My story: I was looking up the TV film The Scarecrow" on the IMDb, and was lamenting that it was not available on video or DVD. Damn, I thought. I’d really like to see that, and now I guess I never will. Those are the breaks.
So today I was looking through my boxes and boxes of video, out of idle boredom (looking for something to watch). And, yeah, you guessed it. A tape of “The Scarecrow”. Taped in 1989. (I go way back in my video collection.) I had completely forgotten about taping this movie. COMPLETELY wiped out of my mind.
So imagine my delight at seeing the tape in my own collection! I am watching it now (Gene Wilder is pretty cool).
Anyone else have some suprisingly obscure or unexpected video (or DVD) in their collection? I’m sure I’m not the only one that is surprised and disturbed by the many completely forgotten (yet still treasured) items in their collections.
I’ll 'fess up. I do the same, dig through every once in a while, and find some forgotten gem. Or turkey, as the case may be.
Someone posted a question a while back about the flick Bad Manners a couple weeks back, which is at best an obscure title. So I hadda dig it up and watch it again. Funny and twisted, I grant you, but…
I know I’ve got a copy of a weird little bit of French (I think) animation called Strange Planet, or something to that effect, someplace around here. My memory’s shot to hell in a wicker bike basket this week, but that’s the title that keeps popping up in my head.
[sub]Not to mention a Godzilla movie marathon taped off of channel 11 (WPIX) out of NYC, back before it became a WB station.[/sub]
Every once in a while I come across my copy of Dark Star, John Carpenter’s first movie. I’ll put it on the shelf with the other videos, then it grows legs or the tape leprechauns steal it and take it back to their lair.
Okay, get this. My dad has over 4,000 videos in his collection (all taped off cable). He has 3 movies per tape, each tape numbered, and each movie on its own index card filed alphabetically. We HAVE TO CHECK THEM OUT and sign them back in when were done (thanks to my son, who loaned Sid and Nancy to a friend and never got it back). But it works really well! It’s more fun than Blockbuster and WAAAAAY more diverse. Anyway, to get back on track here, whenever we think of a movie we love, we just go to the card catalog and look it up. Keeps ya sane.
That’d be Fantastic Planet. It’s the sort of movie that’s hailed as a masterpiece of animation and science fiction by people who don’t know anything about animation or science fiction. My advise is, let it stay lost. Awful, awful movie.
I have videotapes (VHS and Beta) on shelves and in boxes scattered throughout two rooms of the house. I couldn’t even begin to guess how many there are. The collection dates back to the early 80s and includes movies and sets of TV series in various degrees of completion. Some are sorted and labelled, but most of them just have Post-It notes stuck on them and there are quite a few that are totally unlabelled.
I keep saying that when I retire I’m going to spend the first two months doing nothing but viewing, sorting, labelling and re-recording videotapes. I’m almost afraid to guess at what forgotten “treasures” I’m going to find, but off the top of my head I remember taping:
The “Father Dowling” mystery series (with Tom Bosley)
“The Charmings”
“Love, Sydney”
“Night Court”
“The Frugal Gourmet”
Just about every science fiction show aired during the eighties and nineties.
Umpty-ump TV movies, many of them never edited to take out the commercials.
Now that I’ve finally gotten a DVD player, I’ve started considering replacing most of the videotape collection (some of which is rather low-quality anyway, having been recorded under less than ideal conditions anyway) with DVDs. And when DVD recorders and discs come down to what I consider a reasonal figure, I’ll probably start re-recording some of it (particularly the Beta tapes).
Miller: Thanks mate, that’s the one. But I can’t let it stay lost, see, 'cause it’s on the same tape as my cable copy of H.O.T.S., and well… Somedays, ya just gotta watch a movie like that again. Well, unless I come across the tape of Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure/Ice Pirates/Wizards first.
LurkMeister: I’ve got an EP copy of the V miniseries… Umm, the second set of three movies, where they set up the even dumber regular TV series by letting the villain escape in a shuttle at the end… But the first two hour movie does have the commercials edited out.
[sub]Damn. The VCR I recorded that with had a plug in (to the VCR) remote, good only for pause/unpause. With a toggle slider instead of a pushbutton, yet. Got to be too much effort for a (13, 14? whenever) teenager to keep glued to the set, editing.[/sub]
I have a copy of Predator 2 on DVD. Which is odd considering Fox never released it on DVD in the USA. It’s a Hong Kong import. I also have Tales from the Crypt, Daemon Knight on DVD which is OOP.
