liked.
My childhood predates the average person’s private ownership of movies . As a child no one I knew owned anything other than home movies… The very idea of actually OWNING a copy of a movie would have been the height of opulence … And back then, there was no way to play a 35mm movie without a 35 mm projector even if you could get your hands on a print
Is it true that movies were super cheap to watch back then? I’ve heard that that’s partially the reason people would go watch the same movie multiple times, that and AC/socially.
Movies would also stay in theaters longer, sometimes multiple years. You would also see a lot more second runs. I’m not even that old but I used to get $1 tickets to the second run theater when I was a kid in the early 2000s. I don’t think I’ve even seen a second run theater in the last decade.
The one in my hometown just went out of business 2 years ago due to the pandemic. It was $5 for adults, $3 for children under 14 and students of the local highschool if you present your student ID. They were an important part of the town, and practically everyone 2-3 towns over was talking about it when they closed.
Well i think the point is that today people just watch movies that have “aTleAsT 7 or 8 on imDb” or the top ranked show/album on [insert arbitrary streaming service] that week, and are never exposed to anything outside of the mainstream realm = Everyone you meet is just a clone of the person next to her/him.
On paper you are correct; You’d think people have vastly different tastes and interests but in reality they just watch/listen to/do what everyone else is watching/listening do/doing.
The concept of rewatching a movie is almost foreign to me now given that I have access to a library of tens of thousands of movies. It would have to be very good and something that whoever I’m with hasn’t seen.
Of course I used to watch the same movie about every month or so back when I was growing up in the 90s.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind - it’s just so nicely structured, you always notice something new
Glengarry Glen Ross - I finished watching it for the first time and I thought go myself “fuck, I could watch it again” and I did, watch the whole movie again straight away. I can still just go back and watch it. The acting is so amazing it never gets boring
Veep - best show ever, I’ve seen every episode probably over 10 times and I still watch it all the time, like when I’m cooking or something. It’s just soooo fucking perfect
I actually listen to Futurama to help me sleep. I’ve added some other shows I know just as well. They are in that genre of extraordinary media that I can watch/listen to/etc. over and over again.
It might, but it definitely hasn’t. I work in some fresh blood on the weekends, when I feel up to taking a chance. Actually, I’ve got a date to go see Dream Scenario (Nic Cage 🥰) just this week.
I have a daughter I enjoy showing movies I’ve already watched to. So I’ve been doing mostly rewatching, but with someone who has never seen, for example, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off before.
The best was her reaction to Repo Man. We got to the end and she said, “all of that for a flying car?”
This is so sweet. Getting to show cool stuff you like to your kids must be one of the best things about being a parent. If I ever end up becoming one I’ll show my kids all the great Pixar movies and also the Emperor’s New Groove cause that one is a classic.
It really is, although you have to tailor it to their tastes, which means not showing them some movies you want to. She has absolutely no interest in seeing Star Wars or Indiana Jones movies, for example. But she loves cult movies, so I’m enjoying showing her those.
I have trash taste, so I actually just continue to rewatch the same dumb shit I liked in the 90s so I don’t have to make a decision. I actually paid real money to buy Not Another Teen Movie a few years back because I rewatch it about once a year. I think we have too many options and they’re all on different services so it’s like fuck it, Men In Black for the 85th time.
I used to watch the same movie about every month or so back when I was growing up
I don’t think this is a technical limitation, I think young children really like repetition because their brains are still learning how to predict things
I once had the flu so badly I couldn’t get out of bed or yell for help. My parents put on “Flushed Away” (movie about some fuckin rats) on dvd and it looped at least 4 times before anyone came back to turn it off. One of my core traumas
I lucked out because I was left with a movie like this but VHS tapes have to be rewound once they are over and we didn’t have any of those fancy fucking auto rewinders, that was rich folk stuff
I had the same issue with Barney. I got the chicken pox at 16. The older you are, the sicker chicken pox tends to make you. I was super sick, to where I was hallucinating at one point.
