I miss the days when saying you were a movie buff meant something

  

For as long as I’ve been on my own, one of my favorite weekend rituals has been to set up camp on my couch, have plenty of food within arms reach and watch movies.  I’m partial to the older stuff (like on Turner Classic Movies) in the winter, and the independent and foreign films (on IFC) in the summer. 

Weekends are reserved for DVD rentals, which must always be accompanied by pizza!

And then last year, I got my nifty Nook HD Tablet (which doesn’t cease to amaze me), downloaded the Netflix app and for the paltry sum of $7.99 a month am now able to go to bed, plug in my earphones and have a million hi-def movies to pick from.  Ya gotta love technology.

But as much as I enjoy the low cost & convenience of it all, I think I miss the days when watching a favorite movie from your couch really meant something.  I’m not just talking before Netflix, but before the days of Blockbuster, when there was no such thing as renting videos.  You waited for movies to air on tv—or you bought them.

I came across this old advertisement recently and it immediately took me back to 1982, when I first saw it in the back of OMNI Magazine.  It was love at first sight.  (And yes, I’m sure that image of the USS Enterprise played a part too!)

At the start of the 1980s, videocassette recorders cost a thousand dollars, and were uncommon.  Even if you did have one, you had to buy the movies you watched and they were EXPENSIVE.  (A videocassette of “Superman” was a hundred bucks!)  When RCA Videodisc Players hit the market, they sold for less than half the price of a vcr, and boasted you could choose from “over 1500 titles, $30.00 or less.”

Still, 500 bucks for the player was a lot of money—especially when you had a take-home pay of 90.00 a week like I did.  I actually went to Signal Finance & borrowed the money just to buy this contraption.  It came with 3 free movies:  Rocky and 2 of my own choosing.  (I selected Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan and The Way We Were for my sister.)  I was in love, and over the next four years—from 1982 to 1986— somehow amassed a collection of around a hundred titles, including some movies for my sister Shawn.

This played at the beginning of every movie, letting you know you were part of an elite crowd; you owned an RCA Selectavision VideoDisc!

The discs looked similar to a vinyl record, locked in heavy plastic sleeves; you’d slide one into the player, pull the sleeve back out—then repeat the process to watch the second half of the movie on the other side.

The machine had no remote and if a movie was longer than 2 hours, it came on 2 discs.  (These things were heavy too—I think my collection of 100 movies probably weighed close to 75 lbs!)

That videodisc player became my pride and joy, and for those few years I can remember going without new clothes (or other such luxuries like food) just to get something like The Petrified Forest with Bette Davis or The Empire Strikes Back.  Sometimes a couple friends from work would stop over to see my latest titles.  (I can still remember my pal Brenda shuddering under a throw during Christine, or Pete and Kevin staring at Clockwork Orange with their mouths hanging open).

I think these two were my favorites, simply because of their covers: 

               

I bought this for Shawn one Christmas, a collection of Judy’s live performances and enjoyed it just as much as she did

I loved the MGM discs best—I owned a couple of their old musicals, but on Selectavision they had the best sci-fi!

     

All this & Kramer vs. Kramer too; Dustin Hoffman was all over these discs (at least the ones in my collection)

 

  

I’d only seen Mel Brooks “Young Frankenstein” until RCA Videodiscs came along; I’m embarrassed to say how many times I probably watched these two

     

And finally, my Star Trek collection:  the first 3 movies, and 12 tv episodes (two episodes per disc)

It was a fun ride while it lasted, but within a few years, prices on vcrs dropped pretty drastically and video rental places began poppiing up everywhere.  I knew it was just a matter of time before RCA pulled the plug on their discs, but for me it was just as well.  By 1986, I was done collecting movies and trying to figure out what I was going to do with my adult life.

FYI, being the nerd I am, I kept an updated inventory of my videodiscs and still have the list to this day.  Below is my complete collection—there’s a few klunkers here n’ there, but I bought many of these ‘sight unseen’.   

Nothing like the cinephile I am today, of course…