In 2017 IMDB pulled the plug on its message boards. One of the most useful ones was “I Need to Know,” where you could post a fragmentary memory of a movie or TV program, and the experts could usually identify it pretty quickly.
I used that forum many times when someone on this page asked for a TV/Movie id and hit a brick wall. When IMDB closed the forums, they said that the new place to ask questions would be *community-imdb.sprinklr.com. It’s pretty good, but not all of the experts went along with the move. And there’s probably also been a fair amount of attrition due to mortality. But such is life. . . and death.
But now that site has announced that they will be closing the “I Need to Know” forum at the end of the month. No more questions, although they will preserve the ones already asked. They recommend asking AI instead.
[And I still have an unidentified animated short that remains unanswered after over 25 years!]
*Maybe. There might have been a different site between them.
I’ve got one 57 years old. I fear I will never know.
Other than that, this board is great for these questions. Everyone should come here! I’ve seen “I vaguely remember this movie, all I remember is some guy reading a book in a semi truck driving through Tennessee”* and in ten minutes you have the correct answer!
*not a real movie, or memory
If you need it, there’s always r/TipOfMyTongue on Reddit.
I hated that. I loved those message boards.
I did, too, but consider the headache of maintaining and moderating the board. If they had charged for membership in order to cover the cost of keeping the board open, I would have gladly paid it. Because I did use the board a lot and it was the place to find people who really knew their movies and TV shows. But for a free forum? Forget about it.
It probably still requires a lot of time and effort to keep it updated and as accurate as it is.
ChatGPT is pretty good for details on movies and TV shows.
I still use the IMDb every day, pretty much constantly whenever I’m watching TV. I always have it open to whatever show/movie I’m watching, and keep track of the actors, and especially the trivia. I’ve contributed quite a few items over the years to trivia and to goofs.
I liked them as well. They were great for questions I had about some television show I saw last night. I could post my question or comments here but often no one else saw it, but on the IMDB forums, I could be sure someone had and could offer an opinion.
Reddit does seem like a good place for this kind of thing. It’s not the best place to have conversations, like we do here, because of the format. But if you’re trying to get an answer to a question that’s usually a good place (depending on the quality of the particular subreddit of course).
This is the answer for these kinds of questions. If you want to know “What was that movie where this vaguely remembered thing happened”? post it at r/TipOfMyTongue
It’s worth mentioning that narrowing down virtually anything of which you have a half-remembered recollection – a movie, TV show, book, or historical event – is one of the things that AI is very good at. With the technology we have today, it seems almost quaint to rely on humans to jog our memories!
My memory of that message board was that 80% of all questions were either about The Lathe of Heaven, or Starchaser: The Legend of Orin.
The most common ones in the first couple of years were:
“What was the movie about the monster that caught on fire in salt water?”
“What was the movie about the giant turtle and the girl?”
“What was the movie that had a man that was part half-track?”
“What was the [old silent cartoon?] about a farmer and some mice?” (Memory is fuzzy on this one, as I never saw it.)
The first one about the monster baffled even the experts for over a year. Everyone remembered it, but nobody could think of the title until finally someone dug it out from an old TV guide.