how would you rate it?
out of 10.
shareThis one goes to 11.
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MovieChat Forums > Citizen Kane (1941) Discussion > how would you rate it?
10/10
shareBased on it's technical achievements and creative innovations it's easily a 10/10
For it's entertainment value I give it 6/10
First view? A 1 (not the steak sauce), but I have to qualify that.
Many years ago when home entertainment was a 35" picture tube TV and a whiz band 240 line of resolution VHS player, I bought a copy of Citizen Kane and brought it home in great anticipation. I watched about 15-20 minutes of it and shut it off - my VHS copy in parts unknown although it may be in one of those boxes we all pack when we move but never unpack. My only recollection is that I wasn't drawn into the movie and my mind wandered (kind of like reading Shakespeare).
I never rated it on-line because I know I didn't give it a fair shot. I don't recall the situation but I may have had business problems in mind when I tried to watch it. It has always been my intention to watch it again and give it my full attention.
First off, 35" is pretty damn big for an old school TV.
Second, I've seen Citizen Kane twice. The first time, I thought it was good but I was prejudiced by its enormous reputation as "the greatest movie of all time." I later watched it again and enjoyed it much more and realized what a masterpiece it is.
It was a 1992 RCA ColorTrak 2000 specifically. It had a 35" Invar CRT and that thing kicked ass. Projection TVs were bigger but those projectors had dimmer, slightly blurry images with edge convergence problems, so I went with the 35" CRT. I bought one for my inlaws at the same time who are still running it because it fits an alcove nicely. If we replace it, the wide-screen TV replacement would have to be a 50" minimum to replicate the vertical height of the squarish 35", so they've been holding off. That old RCA is still running well. I'm trying to talk them into rearranging the room to allow a bigger TV, but people in their 80s can be a bit dense..
Heh, you know what's funny about that is literally just about a week ago I was wondering if anyone in America was still using an old CRT TV. I guess now I have my answer.
Growing up in the late 90s, I had a 19" TV in my room and we had a 25" in the living room. I remember that 25"-27" was pretty much the standard size in most homes.
In my early 20s I got a 32" and remember thinking how absolutely HUGE it looked! It's funny now that a 32" is really considered rather small and the minimum size that you could have in a living room and get any enjoyment out of it. Anything smaller than that in a living room setting is also likely to get an odd look from guests.
Our family included a TV/Appliance business, and I used to go to some of the shows when the new models came out late summer. The first time we saw a 31" CRT at the show we also thought it looked huge next to the 27", which up to that point was the biggest tube available. The 35" was the next leap. Projectors had been out for some time but the pictures weren't all that good on them.
I have a 1951 Andrea 16" B&W that I restored during the Covid lockdown. When I get the cabinet refinished, I'm moving it upstairs in our front living room to watch Honeymooners, Twilight Zones, and old Christmas specials. That thing has a *really* good picture..
Well you got me curious so I had to do some digging. Does the Andrea look like this?
https://www.earlytelevision.org/andrea_C-VL16.html
That looks like a pretty interesting artifact to have, but I can't imagine actually watching much on it. I guess you'll need to either sit 3 feet away or get out the binoculars.
That is the console version of the exact same TV, mine being the table model.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/hQQAAOSwq8Fej1Ij/s-l500.jpg
I don't have a photo of it right now because the cabinet is apart and in rough shape. When I get home this afternoon I'll take a picture of the chassis with a picture on it from a DVD player through an RF modulator on channel 3. Your choice, Twilight Zone or Honeymooners.
You might be surprised at how big the image is or rather, how not small it is. Not being a wide screen format, the actual images are larger than you would guess they would be. Or course, some cropping naturally occurs at the sides. But no, you don't want to be watching it from across a big room.
LOL, all right, give me The Honeymooners.
This does sound interesting. I have always liked old tech and the nostalgia of working with it. But have also found, for me at least, that once the novelty wears off I lose interest.
That is to say, I would probably restore that TV and get it working and then use it for about a week before it assumed an entirely decorative role.
Here are the Honeymooners. The pics aren't that good and I'm not sure why. I think it's my phone.
https://i.imgur.com/ep6zPOZ.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/5RMnwmL.jpg
Here's an earlier pic I took with a different phone of the Twilight Zone earlier this year, and it came out a lot better. No artifacts such as lines and bars like the ones I took today have.
https://i.imgur.com/hDwmMKm.jpg
I'll try again with my wife's iphone.
Hey, that's pretty cool! The pics aren't bad. Thanks for posting them.
So you are running the video through a DVD player? I'm surprised there's even a way to connect a DVD player to an old TV like that.
Fortunately, the pictures on the screen are clearer than how they photograph, although the TZ one is pretty close. Taking a picture of a scanning CRT isn't easy. A modern flat panel TV doesn't scan, so taking a picture of a flat TV is literally point and shoot.
Yes, the DVD feeds an RF modulator, which were very common ten or more years ago for adding a DVD or video game with only RCA outputs to an old school TV that only has antenna inputs, like this old Andrea. They still can be found on Amazon for like $10.
I was considering adding A/V RCA jacks to it which is kind of "cheating" when you're demonstrating a working vintage TV. Using RCA inputs bypasses the TV's tuner, audio IF and video IF processing stages. Adding the jacks is about 3/4 the way into the TV. I still may do that anyway.
