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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.
Back in high school, a buddy of mine mused about something that still itches my brain.
When they built the first computer. How the fuck did they figure out how to “make it turn on”? Like… the first boot cycle.
Really makes you appreciate some of the insanely complex stuff that we take for granted.
I’m not really sure what you mean. The first computers didn’t have an OS or anything. They just took the input and applied the assigned operation.
This gets more advanced when you want a BIOS loaded first, but it’s not particularly complex. It does the same as above, but the first instructions jump to the BIOS, which itself is just another set of instructions that initialize things.
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.
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…
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
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!”
Children of the DVD era also know this life
I’m in-between both. As a little kid I watched Bambi and Winnie the Pooh on tape and then later we hired all kinds of dvd’s in the library and that’s how I discovered Star Wars. Good times.
That’s pre-streaming as well. I recently volunteered on a film festival and was surprised how many people still watch DVDs when I worked at the merchandize.
The Robots DVD radicalized me
The early online pirating era still remembers it as well. When the torrent is already taking more than a week to complete the old dvd and tape collection had to be revisited.
I had a friend that recorded every single episode of the power rangers on VHS from pay tv.
Also, borrowing DVDs from the library was a thing back then (probably still is but noone does it).
Borrowing DVDs is absolutely still a thing. Hell, now you can even borrow console games from your library. I do it all the time.
Some let you straight up borrow consoles, kitchen supplies, tools, etc. The central library in Los Angeles has a 3D printer and podcasting studio, among others.
My library doesn’t do console loans but it does have a dedicated maker’s space with 3D printers, a laser cutter, sewing machines, and other assorted stations. No real heavy stuff though, so no power tools or wood-working stuff sadly. It does have an HTC Vive complete with full lightbox set up for people to use, though.
Libraries are the fucking best.
I recorded the entirety of Star Trek TNG on VHS from local network broadcast. It turns out that its the commercials that are priceless now.
Watching old commercial segments on YouTube from when we were kids hits right in the feels every time.
You should get them transfered to a disc. Tapes degrade
I wonder if people will fondly remember any YT ads of today in the next 10-15 years.
I think a key factor is that pharmaceutical commercials were not legal then and there was no modern internet as is exists today. So local businesses had to advertise on TV and because big pharma didn’t own every available second of available commercial time, local businesses could afford to advertise. This led to some…unique commercials.
Remember the TV and movie character Ernest? He was originally created as a character for local TV commercials.
Being from Brazil, I never saw Ernest outside his movies, so the majority of commercials I saw are very different from what you saw. One or two from imported stuff might’ve been the same, like nearly every damn car commercial. We did have the “Garoto Bombril”, a character for a steel wool that aired for over 25 years without interruption
I think I can stream movies for free at home from my library. It has some limitations on numbers and selection, but the general idea lives on.
Yeah I did the same with ebooks on my tolino with onleihe for some time. The device itself has amortized pretty quickly that way.
I grew up with The Legend of Zelda. “Well excuuuuuuse me, princess”
We had Spaceballs. It’s still awesome!
Us too! That and Innerspace.
Same, and flight of the navigator. “I don’t leak, you leak, remember.”
Spaceballs? We’re fucked!
Enemy Mine. That’s the movie.
Such a great movie. You aren’t human if you didn’t shed a tear during that film.
On a side note, the book is amazing, too. One of the rare instances where both are excellent.
Sometimes I feel like I’m the only one who ever saw that flick. Concur there’s some lasting life lessons in there. And space turtles!
Happy to see some fellow lemmings enjoy it as much as I did.
Earthman, your Mickey Mouse is one big stupid dope!
Indian in the cupboard.
Though even as a child I remember thinking how annoying the main kid was and how bad he was at acting
Was this an obscure movie? I thought a huge slice of US Gen X and Millennials loved that book.
There’s really no obscure movies for 90s kids. The most obscure film will have a big following. I didn’t know everyone also watched an American tail and little giants as much as I did
The 90’s kids movies that are obscure are the kind of bad ones.
some of us watched bad movies for fun
Oh man, I remember the books! Exciting. I should never read them again so to preserve the good memories lmfao
The Last Unicorn and Titan A.E. loved those movies.
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.
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.
It can’t be… are you sure?
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 🙂
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.
Yeah, kids today certainly won’t watch the same shit over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and
like a monkey with a miniature cymbal
Depends on the movie and the kid.
My first kid watched Coco about a million times. Probably most underrated Pixar film, imo. I still tear up during My Strong Corazon.
Can’t tell you how much I’ve seen the Mario Movie.
Or the same episodes of Bluey.
So blockbusters still get tons of rewatch.
But…there’s soooo much independent content out there. And kids aren’t beholden to what’s physically in the house.
Honestly it’s amazing to me that modern kids have a cohesive culture with so much media variety.
I suppose as long as there are huge franchises, people will always grasp onto them in some way, and they will be kind of beacons for an array of subcultures. You’ll still have kids that gravitate towards Minecraft…or Star Wars…or Sonic…or LotR, and then discover more niche stuff on a tangent from those.
Zoomer here. I had this with random YouTube videos. We had cult classics like asdf, and YouTubers were special.
Children definitely still experience something similar via small/unknown YouTube channels, games, Roblox games, fandoms, etc. Sure everyone knows the big famous stuff, but that’s the same as pre-2000s kids too.
Yeah, obscure interests are hardly a thing of the past. If anything it’s only gotten stronger, people of all ages can now be sucked so far down the fandom rabbithole that they lose sight of it being their obscure interest.
Although the way it used to be, kids would have access to one obscure thing, and so that’s their one chance at having an obscure interest. That’s changed, kids now get much wider choice.
Edit: Clarity
Soft of, but it’s not the same as watching golden child and half of jewel of the Nile 100 times.
yeah but they’re choosing to watch that out of millions. It’s not because that was literally just what was in the house so it was that or nothing.
Ah, good distinction!
“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.
The Master of Disguise.
I uhh, can’t really say its good tbh.
Was he not turtley enough for you?
The entire movie is immersion therapy for those who suffer second-hand embarrassment.
Except one character that was genuinely fun. And a crack to the didgy-donch!
Little Rascals (1994)
So many quotes burned into my brain, particularly from buckeheat and porky. To this day, I sing “We got a dollar” and “I got two pickles”, ask “Quick! What’s the number for 911?”, and recite Alfalfa’s “Dear Darla” letter.
You have an ugly face.
Banker: “And what is your account … number?”
Child on another child’s shoulders in a trench coat with a fake beard: “seven”.
Banker: “seven? . . . Sevennnn?”
Child inside coat: “Try eight!”
Child with beard: “Eight.”
on saturdays the local station would broadcast scifi b movies. we’d record them and keep the good ones.
