It was really big deal when they first ran a Bond film on TV. It was Goldfinger, and I think it was back in 1974. Shortly after that they all started showing up on TV (and I’d had to go to theaters to try and catch up on the Bond films before that).
Heck, I remember when they first showed Gone With The Wind on TV. People were still saying in my lifetime that “they’d never put that on TV”. Now they show it about once a year on a cable channel, and I think it’s pretty much ignored. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.
I don’t remember Jurassic Park being a big deal when it showed on TV. The last film I remember making a big splash was way’s back in 1982, when they showed The Deer Hunter on network TV, uncut and without commercials.
And, yeah, I remember watching New York’s (well, Secaucus NJ’s) WOR’s [NB]Million Dollar Movie**, which used to run the same film twice in a row early Saturday morning. It confused me about exactly where some movies started. And it’s forever connected in mmy head with the theme from “Gone with the Wind”, much more than that movie. I expect to see a clapboatrd rise up over the silhouette of Manhattan every time I hear that.
Yeah, about the only time the broadcast networks run a movie anymore is for that “broadcast premiere”, and even then, it’s usually only a movie that did big box-office (such as the Star Wars prequels, Harry Potter movies, etc.)
And, they’ll almost never run a movie more than once anymore, as repeat showings of a movie, no matter how big, are now the province of the cable channels.
I remember watching the “Disney Sunday Movie” and the ABC Sunday Night Movie. I’m sure my parents still have a box of VHS tapes somewhere with all the crap we taped off the tv, including Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Romancing the Stone, and various Disney features. Good to have on hand for snow days and sick days.
Gosh yes. That was my first husband’s favorite movie. I liked it as long as Yul Brynner was on the screen – what a powerful actor he was.
One of my least favorite TV movie memories is the kids settling down to watch The Muppet Movie. Their dad came home half-schnockered and made them go to bed because they hadn’t cleaned their rooms.
When my brother and I were kids, we considered the showings of The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as Special Days, equivalent to birthdays or Easter.
FOX STILL shows Jurassic Park at least once a year, usually on Sunday nights. Back when I still watched the Simpsons, I really started hating that movie.
Network TV & basic cable movies were the lowest-brow way of seeing something. Even when I was a kid, I wouldn’t bother…between the censorship (and scenes removed for time), pan&scanning and the commercials, it was like a chore just to watch. My family had a VCR before we had cable (one of those flip-up VCRs which you could also plug a camcorder lens into), so I could rent movies for as long as I could remember anyway.
I remember when the “New Season” issue of TV Guide (back when TV had an annual season) would list what major movies the networks were going to broadcast in the upcoming year.
I remember “made-for-TV” movies (some of which were quite good).
I remember the Four O’Clock Movie on Channel 11.
I remember my local PBS station having classic movie marathon weekends during pledge weeks and having to figure out which movies I should stay up late for.
I remember watching Silver Streak (still a favorite) and What’s Up, Doc? (not so much) every time CBS ran them on the Friday Night Movie. Probably twice each all through my childhood, but it feels now like I saw them dozens of times.
That’s just it. Watching movies on TV may have been a poor second to watching them in theatres but there was no third choice. When I grew up we didn’t have cable or VCR’s - you had to watch a movie when and where you had a chance to see it.
Ah yes, I remember fondly that every year, on one of the major holidays (Thanksgiving or Easter I think), “the Wizard of Oz” would be broadcast. While the extended family were gathered at one relatives’ house for dinner, the assembled youngsters would be running around screaming and carrying on. Finally, all the mothers would gather us together and say "Hey kids! Do you want to watch “the Wizard of Oz”? And we’d excitedly say yes, so they’d heard us into a back room, turn on the TV, and shut the door. It never occurred to me at the time why our parents (who normally complained that we watched too much TV) would WANT us to watch TV.
Years later, as an adult, I discovered that this was part of a large-scale plot! The movie always came on just a little after dinner, so the parents could round us up, plant us in front of the boob tube, and forget all about us while they had their cocktail hour and get licquored up. I can’t believe the networks weren’t in on this little scheme…
New York was a great place for catching movies on TV. They had WABC’s 4:30 movie on weekday afternoons when they showed the cheesy movies. I remember John Garfield’s “Between Two Worlds” and “A Summer Place” and “The Dumwich Horror”. I think it was either ABC or CBS that had movies on Saturday nights at 11:30 after the news. And there was Chiller Theater that played the horror movies and the the opening with the 6 fingered monster hand rising up out of the swamps.
Yes fond memories and also trauma. I remember waiting weeks for a cool movie to finally show up on TV only to be preempted by a sporting event. Now I hate sports anyway so imagine you waited weeks to see 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea only to have half the movie lost due to a fucking football game in over time! In the old days, early 70s once the film was gone you were out of luck.
Growing up in the 70s before VCRs I remeber all of these. Especially ones like Roger Moore James Bonds.
Most guys my age are immediately familiar with Planet of the Apes and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. And it sure wasn’t from seeing them at the theatre or watching them on VHS/DVD. We all saw them once a year on TV growing up.
Same goes for Wizard of Oz, James Bond, MelBrooks movies, Disney movies, etc.
The ABC movie uased to be “The Big Show” before it became The 4:30 Movie. It was a crapshoot what you’d get – sometimes it’d be a blockbuster like “The Agony and the Ecstacy” vcut into parts. Or it might be a bad print (often edited, to boot) of a Harryhausen classic like “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad” or “Jason and the Argonauts”. Or it might be Godzilla Week. Or a real loser like “The Killer Shrews” or “From Hell it Came”.
Chiller Theater seemed to own a short library of awful films that it showed over and over:
The Ape Man
The Cape Canaveral Monsters
The Black Sleep
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman
The Cyclops
The Neanderthal Man
Voodoo Island
Killers from Space
Plan Nine from Outer Space
Before they had the animated six-fingered hand, they used a montage of scenes from the movies:
The six fingered hand came later:
(By the way, Zackerley (John Zacherle), the host who cut himself in for (long pre-MST3K) comments, used to do the same thing for CBS TV’s Late Show before he went to WPIX.
WNEW Channel Five had Creature Feature, which ran the classic Universal movies like Dracula, as well as newcomers like The Monster that Challenged the World.
WOR, besides running Million Dollar Movie (“Brought to you by Miller High Life, the Champagne of Bottled Beer”) also ran Supernatural Theater. The show’s opening featured clips from Forbidden Planet, which wasn’t Supernatural (and I don’t recall seeing there). They showed films like Carnival of Souls and The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, both of which freaked me out as a kid.
When I was a kid, I remember the other big annual TV event besides Oz was the Mary Martin version of “Peter Pan”. I was pretty young when they stopped showing that. A few years back, I rented it… it was kind of an interesting experience. I remembered almost no specific content from it, but it did produce an odd sensation, like a memory of the feeling of watching it… a little like when you wake up from a dream and can’t remember anything but a feeling.
I also remember that it was always a big deal when one of the Disney animated features was shown on “Wonderful World of Color”.
As the various Christmas specials proliferated, the “classic” ones also became big deals, of course.
We considered ourselves blessed in Chicago because we had lots of UHF stations (plus WGN) that would show old movies mixed in among the pro wrestling. I remember the buzz that would go around my high school when a cool movie like The Great Escape or Psycho was going to be on Channel 32 that night. Miss it, and you’d have to wait a year or 18 months until they felt like showing it again.