Pretty cool.
Can you connect a digital converter to pull in channels over the air? As you probably know, there are several digital subchannels that often plays old shows and movies from around the time this TV was manufactured. If you could tap into that, it would be quite fitting.
If you don't know what I'm talking about just read up on "digital subchannels."
Can you connect a digital converter to pull in channels over the air?
The short answer is yes (an ATSC digital converter box can be used on any TV that can receive at least channel 3, which is any TV manufactured after the war). The long answer is my house is in an area that is lousy for over the air reception. When I was investigating putting in an antenna to replace cable several years ago, I couldn't get three stations with a decent antenna on my second floor in a window. I would have to put a very big professional antenna at least 15' over my roof to get over the air reception. A lot of cost and trouble for what I'd get back.
Alternatively, I can stream literally anything on my laptop which is equipped with an HDMI output, feed the laptop into an HDMI to an RCA output A/V adapter, feed the RCA A/V cables into the RCA jacks I'm going to add to the TV, or into the RF modulator (ch 3-4) that I'm using now to feed the DVD player into it.
Getting the content in is the easy part. I have to restore the Andrea's cabinet and finish the chassis restoration (it's about 80 percent done) and then put it together. My plan is to watch Christmas specials next Christmas in my front room.
I also have my parents silver Christmas tree from the late 50s carefully stored in it's original box with each "branch" in the original paper tubes.
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My thought with the digital subchannels/over-the-air signal was primarily related to authenticity -- it would be one step closer to watching the TV as one would have when it was manufactured.
I'm looking on my guide right now at my subchannels and I'm seeing upcoming episodes of The Rifleman, The Munsters and Perry Mason, as well as movies like Lassie Come Home and a Cary Grant film I haven't heard of, Night and Day. It just seems like it would be cool to actually TUNE IN to a TV station playing these old shows and movies rather than do everything through DVDs and streaming, but if you can't get a good signal where you are, it's a moot point.
Christmas specials sounds like a good idea! You actually made me a little jealous with that comment. That sounds like exactly the kind of thing I would do if I had an old TV like that.
And that's interesting about your parents old tree. I never have been big on artificial trees, but if it's a family heirloom like that then that's pretty cool.
It's the first Christmas tree I remember. Funny thing is that my memory of the tree was that it was like 8' tall and dense. My dad had two 150W floods bathing it in a blue light which reflected off the silver "leaves". It was replaced in the early 60s with a more accurate fake green tree and stored in the attic. Fast forward a dozen years when we put this up at my brother's business in the 70s, I was stunned to discover that it was in reality maybe 4.5' tall tops and *very* spindly. With all the branches installed, you could see the wood dowel center support clear as day! Funny how you see things differently as a kid.
Back in the 50s, the silver tree was the hot item despite it looking nothing like a real tree. I think the silver tree was the impetus behind Charlie Brown's selection of the poor little natural tree in the Christmas Special.
Yes, it's funny how our memories can play tricks on us.
Growing up, our family always had a real tree, and we'd always cut to a tree farm and cut it down. I think that ideally this is the way that it should be. However, right now I live in a tiny studio apartment and can only have a tree of a very specific size, and so I'm using an artificial tree that I picked up for 20 bucks.
I have to say, for a $20 tree it's pretty good! But I do look forward to a time when I can have a real tree again.
"...but people in their 80s can be a bit dense.."
Old people can certainly become tied to old ways (I'm one of them). Starting with their first tv in the late 1950s, my parents always had a CRT TV housed in a massive wooden furniture console. When their latest one died in the early 1990s my wife and I bought them a nice, new CRT TV, but it was simply housed in a close-fitting black plastic shell. Instead of getting rid of the big furniture tv, my dad just removed the old CRT and other electronics, and sat the new TV inside the hole that was left. It looked ridiculous, but they were happy because they got to keep their big piece of wooden furniture. After all, you can't set a doily and Christmas decorations on top of a plastic-shelled modern tv.
Yep, I remember when people did that.
Our family had a TV appliance business and in the 1980s we'd retrofit a lot of 60s vacuum tube TVs to solid state TV guts, but we didn't just drop in a table model in the hole where the picture tube was which, as you said, looked ridiculous. This was for a high end retirement community mostly and those people didn't care what it cost.
On the original cabinet, we'd remove the chassis and picture tube and *then* remove the cast metal mask the tube and mechanical tuner mounted on. This left a large rectangular opening.
We'd then take a brand new *console* TV, remove the picture tube and controls and then remove the mask from the new cabinet. We'd transfer the mask over to the old cabinet using small pieces of trim wood to fill any gaps if necessary and we'd match the stain pretty close (there was a frame shop right next door so getting a match was pretty easy).
The end result looked like a factory job. The difference was the old cabinet was plywood and real wood veneer with hardwood accents where the 1980s TV cabinets were usually press board with contact paper or laminate, so the newly constructed TV was really nice. The other difference is that the 1960s 23" picture tube was replaced with a flatter 27" tube.
We took pictures of several of the ones we did but they got discarded after the business was closed.
I saw it a long time ago and I think I rated it 6/10.
share9/10
shareF..K that guy man.
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9.8/10. The only film I've ever rated as 10/10 is 2001: A Space Odyssey, the greatest film of all time.
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