Here’s a snippet from a recent phone conversation with my dad…
“Chris, I’m going to need your help with moving some things around when you come down to visit next time, so maybe you can make it over here a little bit earlier than usual.”
“What’s that Pop?”
“Well, one of my Betamaxes is on the flits, and I need to get it out of the entertainment center, but I can’t seem to lift it out of the cabinet and get it unplugged at the same time. The damn thing is awkward.”
“Ok Pop. No problem.” Hey, lifting heavy things is one of the three things I do exceedingly well (the other two being getting things from the top shelf and unscrewing tight lids off jars).
I can remember a window of time in my life growing up when my family was what was considered by our neighbors, hi-tech. This period of time was from 1978 to about 1980 or 81 and was limited to realm of home entertainment. We were the first family in my neighborhood growing up on the glorious Westside to get a VCR. In fact, we got two. Specifically, my dad bought shiny, new top-loading, big button Betamaxes (What’s the plural of Betamax anyway? Betami?)
This is not to say that before 1978 my family was behind the times when it came to home entertainment. My dad (aka Pop) has been a huge film fan, movie nut, film-o-phile his entire life. The McC family was the only one on the block to have our own projector. Ok, ok nearly everyone back then had some sort of home movie projector that would be perfectly good for Super 8 type home movies. My dad had one of those too, but he also had a 16mm film projector and a screen. My earliest memories of the birthday parties my parents would hold for me at the house as a kid all involved pitchers of sugary kool-aid, cakes, piñatas and movie shorts run on the projector. My dad had on film at the time old Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy shorts as well as Warner Brothers cartoons and this would serve to entertain the rowdy sugar-high crowd of my playmates invited over for the day.
I was taught at a very, very young age how to thread a movie projector… a skill that proved exceedingly handy in my 2nd grade classroom at Clover Ave Elementary School. My teacher, Mrs. Freed, would always struggle with setting up the projector from the AV Room whenever an educational film had to be shown in class. Me, never being a particularly shy sort (surprised?) would always step up and do it, much to my teacher’s amazement, in no time flat (the secret is to make a good loop… lose the loop and the film flickers). Does that make me the teacher’s pet? I know she always reported to my mother on parent-teacher day that she just didn’t know what she’d do without me to help w/ the AV equipment.
We had to have two (at least two, more followed as the years went by) Beta machines in the McC household because, as my dad would quickly tell you, there’s no point at all in just having one. If you taped something off television, unless you had two machines wired together, there was just no way to go back and effectively zap out the commercials. Sure, when you taped something live you could always pause the recording whenever the station broke for commercial, but this was before the days when a remote control was included equipment with any electronic home entertainment device. Pausing the recording would require you to get off the couch, dodge the corner of the coffee table, and physically depress the large tooth-like pause button on the top of the machine and then wait for the commercials to end before depressing the button again to resume recording. All in all, the process made watching and recording a program a laborious exercise in agility and focus.
My dad quickly became the undisputed master of this little known martial art. The Betamaxes were wired together and setup in the den in the back of our house (which was actually, more in the front, but that’s a whole other story). Very quickly, Pop began his Beta tape collection. Every week, he would pour over the TV guide that came with the Sunday Los Angeles Herald Examiner and circle all the movies he wanted to record. Mostly, these were old movies that ran on local all-night movie programs like Movies ‘til Dawn or the Late-Late Movie. Like I said, Pop is a huge old movie geek. So, my dad would set the timer on the Betamax and record the movie while our family slept. Then, at some undefined point in the future, my dad would go back and pop the tape in Betamax number two in his configuration, and a fresh tape in Betamax number one, and re-record himself the movie without the commercials in it. This was achieved by synching up the two machines, and then pausing the fresh recording whenever a commercial was reached. He would then, with lightning like efficiency, backup the new recording whenever a commercial was reached to the exact spot where the station went to commercial and pause it. Then, he would resume recording as soon as the movie resumed after the break.
Is my description of this process making any sense? The important thing to know is that the end result is a commercial free recording of the movie. I can’t even venture a guess as to the number of Cal Worthington (and his dog Spot) commercials my dad personally sent to the video graveyard. Pop would then make a label for the tape on his Remington typewriter that included a) the title of the movie, b) the star(s) of the film, and the running time because often times he was able to fit more than one movie on each tape. After that, the tape was added to a numbered box and noted on “The List.” The List was my dad’s way of going back and finding a tape if he wanted to re-watch a movie in his collection. There was little rhyme or reason to it. It was purely chronological. Like I said at the beginning of this tale, hi-tech in my house was strictly in the area of home entertainment. The List was a handwritten log of the contents of each box in the collection.
