When I was a teenager, it was entirely possible to know enough about an old movie to want to see it, yet never have the opportunity to do so. This was of course because prior to the advent of home video, the only way to see a movie not currently playing in theaters was to catch it on television. And since I’ve always had kind of oddball tastes in cinema, that meant scanning TV Guide as soon as it came in (plus the newspaper TV magazine in the Sunday paper) to see if anything worthwhile was scheduled for that week. I sometimes waited for years to see some films I’d heard about or seen once; it was probably ten years between the first and second times I saw Jesus Christ Superstar. And when I still lived with my folks, if a flick I wanted to see was playing in the wee small hours on a school night, I had to give it a pass because my mother was very strict about that. Even after the advent of VHS, movies were at first stupidly expensive (often $60 or more in ’80s dollars) until 1988, when Wal-mart ordered umpteen gajillion copies of E.T. and priced them at under ten bucks, which totally changed Hollywood’s greedy attitude about pricing. Then some movies never got a video release, which made them still difficult to get ahold of (a condition which still persists today). But there are some movies which, despite my wanting to see them for decades and their being readily available on DVD, I’ve somehow never managed to see. Recently, I put several of them on my Amazon wishlist, and a new reader bought both Animal Farm (1954), which I’ve known about since the early ’90s, and Alice in Wonderland (1933), which I’ve known about since the late ’70s (he also got me a hearthrug, but that’s not as much fun for me to write about or you to read about). I’m excited about finally getting to see both of them, and extra-excited about sharing them with Grace, so please believe me when I tell you that I really do want everything on my wishlist, even if it’s inexpensive or seems silly to you!
Archive for January 30th, 2024
Diary #709
Posted in Diary, Miscellaneous, tagged Hollywood, imaginative fiction, Presents on January 30, 2024| Leave a Comment »
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