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.
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.
Ours was "Who Framed Roger Rabbit". I don't know why nor where but one day my step dad showed up with this movie for us. It was the only "kids" movie we ever own and we watched it a 1.000 times. looking back it wasn't as inocent as I thought at the time, but it was the 90s. Another movies we loved?! Howard the Duck ( the movie where Marty Mcfly mom fucked a duck) So yeah the 90s were kind of weird and had a lot of inapropriate movies for kids.
I would also add that if you had a neighbor or relative that had HBO, you'd be able to record on VHS a set of movies playing at that time. For many of us this may have been only a few months/years of movies. That set of movies would grow on you because thats all you had to watch on demand. Genre, theme, high budget, low budget, it didn't matter. Someone close to you popped in a 6 hour tape one day and pressed "record" before they went to work. You got the one movie you were hoping for and whatever came afterward.
Back in the day, me and my siblings recorded movies on VHS by sitting next to the TV and starting/stopping the recording for commercial breaks. The best movies were those with only small snippets of commercials, and my most treasured movie was a nearly "clean" copy of Die Hard that I've watched probably somewhere between 50-100 times.
My father was a film historian. We had so many obscure movies on tape. I've seen tons and tons of movies, although not in the last 10-15 years in terms of recent ones.
I used to have a party trick where I would have someone open a random page of Leonard Maltin's movie guide and start listing titles and I could almost always summarize the plot of at least one.
My family watched the movie Clue about a million times. Can quote every line by heart. To this day, we only have to look in one another's eyes whenever a quotable opportunity comes up. "Are you trying to make me look stupid in front of the other guests?" "You don't need any help from me."
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.
I will never forgive my friend's sister taping over several Transformers episodes to record a Madonna marathon from MTV...
That was in the 80s and I'm still sour.
How about building a core memory around a weird French movie you only saw because it was in the wrong case when you rented it from Blockbuster?
I remember calling into the radio station and requesting a song. And then sitting around with friends waiting to hit record on our boombox!
All the 90s Disney animated films.
And Robocop.
Goooooooood morning Vietnammmmmm
My neighbor had so many weird yet charming movies we didn't have in our house. There was this one where I think an English man took care of an otter for some reason? It was also at this neighbor's house that I first saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail for the first time. We had those 1am sillies and were in a permanent giggle fit.
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
Ah yes, bootleg Harry and the Hendersons.
My dad made bootleg copies of just about every vhs he rented until the mid 90s.
The ones that were for kids he imprinted with red or blue tape, all the others black.
I have no idea what my mom did with that wall of tapes once he was gone, at this point she doesn't remember either.
The main tape I remember rewatching was the Raggedy Ann movie from the 80s that got super psychedelic and had elements of body horror.
The daycare I went to after school when I was a kid had a few that got a lot of play, but the most obscure were a 1994 ABC Family animated rendition of The Secret Garden and a 1985 Hanna-Barbera Pound Puppies TV special.
Or catching the same movie in different places over the course of a month before HBO changed its lineup.
In communist Poland you couldn't simply buy movies on VHS so the only ones we had were Iron Angels I and II: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094146/
No idea where they came from and I've seen both way too many times.
Today’s childhoods will be defined by watching some semi-obscure streamer or meme video on YouTube that only your friends understand.
I have two. I grew up near Toronto in the 80s. Both were CityTV movies. They used to do a thing. I can't remember what it was called..
1 - SPACEBALLS!!!! ("F___! Even in the future nothing works!")
2 - Predator (there's a line where Arnold says, "That's one bad motherfucker." They only censored the word 'mother'. i was 8. best thing ever)
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.
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.
The Thief and the Cobbler!
so true.
my uncle had a tv. and 2 movies on vcr. I saw "Smokey and the bandit" more then a hundred times. and "the sting" 30-40 times..Hellooooooo The Great Outdoors and Harry and the Hendersons.
Image Transcription: Twitter Post
Kris P. Bacon, @KrisWolfheart
kids today are missing out of the pre-streaming era, where your childhoold was at least partially defined by some semi-obscure movie your family just happened to own on tape and you watched several dozen times
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.
I had a VHS copy of the Empire Strikes Back that my uncle recorded for me when it played on one of our 3 local TV stations. For the holidays I had a recording of a bunch of the old holiday cartoons that would play in a marathon every Christmas, and one of Ghostbusters (for some reason it used to play every Christmas in the evening, so it became a Christmas movie for me).
