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.
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.
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.
An American Tale for me and my closest(in age) siblings. Bonus because while my older brother and I were American born, we moved out of the country when I was 2, and my younger sister was born outside the states. We saw the movie first overseas, then often when we came back to the US (7 for me).
I’m gonna have kids just so I can make sure to raise them on the correct media diet. They’re getting all the classic video game consoles, in order of generation, so when they get to something like Elden Ring they have the context all the way back to Space Invaders to appreciate it. And we’re going to be a home of physical media, god damn it. We’re not streaming things. We’re putting CD’s and vinyls and blu rays in their respective players. No iPads. Only books, comics, coloring books and notebooks.
How the fuck did parents start giving their kids iPads, anyway? Nintendo Switches? My first Gameboy cost $90 and I bought it with my own birthday money. A children’s book from a young reader series cost $6 new in the 90s and is probably not much worse now. Less, if you buy it used, which is much easier now. And people are just like, “here, my 12 year old child, have an Xbox Series whatever, and an iPad, and a Galaxy phone. They’re all pre-connected to your YouTube account. Don’t let your other parent know that I told you that for Christmas we’re getting you a gaming PC, Logitech C920, condenser microphone, wireless headset, gaming chair, scissor arm, and LED lighting array so you can chase the completely impossible dream of being a professional streamer. Can I kiss your feet while I’m at it? Will that make this a good half-birthday for you?” Unfuckingthinkable. Knock it off.
Not a movie, exactly, but we had the VHS of the extended version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the making of the video. It was over an hour long. And amazing.
I can’t recall my family having obscure movies. Don’t remember what it’s actually about, but I at least remember we had one Home On The Range VHS. Don’t recall ever watching it once, but this post made it come to the forefront of my memory
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.
My movie was princess and the goblin. I watched it on a 10x10 in monitor that had the VHS in while I worked at my family’s business where I did labor at 10 years of age 30+ hours a week. Good times
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