I remember the networks played Steven Speilberg films like Jurrassic Park and ET. It was a big deal. The networks promoted them as “Thanksgiving Specials”. I still don’t know what ET has to do with Thanksgiving, but I still remember the TV Guide adverstisements with our favorite little extraterrestial pictured.
Of course, every Easter was “Wizard of Oz”. Every Sunday was “The Wonderful World of Disney” (I remember the first time I saw “Mary Poppins”, I was 6 and had a fever of 103). In the 80s, every Saturday was a big movie on HBO–I remember the first time Grease was on.
TV was more of an event then.
Mommy???
ETA: CalMeacham, I had forgotten about the Million Dollar Movie!
Sorry to see there are kids with similar memories. 
But hey! Didn’t we take you to see Death Race 2000 at the drive-in the following week? Or was it Night of the Living Dead? (One of those.)
Oh, man, do I feel old! I’ve lived through the birth, heyday, and death of the VCR.
As a teenager working at the local mall movie theater during high school I tried to get a co-worker to swap shifts with me. But “American Gigolo” was on TV that night and she wouldn’t give it up. Yes, I still remember that, Anna-Marie, wherever you are!
Ah, memories of childhood…
…even the theater is gone. Sigh.
I was going to mention this, because it wasn’t on network TV. Where I lived (NY Tri-state area) it premiered on WWOR channel 9 which was unprecedented. No major film had debuted on a non-network channel before.
It was almost totally uncut, they did take out the line when they were hunting where Axle asked “Fredo” (John Cazele) about catching his wife, “Sucking some forest ranger’s cock!”
I remember scanning the TV listings that came in the Sunday paper each week to see if ABC would be airing a James Bond movie on its Sunday night movie (or was it their Saturday night movie?) – if they were, I’d be jumping with excitement all day. We hardly went to see any movies when I was growing up, so watching them on TV was almost the only way we ever got to see them.
(It’s kind of funny that the link in the earlier post to the ABC Movie Special is for the James Bond film From Russia With Love. In the early 80s, one of the local art theaters was showing a special double-feature of From Russia With Love and Goldfinger. Being a huge JB fan, I of course had to go see them, which was the first time I’d ever seen them in their uncut version. Imagine my surprise to discover that the train compartment fight between 007 and Donovan Grant was a lengthly, exciting, and brutal fight that lasted several minutes, versus the 30 seconds or so in the ABC version. ABC’s version cut out pretty much everything but the start of the fight and the very end.)
Nobody else used to wait all year for the annual showing of the Rogers & Hammerstein Cinderella? The one with Leslie Ann Warren.
This was the one night of the year we got to stay up past our bedtime on a school night and eat dinner (TV dinners!) in front of the TV and have extra-cool snacks.
A Big Deal, in other words.
Well, one year – I was about the third grade, I think – I decided not to go right home after school like I was supposed to. I went over to a kid’s house instead (Shirley Barnett – I still remember her name) without telling my mom about it. I hung out at Shirleys for an hour or so, then walked home. I met my very-nearly-hysterical mother on the way – she was walking back and forth between our house and the school looking for me and was, literally, minutes away from calling the cops.
As it happens, that very night was Cinderella night. My punishment was that I had to eat dinner in the kitchen and go to bed at the normal time, missing The Big Event for that entire year. I had to lay crying in my bed, listening to the music from the living room, smelling the popcorn and hearing my kid brother and sister enjoying themselves. Trauma!
I remember waiting to see Rogers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, I loved that movie. Prince Charming was handsome.
I remember waiting to see “Heidi”, it was supposed to come on after My Grandpa was watching a Jets game. I used to wonder why he was cursing so bad when “Heidi” did come on. (I had the sound track on a 33 1/3 LP album.)
And CalMeacham, if you’re reading this again, I remember a whole lot of Vincent Price movies that scared the crap outta me. Remember Conquerer Worm?And the “Tingler”?
Yeah! Usually Big Jake, Rio Lobo, or Rooster Cogburn.
And the annual James Bond fest.
More clips of network movie openings and bumpers:
ABC "Movie of the Week"complete with theme by Burt Bacharach.
ABC Wednesday Night Movie (from around 1967).
Walt Disney’s intro to a 1964 airingof Alice in Wonderland on his Wonderful World of World of Color.
Not a movie, but a videotaped television production. Mary Martin’s Peter Pan was another like it.
I know about them, because they were always in Famous Monsters of Filmland, but I have to admit that I’ve not actually seen The Tingler. Oddly, a Chiller Theater site claims that the film ran there in the early seventies, but for the life of me I don’t remember it.
“The Conqueror Worm” is actually a pretty decent film. It’s not one of the Corman Price/Poe films, despite the title cribbed from Poe (deliberately, to foster the confusion. In the UK, its title was “The Winfinder General”). It’s one of very few films directed by that one guy.