Before VCR's

[Dennis Toy]

Networks tended to only show movies that were either considered "classics" (like Miracle on 34th Street), or the blockbuster films from the year or 2 before. Repeating a movie within a year was almost unheard of, and each network had a major movie on Saturday and Sunday night (damn, I can still remember the intro music and visual sequence ABC used for their weekend movies, with the stars turning into lines that would form the logo...).

it was called the "Star Tunnel" sequence, it was used on ABC from 1981-1988 and you could see that on this called called the 80's tv theme supersite.

[Patrick Degan]

I grew up with the Sunday Morning Movie on one of our prime local channels —always the last thing I got to watch before Noon Mass and it had a wonderfully eclectic mix of SF classics, Japanese monster films, and some of the cheesiest Grade-Z turkeys ever made. How can you find fault with a movie rotation that included War Of The Worlds, Godzilla, The Day The Earth Stood Still, Journey To The Centre Of Time, Zontar: The Thing From Venus, and Creation Of the Humanoids?

The major networks all had big movie nights, especialy on Sundays. ABC ran the available 007 movies while CBS got the Planet Of The Apes films. NBC hosted the first network-TV airing of 2001: A Space Odyssey. And you always looked forward to the annual "big event" movies: The Wizard Of Oz, It's A Wonderful Life, and The Ten Commandments (I can still smell the aroma of corned beef and mashed potatoes which permeated the house after cooking all afternoon on Palm Sunday).

We had a local horror-host, Morgus the Magnificent, who aired SF/horror movies and the odd Star Trek episode while, with the assistance of his hulking, mute, hooded henchman Chopsley, performed experiments fated always to end in disaster. And those were also the days when UHF TV was totally cool. They put on everything and anything to fill time and always had wonderfully bizarre programme lineups.

In those days, you knew your favourite movies and shows would be rerun. A show would be taken off and "rested" for six months or a year so that expectation would build up for its return. And you simply waited.

At the end of high school, I discovered the local rep cinema and lived there on weekends for six years. The old Pitt Cinema was where my love of movies was truly cultivated. They ran everything: SF/horror clasics, vintage cartoons, Marx Brothers festivals, Bogart festivals, Woody Allen festivals. It was the first place I saw Das Boot, The Road Warrior, Wizards, La Cage Aux Folles, Andy Warhol's 3D Dracula, and Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior. It was the first place I got to see Casablanca, Gone With The Wind, and Dr. Strangelove on the big screen. Then the bastards turned it into a cheesy dollar-house and cut its two theatres into six, and a few years after that, the wrecking ball got the old girl.

We've got VCRs and DVDs and TiVO and soon cheap DVD-Rs/DVD-RAMs but it's just not the same. The cool pop-culture we used to have is gone now. TV is just turning to shit —cable as well as broadcast. The independent movie house and even the dollar cinema is no more and there's something a bit sterile about the modern megaplex experience —not to mention that you pay $7 to see mostly crap or blah films and summer is just an action/adventure toxic waste dump. True, we can now get any movie or favourite TV show we want, watch them any time we want.

But it's just not the same.