I can’t recall my family having obscure movies. Don’t remember what it’s actually about, but I at least remember we had one Home On The Range VHS. Don’t recall ever watching it once, but this post made it come to the forefront of my memory
Not a movie, exactly, but we had the VHS of the extended version of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and the making of the video. It was over an hour long. And amazing.
My movie was princess and the goblin. I watched it on a 10x10 in monitor that had the VHS in while I worked at my family’s business where I did labor at 10 years of age 30+ hours a week. Good times
Oh my goodness, I remember for some reason people kept giving or lending my parents all these long play VHS tapes full of movies. Random video mix tapes where you didn’t know what you’d get next. Now and then some of them had kid movies (like the Sesame Street movie, Follow That Bird and there was at least one muppet movie), but most of them were PG and occasionally R-rated stuff, and I still watched it (except the R-rated stuff, but thankfully they were mostly pretty tame as I recall). I think my fave childhood movie was always on TV though: The Goonies.
Mine was The Point. 🎵 Me and my Arrow 🎵
I tried to watch Jingle all the way with my kids today. They pointed out how stupid that movie is, but I didn’t have a lot of choices back then. I don’t miss those days of shitty choices.
My daughter is 19 and that’s one of her favourite Christmas movies.
I want to watch it every Christmas but my wife objects.
I suggested it last year for my family. No one (wife nor kids) wants to watch it this year.
Ours was “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”. I don’t know why nor where but one day my step dad showed up with this movie for us. It was the only “kids” movie we ever own and we watched it a 1.000 times. looking back it wasn’t as inocent as I thought at the time, but it was the 90s. Another movies we loved?! Howard the Duck ( the movie where Marty Mcfly mom fucked a duck) So yeah the 90s were kind of weird and had a lot of inapropriate movies for kids.
Haha I was just talking to someone the other day about how much I loved Howard the Duck growing up. She was like “uhh… that wasn’t really a kid’s movie, was it?” Maybe not. Maybe it and similar movies are the reason us millennials are the way we are.
For some reason, I had the book version at a young age and I’m not sure if it was a weirder experience than actually watching the movie.
Me too! Love me some Howard!
Oh come on, Down and Dirty Duck, by The Turtles, was a masterpiece that literally didn’t show any possible nudity, since it was animated. That was a totally appropriate animated film for families. The main character was specifically interested in creating his own offspring as soon as possible!
/Do I need this?
Also: Who Framed Roger Rabbit was totally a documentary about the oil companies forcing the US into a car-centric society.
More specifically General Motors buying and dismantling city rail lines in order to sell more buses.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Idk how obscure, but “Puff the Magic Dragon” was definitely a weird one for me. Kinda glad it got lost (probably thrown out, who knows). Almost feels like a fever dream, so much so, that I had to double check the movie even existed
One of the things I put on when my son refuses to go to sleep- 5 minutes in, he’s out cold.
Lol, that’s pretty ingenious. It’s soothing and the animation is kinda boring, especially the beginning. Bravo
In the land called Honoli!
Full-disclosure… I found it online and am about to re-watch it. Loved it as a kid, but does it hold-up? 23 minutes will tell
Edit: It… oddly holds up for me lol. Just as weird as I remembered, but kinda sweet (I truly thought when they sang “Honoli” they were saying “Harmony”. It’s been a long time)
I basically knew every line of Space Jam by heart. I even knew when to look for the funny parts of the VHS when rewinding it and watching the movie in reverse.
Ah yes, bootleg Harry and the Hendersons.
Here were mine:
- Spaceballs
- They Live
- Escape from New York
- Hellraiser
- Heavy Metal
- Conan the Barbarian
- Dune
- Lifeforce
(forgot a few)
That’s all good shit tho
We had to watch garbage like “the Hippie Princess” Spanish version. Crispin. All these public domain golden era cartoon compilations on VHS. And whatever other bootleg VHS tapes we got.
God I love Heavy Metal, shaped my childhood. Spaceballs is a close second.
That’s a sweet assortment of movies.
Upside of being a GenX latchkey kid, even if I was born in the tail end of that generation. My parents didn’t really give a shit what movies I rented as long as they weren’t pornos. Not that they looked too close. I got away with renting Caligula by passing it off as a sequel to Masterpiece Theater’s I, Claudius.
Totally normal childhood movies 😬
Spaceballs is a legit classic, but I probably shouldn’t have been watching it when I was 7. My mom let us watch a ton of Mel Brooks movies for some reason, Blazing Saddles was another family favorite.
I would also add that if you had a neighbor or relative that had HBO, you’d be able to record on VHS a set of movies playing at that time. For many of us this may have been only a few months/years of movies. That set of movies would grow on you because thats all you had to watch on demand. Genre, theme, high budget, low budget, it didn’t matter. Someone close to you popped in a 6 hour tape one day and pressed “record” before they went to work. You got the one movie you were hoping for and whatever came afterward.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
And it probably started with this
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I remember HBO used to have a new movie on at something like 6:00PM every Friday. But I didn’t know what the movie would be ahead of time. So I would start the VCR recording as soon as I saw that screen at 6:00, then would wait patiently to see what the movie was that I was recording, hoping it was gonna be something good
It did and it was magical!
I remember thinking about how amazing the animators were that made the HBO logo spinning into frame toward the end. Turns out, they actually build a big chrome logo and shot it with practical photography as detailed in this Behind the Scenes program..
The method of creating the lights inside the O knocked me out. I miss the ingenuity behind practical effects.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Turns out, they actually build a big chrome logo and shot it with practical photography
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Goooooooood morning Vietnammmmmm
The Jungle Book starring Sabu. The only VHS my family owned from when I was 5 - 9.
Beetlejuice? Beetlejuice.
Beetlejuice.
I have a core memory of seeing this movie for my birthday when I was 6. God damn 80s movies were good at traumatizing a whole generation.
Same. For me it was Robocop 2 in about 2nd or 3rd grade at a birthday party sleepover.