That wouldn’t have been so bad if there were just a few boxes of movies in my dad’s library, but that’s just not how Pop operates when it comes to movies. He is serious about his collection. Beta tapes were bought by the box, and with 15 tapes in a box, often times two or three movies on a tape, just finding the title and correct box number on The List could require an investment of time nearly equal to the running time of the movie you were searching for. Before you could say “Ticonderoga,” Pop had filled ten boxes with movies. Ten became twenty and then thirty, and then we got cable television and, from there, the whole situation grew exponentially and then spiraled out of control. It wasn’t until the early 90’s that The List was retired and converted to an alphabetical, handwritten card catalog (Let’s not bring up computers, I did mention that the McC family hi-tech period ended sometime around 1981). By this time there were over 170 boxes of movies in Pop’s collection (15 tapes per box…. 2 or 3 movies per tape… you do the math).
My parents were pretty lenient in the discipline department. There weren’t many rules in the McC household that were consistently enforced. I can’t remember being disciplined very much as a child, not that I didn’t deserve it. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to many of my readers. However, the one sure fire way to incur the Wrath of Pop was to mess with the television or the Betamax when the timer was set to record something. That was an offense punishable, not by grounding, extra chores, death or dismemberment, but by constant reminding by Dad that you once were so stupid as to have messed with his machines and screwed up his recording.
“Look Chris, I’m setting the Beta machine to record a Hopalong Cassidy western in the middle of the night tonight on the Superstation.”
“Ok Pop.”
“Well, don’t touch it.”
“I won’t.”
“Well, last time I tried to record something, you did and I missed Three Men From Texas.”
“That wasn’t me. Besides that was a month ago and you’ve recorded two whole boxes of movies since then.”
“That’s beside the point. You’ve screwed up perfectly good Westerns for me before and you’re bound to do it again if I don’t tell you. You don’t know what a good Western is.”
“Are there any bad Westerns, Pop?” (In case you’re wondering, Pop’s answer to that question is, “Not very many.”)
My mother and father rarely argued. I thought this meant they were a happy couple… at least happier than my friends’ parents who would argue openly when there was company over. Of course, this was something I was wrong about. Among the only times I can remember my parents raising their voices at each other when I was a kid was if my mother would “accidentally” record over one of my dad’s movies with her soap operas. My mom always liked to watch her soaps, but as my family grew (I have three younger siblings), the demands on her time during the afternoons when the soaps were on became too great for my mother to be able to keep up with them. She got herself in the habit of popping a tape in the Betamax every day at noon on Ch 7 to catch All My Children, One Life to Live and General Hospital. Dad gave her a couple tapes specifically for this purpose. Mom had the system down. She’d tape her shows, and then fall asleep on the couch watching them after the kids were all put down to bed. The next day she’d simply record over the previous days episodes and the cycle of her daily ritual was renewed. The Betamax was another household appliance for her that allowed her to chauffer three screaming kids (four screaming kids if I was along for the ride) around town to various organized activities and then have her shows when she had time for them (DVR anyone?).
The Betamax was much more than another household appliance to my dad. It was the center of his entertainment world. Occasionally, Mom would mistakenly grab a tape that was not authorized by Dad for soap opera use. Invariably, this would be a tape with a movie on it that hadn’t been watched yet. When Pop would settle in to watch what he thought would be his movie and discovered instead the melodrama surrounding the goings on of Port Charles or Pine Valley the house would be filled with angry screams.
“Goddamnit Barb (Barb was my mother’s hated ‘pet’ name), you recorded over my Western with your damn soaps.”
“Well you try to getting the kids off to school, pre-school, Mommie and Me classes and t-ball and see how well you do at it.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“I don’t see why it isn’t? You could never handle all the things that go into my day.”
“Well, that’s not my damn job.” (There was rarely cursing allowed in my house, but as soon as a Betamax was messed with it was open season on the damn, damned damning).