A couple of days in, I probably should have been at the hospital, so of course my mom was leaving me at home by myself to go to work. She turned the TV on and just left without checking the channel. It was PBS and some sort of Barney programming block was on. Hours of Barney. Hours. The TV’s remote was long broken and I was too sick to walk, so I just watched that singing, dancing purple fuck.
On the bright side, I can do a great Barney impression. I sometimes do it randomly when I tell my wife I love her.
When we moved to the middle of nowhere and couldn’t even get channels over the air, my sister and I wore through every tape in the house.
The worst was being 9 years old desperately trying to find the second half of Lonesome Dove because you only got most of the episodes on some random VHS.
We must have worn the sound off of The Princess Bride, splash, Aladdin and the little mermaid. For a 9 year old boy living in the hinterlands after growing up in a city, Ariel singing “I want to be where the people are” hit me right in the feels.
Even though it was from 1966, I think the youngest person in it was Mako.
I couldn’t find a single person from it who is still alive.
It’s on Disney+. It’s not great, but it was on a tape my parents used to put on for me so they could be undisturbed for an hour. I didn’t even like the film that much, but there were two Chip and Dale cartoons at the end, so I watched it to get to them.
My mom liked that movie a lot. I also ran across it on Disney+ a while back and watched it with my kids. I watched a lot of those 60s and 70s Disney movies as a kid in the 80s… Herbie, etc.
My daughter asked me what a VHS Player was last night. It was in one of her books, and I couldn’t tell her how it works. But I got to tell her why we say “rewind” when we reverse a movie.
I tried to watch Jingle all the way with my kids today. They pointed out how stupid that movie is, but I didn’t have a lot of choices back then. I don’t miss those days of shitty choices.
Me and my brothers loved the Asterix and Obelix books, we used to get them every time we went to the library. We probably read through most of them several times.
We also really loved the Tintin books, it was crazy to me when they made a movie from them, prior to that i had never known anybody else who had heard of Tintin.
If i ever got the opportunity I’d love to start collecting them, would be a real nostalgia kick.
I don’t know Asterix, but I loved the shit out of Flight of the Navigator. I still drop a “compliance!” every once in a while when somebody asks me to do something.
Also, The Last Starfighter was fantastic and… The Last Unicorn was definitely a movie that was. That Unicorn was kind of an asshole, though. Watching it cringe in horror at feeling mortality was like, yeah asshole. Welcome to the slums of the mortal world, ya prissy bitch.
I’ve seen a lot of nods to Flight of the Navigator in here, but this is the first mention of The Last Starfighter. I saw that probably a dozen times because my best friend was obsessed for a while and we’d watch it every time I want over. I have very fond memories of that.
No kids these days still have that. It’s just some random film available on streaming. I’ve watched so much Trolls. Please send help, my kids won’t stop watching
You need to get them hooked on something else. But be careful what you wish for because this will only give temporary relief until you start hating the new addiction and wish back the previous one. My girl went from binge rewatching a penguin cartoon to the little mole to a horribly animated newer cartoon about cats and dogs. And I fear we have reached the point at which we cannot hide or deny the existence of peppa pig any longer and I already regret dissing the kittens & puppies stuff because jfc I watched peppa pig for the first time today and I won’t be able to bear this one for the love of God
Peppa Pig is the worst thing that ever happened, and not just on TV. We had a short run of it with my younger son and it was an awful time. Now we get SpongeBob and/or Pokémon and it makes me so happy.
Idk how obscure, but “Puff the Magic Dragon” was definitely a weird one for me. Kinda glad it got lost (probably thrown out, who knows). Almost feels like a fever dream, so much so, that I had to double check the movie even existed
Full-disclosure… I found it online and am about to re-watch it. Loved it as a kid, but does it hold-up? 23 minutes will tell
Edit: It… oddly holds up for me lol. Just as weird as I remembered, but kinda sweet (I truly thought when they sang “Honoli” they were saying “Harmony”. It’s been a long time)
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