Right now, my favorite James Stewart film of all time, Flight Of The Phoenix is on, and it’s absolutely infested with commercials!
It isn’t out on DVD, and I wanted to record it, but my VCR doesn’t have the “edit out commercials” capability!
Dammit!
Q
You’re not alone—I recently taped Supernatural (with Carole Lombard), and had to fast-forward through all the commercials. At least they showed it, I suppose . . .
There was a thread about this a couple of months ago, but my searches were in vain.
Isn’t AMC supposed to stand for “American Movie Classics”? They just showed Robocop 3; I think they’re stretching the word “classic” just a little.
(Flight of the Phoenix is one of my favorites; got it on VHS. Has probably the best engine-starting scene in cinema.)
Last year, when they aired Rear Window, I set my vcr to tape it. My tv guide said it was “x” minutes long, so I set that into the vcr and left it. Turns out they had started inserting a long commercial break into the middle of the movie, so my vcr stopped recording during climactic scene at the very end. What with all the commercials now - as well the poor movie selections just mentioned too - AMC has really slipped.
Oh, they also showed Hot Shots and Short Circuit.
I’m sorry, but not even the Absolutely Audrey marathons make up for that.
See if you can get TCM-Turner Classic Movies.
[announcer voice] Tonight on AMC, Police Academy 4, followed by Porky’s 2, Porky’s Revenge. But first 20 minutes of commercials. [/announcer voice]
It didn’t help that Turner Classic Movies was already beating the pants off AMC when it came to quality broadcasts of classic movies (ironic considdering how Turner was the Great Satan of classic movie buffs in the eighties), but the changes in format both in movie selection (“AMC, now showing the crappiest films of the eighties!”) and the addition of heavy commercial interuption just kills them. I haven’t watched enough AMC to check since they changed up their format but I suspect they’ve also begun editting the movies.
When FX Movies starts doing a better job of airing films (at least when they showed Preditor 2 they showed it uneditted and without commercials) you know you’re in trouble…
They’re definitely editing the movies. I watched Aliens last week and basically all foul language was muted out. Not sure if they did any other editing though; I don’t remember that much of the movie.
The thing that pisses me off is that almost all of the commercials are for AMC!
So apparently, we can’t just sit through a movie thinking, “Boy, isn’t AMC keen for showing movies without commercial interruption! Gosh, I love AMC!”
Noooo, we have to be reminded by commercials how cool AMC is.
Which, ironically, now it is not.
sigh You realize they’re putting in commercials so that they can afford the show Robocop 3.
I know…they were showing Dragnet the other day. I don’t think even the USA network would stoop to that.
They had a Godzilla marathon on Halloween, so I guess they should change the name to “American Movie Classics, well…Movies, Anyway. Possibly Classic, and Mostly American.”
Their timing sucks too. Whenever I TiVo something I have to remember to pad it at the end by 5 minutes or I end up having a similar experience to Sir Drix.
I was soooooooo excited about the Gojira marathon that I taped it. What a crock! It’s all full of ads of people telling me about the best way to watch movies is UNINTERUPTED!!!
I think I saw a website on one of those interuptions one could go to and tell AMC how we liked the new look… ready?
The other day I found myself hypnotized by the flashing lights of one of those insipid Access Hollywood shows, and right after I learned the juicy details of Russell Crowe’s hiatus, I discovered that I’d been watching AMC the whole time. They’ve got their own version of Access Hollywood now, because of course it’s not on enough channels already.
Are they not even trying to have credibility anymore?
Credibility seems to have gone the way of Honesty and Integrity. The almighty dollar speaks loudest.
I’ve often wondered how these movie channels could run commercial free. Don’t they have to generate revenue to purchase the rights to air the movies in the first place?
Ruby the answer is in subscription value. Getting the rights to air old movies is cheap, they don’t haul in the ratings any more (as a rule of thumb if people see black and white or hear a foreign language they turn the channel immediately) and often the people who hold the rights to them will bundle a whole pile together and throw them at people. “Sure you can show Citizen Kane and Casablanca… but you’ve got to take these 150 pieces of garbage that we couldn’t sell if our lives depended on it as well!”
So the films themselves don’t cost that much, where they make their money is that every cable system that has AMC or TCM (FX Movies shows films with commercial interuption during the day but not late at night so I won’t count them) pays them a certain ammount of money per subscriber. They don’t care if you’re watching or not! As long as it’s on the dial they get money!
Now AMC has gotten caught in kind of a pinch. As I mentioned TCM was beating them in the quality department even before the changes to AMC. Turner has a huge library of films available to them and they’re not going to hand them out to AMC when they have their own film channel. Same thing for Fox. Even Disney is kind of getting into the act (the Encore/Stars package seems to air the older films that Disney owns that lack the actual “Disney” label). In 1990 they were the only point on the cable system for old movies, now there are many choices.
From this point on it’s just conjecture but it does appear clear. Classic movie stations tend to be dead spots on a cable system but popular enough niches to keep. However most cable groups aren’t going to put two of them on there (having a satillite dish I don’t particularly care; get a dish, they rock) and TCM in general aired the better selection of movies. AMC is suddenly lacking in films and lacking in the income to cover the movies. Their response: go commercial and get the rights to air what they can. One thing I’ve noticed is they seem to have picked up all the movies that were parts of a syndication package and aired in the dead time spots on independant stations in the eighties and nineties (I mean, when they’re showing Sheena you know they’ve hit the bottom of the barrel).
How long until they have Running Scared, Gargoyles, and Toys in permanent rotation? When I think of the kind of syndication fodder JSG mentioned these films pop to mind. Oh, wait I almost forgot 52 Pick-Up!
The New AMC=Aggrevating Movie Garbage!
Thanks for the education, Just Some Guy.
I’m fortunate that my cable system offers TCM, and a couple of others that show the “oldies”. I would take Cary Grant and Leslie Caron any day over the crap that they’re showing now.
I went to it - I told them that AMC now stood for “American Movie CRAP.”
For the last few years, AMC ran a monsterfest marathon at the end of October, complete with the old Universal and Hammer monster movies and a fantastic interactive website with a trivia contest and great prizes. Last year, I was online all week playing “You don’t know Jack about Monsterfest,” and won an IPAC. This year we got faster internet connection just to improve game play.
This year, they ran a game that you could only play while simultaniously watching the 8:00 pm movie and then ran the complete series of Halloween movies. Ahhhhhhh! MY EYES!
My heart bleeds that I wasn’t home to watch the Godzilla films, during the day. It was the closest they got to quality programing. And no prize on earth could convince me to sit through Halloween IV.
AMC, tool of Satan.
This was a channel cool enough once upon a time to create Remember WENN.
I think they make the baby Jebus cry.
AMC used to be one of favorite channels, but I just don’t go there anymore. The last time I tried was during an Audrey Hepburn fest. Sabrina, Roman Holiday, Breakfast at Tiffany’s–who could resist? But I couldn’t take the commericial breaks every 8 minutes. Do the networks even break that often during a movie?
Especially irritating are the self-congratulatory promos: “Tell us what you think of the new AMC!” No, they don’t want to know what I think.
Thank goodness for TCM. I’ve been in Old Movie Heaven since our cable service finally started getting it about 1-1/2 year ago.
Hastur, I remember Remember WENN. I used to love that show.