I am the typical movie watcher background. I was born in the age of blockbuster…post-Jaws and with Star Wars just on the horizon. I was a Spielberg & Lucas baby with Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies lining up for my summers, and Disney films always in the theater.
The first movie I can remember seeing in the theater was Mary Poppins (probably around 3 or 4). I went with sister and our neighbors. I can recall being amazed and questioning how they were able to float, have tea on the ceiling, and how Mary and Bert were able to “Step in Time” with animated characters (I remember deciding they were probably standing on clear glass blocks).
Seeing movies on TV was generally the option since there was no way to see movies if they weren’t in the theater. Another big early movie was the 1976 version of King Kong when it premiered on TV…back when movie premieres were a big event. Superman on television gave me a view of Superman before being wowed by Superman II in the theater.
Yep, they most definitely are sitting on glass boxes
The invention of the VCR was a big change in the world of movies. I remember a friend of mine had one and I was amazed that he could watch Star Wars…whenever he wanted?!?! At one point we even rented a RCA CED (Capacitance Electronic Disc) player for a birthday (called SelectaVision) with The Last Unicorn and Dragonslayer as some of the discs. If you’ve never seen once check them out online…few people remember them. We got our VCR around 1983 or 1984, and it opened a world of movies that had only been heard of before. I was no longer subjected to the TV guide (we never had cable) and rereleases in the theater (which soon dwindled). I could get almost whatever I wanted when I wanted.
Please rewind…If you didn’t live before VCRs, you don’t understand how they changed things…
The rental places would give you printed lists of the movies you could check out (including the X-Rated ones) and you had to be members. I think my parents were pretty proud when I knew the titles of a bunch of porn titles at eight years-old like Beyond the Green Door, Debbie Does Dallas, and Deep Throat (and yes, I would review any of those three movies for BasementRejects if I had a copy…they are classics). Just to be clear, I wasn’t able to rent them, but they did sure raise some questions. With VCR it became more pick and choose, but the glut of choices allowed you to be less refine on your choices. I didn’t have very many limits to my movie renting however, so if I wanted to rent C.H.U.D., I rented C.H.U.D. (yep, rented that one a bunch).
I take part of the blame for giving Kevin Smith a career…my bad…
In high school however, my movie tastes began to change. The art boom occurred, and I started checking out classics (mostly from the late ’60s/early ’70s) from the video store. I was one of the first on the Clerks and Pulp Fiction bus and encouraged others to see them. I saw The Shawshank Redemption in the theater before everyone…typical art snob stuff. I however would mix it up with movies like Cutthroat Island, Virtuosity, Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh, and Phantoms (yeah…I shamefully saw those all in the theater).
Today’s the day we free ourselves from crappy average movies like this one!!!
You would think the evolution would stop, but it hasn’t…now Kevin Smith is too cliché and watching Clerks is hard. I burnt out on Tarantino for the most part but I love diving into subgenres like exploitation pictures, kung fu, foreign, and the art house scene. That is the best part about movies…there are so many choices.
No matter how bad a film is, it can become good, but now I have problem tolerating average and I challenge people to seek out films that aren’t average. When you’re young, an average film is ok because average is still new to you, and you can still like those films from childhood. Now however, I can’t stand average. They can be horrible or they can be great, but an average film seems intolerable to me…and I hope that I never settle for one.
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