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Psycho and The Greatest Invention 0f the 20th century

posted 4 years ago by ecarle (14979)
2 replies | jump to latest

January 1966. Mid season 1965-66, ABC TV excited youth with a Batman tv show. The one hour show was split into two half hours, each at 730 pm.

Wednesday night would introduce the week's "guest villain"(Joker, Riddler, Penguin..Catwoman and some "addtiives") and would place Batman and/or Robin in a death-facing cliffhanger, to conclude on Thursday "same Bat time, same Bat channel!"

This was a tough time for this young Batfan.

For on Thursday nights' at 7:30 weekly,,I had to attend an evening cub scout meeting. Every week. And in the living room where we met..I could hear in the other room, being watched by the non-cub scout in the family...the final Thrusday Batman epsisode of the week. I could only HEAR it...not see it...not watch it. And then it was over and we still had another half hour of crafts class...

So i never saw a full Batman show for over a year...in syndication eventually...when the series simply didn't matter to me anymore.

Little did I know, in 1966...that I was a mere 16 years away from never having that Batman angst again.

1982. The VCR arrives at homes in America.

The miracle of my life, for two reasons:

ONE: Never would I have to "miss a show while I was out somewhere." It was sadly too late to matter so much anymore if I missed a show or not, really...but it came ii handy to have Hill Street Blues or St. Elsewhere recorded and waiting for later viewing.

I went to night school in the 80s. I recall taping entire Oscar shows, coming home and getting them finished in 45 minutes of fast forwarding to the winning speeches.

TWO: The greater miracle was this: Suddenly, NO favorite movie was EVER "gone."

Starting with Psycho.

When the first VCRs hit in 1982, Universal sent out three VHS Hitchcock classics first: Psycho, The Birds, and Frenzy (The Hitchcock Lost Five were Still Lost.) But there was a catch: Each tape cost $100.

No way. A co-worker had persuaded me to fork over the $800 for the VCR...but I wasn't paying $100 for a movie I watched one a year on TV.

The co-worker said, "You don't have to. I have Psycho. I taped it off of TV. You want to watch it??

"Sure."

Any other favorites?

How about North by Northwest.

I got that for you.

The Wild Bunch? Yep...taped it off of HBO.

Bullitt? Sure.

And even...of very recent vintage....The Shining. (Off of HBO.)

I took a bagful of the movies of my life home, and used my new VCR to study them, frame by frame, shot by shot, til I learned them all.

Psycho yielded every secret up. The string pulled down the tube pasted to Arbogasts' forehead and cheek. How Hitchcock cut "on the frame" of the door opening from Mother's room. How mother came out the second Arbogast's hand came down on the stair balustrade at the top. How Mother's raised knife was caught in a glare of silvery light as she raised it; how her attacking shadow came down on Arbogast's own shadow against a side wall.

All that WORK from Hitchcock, all that precision, all that preparation. It paid off across the screens of the world and made Hitchcock a multi-millionaire.

Oh,yeah...the shower scene too. Days of study on that one.

Meanwhile, over at North by Northwest. When that crop duster hits that truck with Cary Grant under the truck...REVEALED..a little Cary Grant doll. A toy truck. Then a CUT to location where a planted REAL plane exploded and Cary Grant's more stocky stunt double climbed out and back away.

Meanwhile...over at Bullitt. A chance to study how that final crash of the bad car was "rigged" with the car actually far away from the explosion that blows it up.

All of these secrets disappeared with the VHS copies..DVDs "jump" before the secrets can be revealed. (Though you can still see the tube on Arbogast's face in the 1974 photo book by Richard Anobile.)

I had to return the VHS tapes to my co-worker. A few years began of making my own tapes. From HBO. From Showtime. "Tape to tape"(rentals.)

And...off of "TV classic film festivals." I learned how to "pause" Psycho every 10 minutes, remove the commercials, start 'er up again. Did this with Casablanca and Notorious and NXNW and The Maltese Falcon, too. True precision...if even a second of color commercial survived...start over.

Soon the 80s went on...and VHS tapes got "low priced." I'd buy Psycho and Frenzy and The Birds (and Rear Window and Vertigo) for $15.

1989 was a big year. Tim Burton's Batman was a summer blockbuster but Warner Brothers decided NOT to make people wait 5 years for a VHS tape. They bought it out at Christmas.

So ended the 80s and the coming of the greatest invention of the 20th Century.

Just one more great, wonderful, exciting memory of the movies of my life and how I came to them.

[–] swanstep (2715) 4 years ago

@ecarle. On one level the VHS VCR, like the music cassette, was an inherently transitional ("over" by about 2000, and unlamented and completely forgotten about by kids today), poor quality technology. Even at the time, Sony's Betacam VCR was better quality but the whole world quickly standardized on VHS so that was that. On another level, however, it was *the* watershed technology for film and tv appreciation. Once the full infrastruture of relatively comprehensive video stores was in place by the mid-to-late '80s, almost anybody who didn't live in the complete boonies could see almost any film they heard of or read about. And, as you emphasize, not just "see" but watch repeatedly, or even, if you wanted, study in pausable, frame by frame detail.

It's actually hard to get 'kids today' to fully appreciate the depth of the change the VCR revolution wrought. Before the revolution, unless you were in one of few mega-cities (principally just NY, LA, London, Paris), film viewing existed under conditions of real *scarcity*. You'd maybe have *heard* of a famous old film like Rear Window or Touch of Evil or Rules of The Game or Singin' In the Rain or M.... but you'd have incredibly few chances to see any of them. Occasionally old and cool things would pop up on TV, and occasionally something great would screen at a film festival or a local film club or pseudo-art cinema, and all the film buffs in town would have to rush out to take their only foreseeable chance to see The Lady Vanishes or Citizen Kane or Third Man or whatever it might be (and just hope the print in question wasn't too deteriorated). The upshot was that, unless you lived in one of the 4 top film mega-cities, you necessarily had enormously frustrating, huge, unfillable gaps in your film knowledge.

The mid '80s and the rise of video stores saw the basic logic of film viewership change from scarcity to complete *abundance*, and things have never been the same since.

[–] ecarle (14979) 4 years ago

It was an incredible time...a time of dreams come true...even as the movie industry market bumbled and stumbled around trying to figure out how to "make the market work." $100 for a Psycho VHS. Pshaw.

If I still come here from time to time to offer a little "history" -- how did we get from there to here? The whole VHS thing was glorious even as it was limited(having to fast forward forever to favorite scenes...with DVDs, you just jump there.)

I do wish we had VCRs when I kept having to miss Batman in 1966, though! Sheer agony for a boy...