Aside from that I'd mostly just rent the same VHS tapes from our local hole in the wall video rental place every weekend (Neverending Story and Inhumanoids) from the ages of 4-6. Then I think we got a real video store and my movie watching experience improved a bit. To be fair, the hole in the wall rental shop was probably only about 10 feet long and 6 feet wide inside, and the shelves of movies lined the walls, so there wasn't a lot to choose from.
The weirdest one that comes to my mind, was a vhs tape of some stop motion lego stories that me and my brother watched a million times.
Surprised I just found the whole thing on YouTube
Cats Don't Dance. 20 years later I'm a furry.
“The Cat from Outer Space” we used to rent it all the time from blockbuster for me and when they switched to DVDs we bought it
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.
I lived in an in-between, I have a lot of dvds (even 2 blu-rays I think) but they're not shitty at all, 90% were Disney films when original content was still a thing but we have rewatched them so many times, nowadays my little sister, born in the era of streaming can't handle not choosing what to watch on tv or not having a new film out every 2 months
Or something that came up while channel-surfing on TV and decided to leave it on for a minute, put the control aside, and ended up watching the rest.
Back while in high school, one weeknight I stumbled across Jean Luc Godard's "A Bout De Soufflé" ("Breathless") on our town's local channel, at just the right moment when it seemed like the film was skipping. Intrigued, I left it on, soon enough figured out that this was intentional editing. By the end, my mind was blown and my way of looking at film and art had changed forever.
Honestly my plan is to try and get copies of my family's old home videos
Might be interesting to see if any kids I have being able to see when I was their age has any effect on how they see me as their parent
My condolences to anyone who grew up with the movie Plague Dogs
Cocktail with Tom Cruise, and Independence Day. I watched the fuck out of both of those movies in late Elementary/early Middle School.
For me it was The Boy Who Loved Trolls, The Boy Who Could Fly, Flight of the Navigator and the Rainbow Brite episode/movie that contained this song: https://youtu.be/zPRWuegS8l8?si=OYJ3x4vSSyWg2eNO
This was the movie Troll for me with Sonny Bobo.
For me it was a CD, not a tape, but I watched the hell out of Sharkboy and Lavagirl, dubbed in a monotone voice by a grand total of like three people.
Dude I remember getting so pumped up because of specials on Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network. In high school I loved being home to catch my favourite shows.
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.
Captain Ron fam checking in!
EDIT: We also were frequent watchers of "Money Pit" and "The 'Burbs"....all movies which are pretty notable for..............being available for multiple watches.
How obscure are we talking ? Mine was Gandahar (1987). Try to beat that !
100%!!!
I co-host a podcast focused on superhero movies. Over breaks (summer and winter holidays) we'll typically do something different than our usual. This past summer we did a Jeff Bridges sci-fi double feature - Tron (the original) and Starman.
For this holiday season we just recorded an od pairing that I think could be called "what random VHS tapes did you grow up with?" The movies? Roadhouse and The Pirates of Penzance!
Maximum overdrive. We didn't tape it, but it was saved to our DVR for years.
The Adventures of Milo and Otis! I wonder if it is streaming anywhere?
Aladdin
Tell that to my daughter watching that soviet cartoon about penguins I had as a video tape over and over again on youtube
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
I'm just barely old enough to relate to this
Mine was Scamper the Penguin.
My wife and I used to have Parents with Randy Quaid on VHS. I love that movie but I haven't seen it in 20 years.
Little Monsters and a Herbie movie.
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
Alaska, I really wanted to pilot that yellow Piper Cub.
Also something Tom&Jerry related.
Also something Mickey Mouse related.
Can't remember much, TBF, because later there'd be a few DVDs with Master&Commander, LOTR, SW: RotS, making me forget everything before.
Rikki Tikki Tavi!
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.
'Holy Moses's
An absolutely stacked cast about Moses brother. Somehow very medicreWe could say the sme thing about music.
Mine was The Point. 🎵 Me and my Arrow 🎵
The Jungle Book starring Sabu. The only VHS my family owned from when I was 5 - 9.
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).
For me it was a VHS of the first four episodes of the Swamp Thing animated cartoon
My wife has never seen home alone. She can quote the second one...
"It's Christmas for me"
She's a monster.
The Glowfriends FTW
Ours was The Ugly Dachshund.
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.
for me, that will be the random movie my brother asked me to download to my jellyfin server years ago.
Mine was Labrynth, Aladin 3 and the George Clooney Batman.
Mine was Despicable Me and we had it on BluRay
Psalty iykyk
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.