Skeezix: A lot of my series tapes (including the Fr. Dowling and ST:NG) are in Beta because the VHS recorder I had at that time had a wired remote which got chewed up by one of the cats. It was easier to either use my Beta recorder with the full-function remote or record stuff on my VHS in SP mode and then transfer to the Beta later.
I’m sure I have all the V movies and probably most of the series on tape … somewhere.
I was just looking through one of the boxes and found a professional copy of A Polish Vampire in Burbank which I think I picked up cheap somewhere and have never watched.
OH MY GOD! I must have Multiple Personality Disorder and you’re one of my insiders! I too have thousands of videotapes (VHS and Beta) dating from the early '80’s, which includes movies and sets of TV series in various degrees of completion, some sorted and labeled, but a few hundred that are not labeled at all!
Shades of Sybil!!
Yeah, yeah, yeah…ah geez!
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WHEW!! Ok, now I know you’re not really me. I don’t have any of those things. I have stuff like Dr Whos, Due South, Our World, MST3K, Nova, Twilight Zone & The Outer Limits, ER, Chicago Hope, Cupid, Siskel & Ebert, How’d They Do That?, Academy Awards & Golden Globes, Twin Peaks, Understanding, Connections (the ORIGINAL), Story of English, dozens and dozens and dozens of skating tapes and on and on and on and on and on. Oh, and every Olympics since 1984. Summer and Winter.
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Same here.
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Yep, I’ve already given away most of my pre-recorded movies, after replacing them with DVDs. The ones I have left are either PAL or not available on DVD.
HA! Yeah, yeah yeah…OH YEAH! I’m chomping at the bit to get my hands on a decently-priced and reliable DVD recording system. I could reduce the thousands of videotapes to jewel boxes that would fit on 2 shelves. I HATE JACK VALENTI!!!
You guys are scaring me. Some of you are a little (and I emphasize little) worse than me.
Freaky, eh? I must be in there somewhere too—because I suffer frome the same problems (everything except for having Beta tapes). Oh wait—I think I have a Beta tape of “The Scarlett Pimpernel” (Anthony Andrews) and “A Tale of Two Cities” (Chris Sarandon) that a friend with a BetaMax taped for me.
My sister got a VHS VCR way back in the early '80s. I had a friend who had access to a VHS VCR even earlier than that, and she taped things for me (We were kids, we saved our babysitting money for VHS tapes, OK?). Therefore, I have tapes that go way back. It scares me. And yeah, I have tapes of hte '84 Olympics too. (I am from L.A., we were all thrilled that the Olympics were in town, what can I say?)
And some of the series you guys mention are familair. Of course, I have my own scary collection. Often, sandwiched between “legit” movies and TV shows, there would be excerpts of soap operas. I often put my soaps on timer to watch later, and they’d run until the very end of the tape. So if a show or movie ran short, I’d have old soaps filling the tail end of the tape. (I was quite the soaps fanatic back then—I finally had to go cold turkey several years ago.) So, after I saw “Scarecrow” the other night, I watched excerpts of the soaps “Santa Barbara” and “Edge of Night” (which starred, I might add, some familiar faces).
Oh, I forgot to mention—I added a 120 GB hard drive to my G4 PowerMac because I figure that I’ll eventually want to transfer some of my tapes to DVD or VCD or some digital variation, and I’ll need extra hard drive space to store all the stuff while I transfer it. I hope 120 GB will be enough! (Not that I intend to keep all of the kajillion tapes I have on my hard drive at one time!)
Twilight Zone, Outer Limits, Story of English, Connections, Cosmos, Diagnosis: Murder, the Bugs Bunny marathon from Cartoon Channel last year (waiting to be edited), The Dick Van Dyke Show (from a Nick at Night marathon).
I’m in the middle of rearranging two of the first floor rooms, partly so I can get my TV/VCR/DVD set up more conveniently and attempt to reduce the chaos of the videotape collection. I shudder to think what I’m going to find when I start unpacking some of the boxes.
yosemitebabe, a lot of my videotapes have tag ends of soaps on the end. I was once told that it was best to run a videotape through several record/play cycles before using it for a “permanent” recording - something about clearing loose bits of the magnetic coating IIRC - so I usually let my wife use them to tape her soaps before I used them for archive taping.
