Microblog Memes

Swiss Family Robinson

Nobody remembers Swiss Family Robinson

"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.

Or, what movie you dubbed from a rented VHS tape and watch 200 times until The quality had degraded so bad that it was almost unwatchable. I'm looking at you Short Circuit.

Mom: why do you want to rent that You've watched 500 times at home Me: our slp copy's looking pretty bad. Mom: grrrr

on saturdays the local station would broadcast scifi b movies. we'd record them and keep the good ones.

That’s parental failing for not torrenting

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.

We had a tape that had Asterix in Britain followed by the Only Fools And Horses feature-length episode where they go to Florida and Del-Boy gets mistaken for a mob boss.

To this day, I can probably quote both from beginning to end.

LA Story! I still love that movie. Our movies were whatever the people that lived in the house before you left when they moved back to wherever they were from (expat life in the Middle East). Also my grandma taped all the Fairy Tale Theatre episodes for me. The three little pigs was the best! Billy Crystal as the runt and Jeff Goldblum as the big bad wolf, so so good.

And commercials. My wife and I were just talking the other day about shared commercials we saw growing up that kids today will never experience. “Ancient Chinese secret”, “Don’t squeeze the charmin”, the crying Native American, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing”, “Where’s the beef?”, “My bologna has a first name”, “I’m stuck on Band-aid”, “Calgon take me away”, “Mikey likes it”, “Sometimes you feel like a nut”, Joe Isuzu, “Avoid the noid”, “York peppermint patty gives me the feeling…”, Stompers, Micro-machines, “Who wears short shorts?”, “You got your chocolate in my peanut butter” … and these are just the ones I remember. They have none of those shared experiences.

I mean just making this list gave me such a wave of nostalgia.

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!

Oh man, we had so many weird movies.

While my mom was in charge of nurturing a broad taste in music, my dad was in charge of taping movies of all kinds and showing them to us.

He waited for me to turn 13 to watch Seven Samurai and several other Kurosawa movies. We watched all the old Pink Panther movies, a couple of Jacques Tati films (Mon Uncle being our favourite when we had the flu), Le Ballon Rouge, multiple Soviet animated movies, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Charlie Chaplin's Gold Rush, Gloria, The Blues Brothers and on and on and on.

I owe a lot to my parents for instilling a broad music and movie taste in me super early.

I'm sure kids of today form their own valuable memories, but their reality is so foreign to us that we only see it as a threat.

I'm a pretty big fan of the podcast Creepcast on youtube and one of the cohosts grew up on creepypastas online which is very interesting to listen to whenever he talks about the nostalgia for him and many others. I was already in my 20s when creepypastas became a thing online so to me, it is interesting to hear what childhood was like for the 20somethings of today, who all grew up on the internet and have fond memories of it.

The kids of today will have their stories too and they will also be interesting to listen to, I'm sure. It is differnet than growing up on worn out cassette and VHS tapes, but it doesn't make it all bad. Things just change over time.

Not obscure but shout out to milo and otis. I must have watched that movie hundreds of times then a hundred more when my sister started watching things.

Enemy Mine. That's the movie.

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

Tremors FTW!!

To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar.

We had a lot of VHS tapes that got worn out over time because they got watched so many times. My little brothers watched chitty chitty bang bang so much that the quality of the entire film was noticably worse by the time the tape got accidentally stepped on and destroyed.

Also mysteriously all the sex scenes with the incredibly attractive women in the Pierce Brosnan James bond films were worn out too. I wouldn't know anything about that nor does it have anything to do with why I'm now a masochist whos into women that bite, scratch and even stab me from time to time... No correlation whatsoever.

Transformers (the animated movie)

Still good today and I rewatch it from time to time.

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.

The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog. Like, the shitty one with Grounder and whatever the chicken robot's name was... Had like the whole collection of those when what I wanted was the more anime like series where Sally Acorn came from. 😔

We had Spaceballs. It's still awesome!

The Master of Disguise.

I uhh, can't really say its good tbh.

They still have that today, though. It's just on streaming alongside the big films.

I don't doubt a portion of the Disney remakes would have ended up being direct-to-VCD sequels you'd only find in a video rental store.

The Miracle on Morgan's Creek. I never liked it much, but my family did. Also The Princess Bride, but that's not obscure so it can't count here.

Children of the DVD era also know this life

My go to was The Sandlot, but whose wasn't? Sprinkle in some Surf Ninjas, with a dash of Twister, and that was me for a good many years.

In the 80s it was Freddy's Revenge and The Woman in Red. Early 2000s was The Matrix on VHS.

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.