Oh my goodness, I remember for some reason people kept giving or lending my parents all these long play VHS tapes full of movies. Random video mix tapes where you didn’t know what you’d get next. Now and then some of them had kid movies (like the Sesame Street movie, Follow That Bird and there was at least one muppet movie), but most of them were PG and occasionally R-rated stuff, and I still watched it (except the R-rated stuff, but thankfully they were mostly pretty tame as I recall). I think my fave childhood movie was always on TV though: The Goonies.
The only rated R movie we were allowed to watch was Demolition Man, which we had a tape of, so we watched it enough times for me to have fond feelings for Stallone.
I also had this on tape! It was where I learned about the concept biscuits and gravy. Except for I didn’t actually learn what they were for another 10 years.
It made sense to young me that when Simon opened the sewer it would smell like digestive biscuits smothered in Bisto.
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.
We had a “kids tape” that had countless things recorded over each other. The second half was just a collage of the tail end of various cartoons and shows. When it got to the Abba-soundtracked documentary about a carnival it meant you were at the end of the tape.
My aunt had a big cabinet full of home recorded tapes, our most favourites were the ones with BTTF, Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones and the one with one and only episode of The Adventures of Sinbad.
There was also an unsettling retelling of Beowulf via awkward English dub. Watched now, it would probably be charming, but 4 year old me was petrified when the cuddly looking Grendel bit off a man’s head and you could see the stalks of arteries poking out of the neck stump.
I also watched the first episode of MadBalls more times than is probably healthy.
I basically knew every line of Space Jam by heart. I even knew when to look for the funny parts of the VHS when rewinding it and watching the movie in reverse.
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.
It was a bunch of shitty animated films on DVD for me (with a couple of Disney and Dreamworks films added into the mix). It’s probably the cause of my love of physical media.
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