It was one thing if the soaps were recorded over one of Dad’s movies from the beginning of tape. It was a whole other thing if Mom didn’t rewind the tape all the way back to the beginning before recording “her stories.” Dad would be 20 minutes into Take Me Back to My Boots and Saddles or Deep in the Heart of Texas and then suddenly, the tape would flicker and resume with Erica Kane’s dilemma of the day in Pine Valley or the trials of Luke and Laura. That’s when things would really get heated. It was beyond Dad’s comprehension and his rage would erupt from the back of the house (which was really more towards the front, but that’s another story). This offense was always considered intentional by my father and how anyone with half a brain could do something so malicious was beyond forgiveness. I never saw it in such pre-meditated, black and white terms. You try packing a two-year old, a four-year old, a six-year old and a moody 14-year old (yours truly) around town and see how many times in a row you can a) stick the right tape in the Betamax and, b) remember to rewind it back to the beginning before you hit the record button and rush out the door. Technically, even that statement is wrong. Tapes were to be rewound in the special Beta accessory, the rewinder (ours was a Batmobile).
Fortunately, for me, one of the first movies my dad recorded off television was The Guns of Navarone starring Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn. It was in Box #1. I was in about the second grade at the time, and this was the coolest thing ever. I watched this movie over and over again. I memorized it. “Remember… I speak German… perfect.” I wore out the tape. My dad had to record it again, and I think I wore out that tape too. My other favorite movie at the time, also in Box #1, was the Sean Connery, James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice (I know, I know… not the most well-known or highly regarded Bond film… but it’s still a good one… check it out). My friends from the neighborhood would come over to my house to play and, because the VCR was still an exotic, “new-fangled” device, often times we would watch a movie… which I would pick and it would always be either Guns of Navarone or You Only Live Twice. It never dawned on my 2nd grade mind at the time, but my teachers at Clover Ave Elementary must have thought me quite the odd nut. I mean, how many kids, when picking sides for kickball, choose their friends by shouting out, “Your by standing days are over! You’re in it now, up to your neck!” Or, would take a sip of their chocolate milk at recess and then loudly proclaim, “Yuk! Siamese vodka!”
In the early 80’s, a war was declared. This war was waged not with lead and lives but with different sized video cassettes that were not compatible. This was the format war between Beta and VHS. By this point, Pop was already firmly entrenched in the Beta camp with its smaller (physically) sized tapes and higher quality recordings. My dad saw little chance for VHS to prevail, so he saw no reason whatsoever to invest in the redundant technology. I don’t need to tell any of you how that war ended up. As the years have gone by, Beta products (tapes, recorders, parts) have become harder and harder to come by. Still my dad has stuck by his Betamaxes. Considering the size of his collection, what choice did he have? In fact, his assortment of Beta products has expanded as home electronic stores liquidated their Beta products, my dad was there to swoop in and buy it all up. As of this writing, my dad has seven Betami in the house in various states of repair. At least three of the machines are working. I assume the rest are being scavenged for useful parts. He also has two Beta tape rewinders and several boxes left of blank tapes… and one VHS machine.
There have been some lasting benefits of my father’s late 70’s one-time dive into the hi-tech swimming pool. Pop has literally thousands of movies, almost all of them recorded off television, almost all of them pre-1970 titles, in his Beta collection. Ok, there may be a few (hundred) too many Westerns for my taste, but with numbers that huge, there have got to be countless major and minor classics in the lot. These days, I have Tivo. Every month, Pop pours over his cable guide and gives me two or three titles running on TCM (the BEST channel on your cable system btw) to set my timer for. He never picks major classics. He won’t call and remind me to Tivo Casablanca or Out of the Past, but he will remind me to record things like The Spiral Staircase, The Naked Prey or Jubal. Have you heard of any of these? I hadn’t, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t thoroughly enjoy every one of them. We’ve been doing this for close to two years now with the classics and he has yet to steer me wrong. I wish I could explain how he’s dragged me to see Rocky Balboa, National Treasure 2 and Valkyrie in the theater on Christmas Day the last three years, but like the den in the front of the house, that’s another story.
Prior to DVD and DVR, I would often times bring him blank VHS cassettes (I made my VCR purchase after the winner of the format war was declared) and ask him to fill them with movies. Rarely, I’d ask him for a specific title, rather I’d generally just ask for a genre. “Here are three tapes. Record me some horror movies.” Then I’d get back three tapes filled with the creepiest atmospheric horror movies you can possibly imagine… all from the 1930’s or 40’s. My roommates and I, through the years, have had our minds blown with the movies he’s passed along to me. The added bonus for me is when these are old recordings from his collection and every 20 or 30 minutes the logo of a now defunct LA TV station would appear in the bottom corner of the screen… KHJ 9 or KCOP 13. It’s then I’m teleported in that moment back to that brief window in time when my family was THE hi-tech family on the block with the shiny new Betamaxes.
