How bad film watching used to be

Every now and then I see people reminisce about the halcyon days of the video store and the cinema experience pre multiplexes. I do it myself often. How it was so much better than relying on Netflix. How we have too much choice now and how it has spoiled us. How film watching was just so much more exciting back then. Maybe it was but one thing I do know is that a lot of people have forgotten about the crappier aspects of being a film fan in the 1980's and 90's.

1) Pan and scan copies of our favourite films. Look at the picture below. Luke Skywalker staring at the twin suns of Tatooine from his Uncle Owen's farm. A beautifully composed image. Now look at the picture below it. Nearly half of it missing. This is what we had to put up with watching Star Wars on VHS and TV back in the day before DVD. Nearly every film was shown like this. Carefully created cinematography ruined by the crappy technology of the 1980's and 90's. The odd film was of course released in widescreen but then you had to put up with questions about why half the screen was taken up with black bars. A lose lose situation right there.

2) Censorship. Always a nuisance. Because Ireland and the UK are a small market they are grouped together meaning we had to put up with videos with cuts enforced by the British Board of Film classification. I remember being baffled by the fact that my copies of Cliffhanger and Under Siege were a lot different to the versions I saw in the cinema. It just wasn't fair. It still happens but it's a lot rarer. 

3) Dirty video tapes. No no not Electric Blue 44 or The Devil And Miss Jones. Actual dirty tape in the cassettes. It was a killer when you legged it home with Stop Or My Mom Will Shot and the tape banjaxed the tracking on your panasonic player so badly that Stallone looked like Chunk from The Goonies.

4) Only being able to tape what you were watching. This one was a huge nuisance and could only be avoided if you had a technical wiz for a parent. It was always mighty craic enduring the icy stare only an Irish mother can muster when you were watching and taping Turner And Hooch and she was missing Leave It To Mrs O'Brien.

5) Fleapit cinema's. Dirty, manky deathtraps with mysteriously stained screens. Sitting in a cloud of smoke watching a film you could barely seen let alone hear. Leaning back and staring up at Young Einstein being projected through the mist of 100 Benson & Hedges. Backbreaking chairs and the sound of rodents scurrying around underneath you. 2 Screens, if you were lucky, showing films that came out 6 months beforehand and the picture full of scratches and tears from being passed around 20 other cinemas before it came to yours. People call modern multiplex's soulless but at least you aren't risking your life and your eyesight to go there.

6) TV edits. There was no better way to ruin the magic of a movie than to cut whole chunks out of it or dub ridiculous voices over the original soundtrack to remove profanity. RTE tended to be good at showing movies intact but BBC and ITV were notorious for their butchery of movies. For example the time they showed Robocop at 3pm on a Saturday in a version made almost nonsensical by editors, that was a fun watch. Below is a fine (albeit extreme) example of the art of killing a film.




7) All copies of a film being rented out. This sucked. You gathered your pennies and ran to the shop to rent out The Pelican Brief only to find that every single copy has been snapped up already and you end up sullenly walking home clutching a copy of The Flintstones or Mighty Ducks 2 knowing full well you are in for an evening of disappointment.

8) Unraveled tapes. You've just finished Legends Of The Fall. It was pretty good. That fella with the long hair is going to be a big star one day you think as you press eject. The tape pops out, you go to pick it up.....but wait, something's wrong, it seems to be stuck so you yank it out and trailing behind it is 3 feet of tape. Well fuck it anyway. Which brings me to number 9.

9) Fines. Late returning your tapes? Pay a fine. Tape not rewound? Pay a fine. Tape damaged? Pay a fine. Damaged case? You get the idea. Have a bad day and your trip to the video shop could get expensive very quickly.

10) If a film you wanted to see wasn't available on VHS you were screwed. In the days before Netflix, Shudder, Mubi, Filmstruck and speciality labels like Arrow and Shameless any movie away from the mainstream was hard to come by. There was the off chance a film you wanted to see might get a late night showing on RTE2 or CH4 but other than that you were goosed. Now we can just press a button.

In fairness we have it great these days. The thrill of discovering new things might be fading but it's very easy to be a film fan in 2018.