Back in my day

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.

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 suspect its been replaced with stumbling upon tentacle porn or 'whats this goatse' when youre 10.

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.

I lived overseas when I was a kid and my grandma used to tape Saturday morning cartoons and mail them to me

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.

No kids these days still have that. It's just some random film available on streaming. I've watched so much Trolls. Please send help, my kids won't stop watching

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."

Beetlejuice? Beetlejuice.

Brave little toaster. And fievel goes west.

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.

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.

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?

All the 90s Disney animated films.

And Robocop.

I remember calling into the radio station and requesting a song. And then sitting around with friends waiting to hit record on our boombox!

Bringing in the deep cuts:

• The Peanut Butter Solution
• DARYL
• Ewoks; The Battle for Endor
• Enemy Mine
• Police Academy and The Blues Brothers (edited for broadcast TV)

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

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.

Goooooooood morning Vietnammmmmm

Today’s childhoods will be defined by watching some semi-obscure streamer or meme video on YouTube that only your friends understand.

There is more obscure media than ever, it just connects less people you're likely to ever meet in person.

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.

Ah yes, bootleg Harry and the Hendersons.

Mine was some weird fairy tale cartoon where a mom goat fills a wolf with rocks and they drown in a well.

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)

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.

Or catching the same movie in different places over the course of a month before HBO changed its lineup.

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.

I grew up watching Stallone, Van Damme, and Schwarzenegger movies with my dad, since he monopolized the remote.

The Thief and the Cobbler!

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.

Mine was Idle Hands, which my grandma taped for me when she noticed me watching an Idle Hands marathon. My love for this movie at such a young age really helps to explain my sense of humor as an adult.

Idk how obscure, but "Puff the Magic Dragon" was definitely a weird one for me. Kinda glad it got lost (probably thrown out, who knows). Almost feels like a fever dream, so much so, that I had to double check the movie even existed

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.

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 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.

Idk about obscure, but OLD Looney Toons classics and The Land Before Time (recorded FTA).

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.

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.

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

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..

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

“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

Hellooooooo The Great Outdoors and Harry and the Hendersons.

Cats Don't Dance. 20 years later I'm a furry.

Asterix. Doesn't really matter which of the 30+ comics, or the 5 or 6 movies. No one knows Asterix in The US.

Also: Flight of The Navigator, The Last Unicorn, or The Last Starfighter

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

https://youtu.be/zJvu8X5OpT4?si=t89ja_1qtWt8ah14

I really liked the movie titan AE and had it on VHS . When looking it up recently aparen it was really bad . Still might give it a rewatch some time though