“Chris, I’m going to need your help with moving some things around when you come down to visit next time, so maybe you can make it over here a little bit earlier than usual.”
“What’s that Pop?”
“Well, one of my Betamaxes is on the flits, and I need to get it out of the entertainment center, but I can’t seem to lift it out of the cabinet and get it unplugged at the same time. The damn thing is awkward.”
“Ok Pop. No problem.” Hey, lifting heavy things is one of the three things I do exceedingly well (the other two being getting things from the top shelf and unscrewing tight lids off jars).
I can remember a window of time in my life growing up when my family was what was considered by our neighbors, hi-tech. This period of time was from 1978 to about 1980 or 81 and was limited to realm of home entertainment. We were the first family in my neighborhood growing up on the glorious Westside to get a VCR. In fact, we got two. Specifically, my dad bought shiny, new top-loading, big button Betamaxes (What’s the plural of Betamax anyway? Betami?)
This is not to say that before 1978 my family was behind the times when it came to home entertainment. My dad (aka Pop) has been a huge film fan, movie nut, film-o-phile his entire life. The McC family was the only one on the block to have our own projector. Ok, ok nearly everyone back then had some sort of home movie projector that would be perfectly good for Super 8 type home movies. My dad had one of those too, but he also had a 16mm film projector and a screen. My earliest memories of the birthday parties my parents would hold for me at the house as a kid all involved pitchers of sugary kool-aid, cakes, piñatas and movie shorts run on the projector. My dad had on film at the time old Three Stooges and Laurel and Hardy shorts as well as Warner Brothers cartoons and this would serve to entertain the rowdy sugar-high crowd of my playmates invited over for the day.
I was taught at a very, very young age how to thread a movie projector… a skill that proved exceedingly handy in my 2nd grade classroom at Clover Ave Elementary School. My teacher, Mrs. Freed, would always struggle with setting up the projector from the AV Room whenever an educational film had to be shown in class. Me, never being a particularly shy sort (surprised?) would always step up and do it, much to my teacher’s amazement, in no time flat (the secret is to make a good loop… lose the loop and the film flickers). Does that make me the teacher’s pet? I know she always reported to my mother on parent-teacher day that she just didn’t know what she’d do without me to help w/ the AV equipment.
We had to have two (at least two, more followed as the years went by) Beta machines in the McC household because, as my dad would quickly tell you, there’s no point at all in just having one. If you taped something off television, unless you had two machines wired together, there was just no way to go back and effectively zap out the commercials. Sure, when you taped something live you could always pause the recording whenever the station broke for commercial, but this was before the days when a remote control was included equipment with any electronic home entertainment device. Pausing the recording would require you to get off the couch, dodge the corner of the coffee table, and physically depress the large tooth-like pause button on the top of the machine and then wait for the commercials to end before depressing the button again to resume recording. All in all, the process made watching and recording a program a laborious exercise in agility and focus.
My dad quickly became the undisputed master of this little known martial art. The Betamaxes were wired together and setup in the den in the back of our house (which was actually, more in the front, but that’s a whole other story). Very quickly, Pop began his Beta tape collection. Every week, he would pour over the TV guide that came with the Sunday Los Angeles Herald Examiner and circle all the movies he wanted to record. Mostly, these were old movies that ran on local all-night movie programs like Movies ‘til Dawn or the Late-Late Movie. Like I said, Pop is a huge old movie geek. So, my dad would set the timer on the Betamax and record the movie while our family slept. Then, at some undefined point in the future, my dad would go back and pop the tape in Betamax number two in his configuration, and a fresh tape in Betamax number one, and re-record himself the movie without the commercials in it. This was achieved by synching up the two machines, and then pausing the fresh recording whenever a commercial was reached. He would then, with lightning like efficiency, backup the new recording whenever a commercial was reached to the exact spot where the station went to commercial and pause it. Then, he would resume recording as soon as the movie resumed after the break.
Is my description of this process making any sense? The important thing to know is that the end result is a commercial free recording of the movie. I can’t even venture a guess as to the number of Cal Worthington (and his dog Spot) commercials my dad personally sent to the video graveyard. Pop would then make a label for the tape on his Remington typewriter that included a) the title of the movie, b) the star(s) of the film, and the running time because often times he was able to fit more than one movie on each tape. After that, the tape was added to a numbered box and noted on “The List.” The List was my dad’s way of going back and finding a tape if he wanted to re-watch a movie in his collection. There was little rhyme or reason to it. It was purely chronological. Like I said at the beginning of this tale, hi-tech in my house was strictly in the area of home entertainment. The List was a handwritten log of the contents of each box in the collection.
