I was surprised to see ABC running Who Framed Roger Rabbit on primetime last night, and said so to my wife, Pepper Mill.
“It’s summer and Sunday night. Nobody’s watching,” she replied.
Well, maybe, but that network prime time is still valuable. They had lots of newer Disney fare they could have run. In fact, I note that they deleted one scene deemed insensitive since its release (the Indian bullet giving a “war whoop” and smashing Eddie’s whiskey bottle with a tomahawk) by use of a strategic commercial break.
WFRR came out in 1988, thirty eight years ago. If they had run the original King Kong in prime time thirty eight years after its release it would’ve been on TV in 1971. There are special cases where networks would do that – The Wizard of Oz had a long afterlife as a yearly TV event. So has The Ten Commandments since the 1980s (It came out in 1956. When they ran it in prime time this year, that made it a seventy year old movie running in prime time on a major network – probably a record, especially considering that it’s a regular event). I suspect that Gone With the Wind was on track for the same kind of fate – people used to say “it would never be broadcast on TV”, but it was, first on HBO and few months later on NBC in 1976, where it achieved the highest ratings ever. CBS then bought the rights for twenty years of broadcasting it. Turner re-acquired the rights, but it might have returned to network TV had not changing attitudes toward the portrayals and apparent endorsement of pro-slavery views soured feelings for the film.
PBS and cable/streaming services certainly do show older films, but I think the major broadcast networks don’t show older stuff except on special occasions. I remember in the 1960s watching 1950s fare like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Rear Window in prime time on the networks, but they generally held out for movies only a few years old.