That wouldn’t have been so bad if there were just a few boxes of movies in my dad’s library, but that’s just not how Pop operates when it comes to movies. He is serious about his collection. Beta tapes were bought by the box, and with 15 tapes in a box, often times two or three movies on a tape, just finding the title and correct box number on The List could require an investment of time nearly equal to the running time of the movie you were searching for. Before you could say “Ticonderoga,” Pop had filled ten boxes with movies. Ten became twenty and then thirty, and then we got cable television and, from there, the whole situation grew exponentially and then spiraled out of control. It wasn’t until the early 90’s that The List was retired and converted to an alphabetical, handwritten card catalog (Let’s not bring up computers, I did mention that the McC family hi-tech period ended sometime around 1981). By this time there were over 170 boxes of movies in Pop’s collection (15 tapes per box…. 2 or 3 movies per tape… you do the math).
My parents were pretty lenient in the discipline department. There weren’t many rules in the McC household that were consistently enforced. I can’t remember being disciplined very much as a child, not that I didn’t deserve it. I’m sure this comes as no surprise to many of my readers. However, the one sure fire way to incur the Wrath of Pop was to mess with the television or the Betamax when the timer was set to record something. That was an offense punishable, not by grounding, extra chores, death or dismemberment, but by constant reminding by Dad that you once were so stupid as to have messed with his machines and screwed up his recording.
“Look Chris, I’m setting the Beta machine to record a Hopalong Cassidy western in the middle of the night tonight on the Superstation.”
“Ok Pop.”
“Well, don’t touch it.”
“I won’t.”
“Well, last time I tried to record something, you did and I missed Three Men From Texas.”
“That wasn’t me. Besides that was a month ago and you’ve recorded two whole boxes of movies since then.”
“That’s beside the point. You’ve screwed up perfectly good Westerns for me before and you’re bound to do it again if I don’t tell you. You don’t know what a good Western is.”
“Are there any bad Westerns, Pop?” (In case you’re wondering, Pop’s answer to that question is, “Not very many.”)
My mother and father rarely argued. I thought this meant they were a happy couple… at least happier than my friends’ parents who would argue openly when there was company over. Of course, this was something I was wrong about. Among the only times I can remember my parents raising their voices at each other when I was a kid was if my mother would “accidentally” record over one of my dad’s movies with her soap operas. My mom always liked to watch her soaps, but as my family grew (I have three younger siblings), the demands on her time during the afternoons when the soaps were on became too great for my mother to be able to keep up with them. She got herself in the habit of popping a tape in the Betamax every day at noon on Ch 7 to catch All My Children, One Life to Live and General Hospital. Dad gave her a couple tapes specifically for this purpose. Mom had the system down. She’d tape her shows, and then fall asleep on the couch watching them after the kids were all put down to bed. The next day she’d simply record over the previous days episodes and the cycle of her daily ritual was renewed. The Betamax was another household appliance for her that allowed her to chauffer three screaming kids (four screaming kids if I was along for the ride) around town to various organized activities and then have her shows when she had time for them (DVR anyone?).
The Betamax was much more than another household appliance to my dad. It was the center of his entertainment world. Occasionally, Mom would mistakenly grab a tape that was not authorized by Dad for soap opera use. Invariably, this would be a tape with a movie on it that hadn’t been watched yet. When Pop would settle in to watch what he thought would be his movie and discovered instead the melodrama surrounding the goings on of Port Charles or Pine Valley the house would be filled with angry screams.
“Goddamnit Barb (Barb was my mother’s hated ‘pet’ name), you recorded over my Western with your damn soaps.”
“Well you try to getting the kids off to school, pre-school, Mommie and Me classes and t-ball and see how well you do at it.”
“That’s no excuse.”
“I don’t see why it isn’t? You could never handle all the things that go into my day.”
“Well, that’s not my damn job.” (There was rarely cursing allowed in my house, but as soon as a Betamax was messed with it was open season on the damn, damned damning).
It was one thing if the soaps were recorded over one of Dad’s movies from the beginning of tape. It was a whole other thing if Mom didn’t rewind the tape all the way back to the beginning before recording “her stories.” Dad would be 20 minutes into Take Me Back to My Boots and Saddles or Deep in the Heart of Texas and then suddenly, the tape would flicker and resume with Erica Kane’s dilemma of the day in Pine Valley or the trials of Luke and Laura. That’s when things would really get heated. It was beyond Dad’s comprehension and his rage would erupt from the back of the house (which was really more towards the front, but that’s another story). This offense was always considered intentional by my father and how anyone with half a brain could do something so malicious was beyond forgiveness. I never saw it in such pre-meditated, black and white terms. You try packing a two-year old, a four-year old, a six-year old and a moody 14-year old (yours truly) around town and see how many times in a row you can a) stick the right tape in the Betamax and, b) remember to rewind it back to the beginning before you hit the record button and rush out the door. Technically, even that statement is wrong. Tapes were to be rewound in the special Beta accessory, the rewinder (ours was a Batmobile).
Fortunately, for me, one of the first movies my dad recorded off television was The Guns of Navarone starring Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn. It was in Box #1. I was in about the second grade at the time, and this was the coolest thing ever. I watched this movie over and over again. I memorized it. “Remember… I speak German… perfect.” I wore out the tape. My dad had to record it again, and I think I wore out that tape too. My other favorite movie at the time, also in Box #1, was the Sean Connery, James Bond movie, You Only Live Twice (I know, I know… not the most well-known or highly regarded Bond film… but it’s still a good one… check it out). My friends from the neighborhood would come over to my house to play and, because the VCR was still an exotic, “new-fangled” device, often times we would watch a movie… which I would pick and it would always be either Guns of Navarone or You Only Live Twice. It never dawned on my 2nd grade mind at the time, but my teachers at Clover Ave Elementary must have thought me quite the odd nut. I mean, how many kids, when picking sides for kickball, choose their friends by shouting out, “Your by standing days are over! You’re in it now, up to your neck!” Or, would take a sip of their chocolate milk at recess and then loudly proclaim, “Yuk! Siamese vodka!”
In the early 80’s, a war was declared. This war was waged not with lead and lives but with different sized video cassettes that were not compatible. This was the format war between Beta and VHS. By this point, Pop was already firmly entrenched in the Beta camp with its smaller (physically) sized tapes and higher quality recordings. My dad saw little chance for VHS to prevail, so he saw no reason whatsoever to invest in the redundant technology. I don’t need to tell any of you how that war ended up. As the years have gone by, Beta products (tapes, recorders, parts) have become harder and harder to come by. Still my dad has stuck by his Betamaxes. Considering the size of his collection, what choice did he have? In fact, his assortment of Beta products has expanded as home electronic stores liquidated their Beta products, my dad was there to swoop in and buy it all up. As of this writing, my dad has seven Betami in the house in various states of repair. At least three of the machines are working. I assume the rest are being scavenged for useful parts. He also has two Beta tape rewinders and several boxes left of blank tapes… and one VHS machine.
There have been some lasting benefits of my father’s late 70’s one-time dive into the hi-tech swimming pool. Pop has literally thousands of movies, almost all of them recorded off television, almost all of them pre-1970 titles, in his Beta collection. Ok, there may be a few (hundred) too many Westerns for my taste, but with numbers that huge, there have got to be countless major and minor classics in the lot. These days, I have Tivo. Every month, Pop pours over his cable guide and gives me two or three titles running on TCM (the BEST channel on your cable system btw) to set my timer for. He never picks major classics. He won’t call and remind me to Tivo Casablanca or Out of the Past, but he will remind me to record things like The Spiral Staircase, The Naked Prey or Jubal. Have you heard of any of these? I hadn’t, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t thoroughly enjoy every one of them. We’ve been doing this for close to two years now with the classics and he has yet to steer me wrong. I wish I could explain how he’s dragged me to see Rocky Balboa, National Treasure 2 and Valkyrie in the theater on Christmas Day the last three years, but like the den in the front of the house, that’s another story.
Prior to DVD and DVR, I would often times bring him blank VHS cassettes (I made my VCR purchase after the winner of the format war was declared) and ask him to fill them with movies. Rarely, I’d ask him for a specific title, rather I’d generally just ask for a genre. “Here are three tapes. Record me some horror movies.” Then I’d get back three tapes filled with the creepiest atmospheric horror movies you can possibly imagine… all from the 1930’s or 40’s. My roommates and I, through the years, have had our minds blown with the movies he’s passed along to me. The added bonus for me is when these are old recordings from his collection and every 20 or 30 minutes the logo of a now defunct LA TV station would appear in the bottom corner of the screen… KHJ 9 or KCOP 13. It’s then I’m teleported in that moment back to that brief window in time when my family was THE hi-tech family on the block with the shiny new Betamaxes.
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