ToxicFletch's Replies


I believe the Bob Seger video is American Storm. If it were rare it would be called Rare Sense. Common sense is caution learned through experience. A young child may not know not to stick their finger in a light socket, I sure didn't, and having survived that as an adult I know better than to do that. To me that's common sense. I don't see it as something that's an inborn trait but something that's learned. If you have access to a channel called Escape, though they are mostly true crime shows they do play movies in the morning hours and all day Sunday. It's an all crime show network. You can check them out here: http://www.escapetv.com/ Don't remember exactly but I was around 7 or 8. It was at the drive-in; obviously I wasn't driving. My parents occasionally went out to see a movie and took us kids along. The drive-in was probably easier to keep control of us as if we were bored we could doze in the car. Ours was just a ground antenna pole attached to the side of the house holding a corner yagi. I could stand next to the pole and turn it with my hands. Only for Elvira would I have gone on the roof if necessary. Our version of an antenna rotator was human powered. If I was lucky someone was there to tell me when to stop turning the antenna. Often I wasn't lucky and run in and out to check the TV. Being I usually only adjusted the antenna to get the one distant station broadcasting Elvira's Movie Macabre it was worth it! :) Of course any late Saturday night Hammer film was worth holding an antenna out the window in my hand to get it in. Some of the rich kids' families had VCRs, but for the most part like 98% of us didn't. You have a point about the times and the lack of recordable media, and especially anything prerecorded you could buy guaranteed an audience in front of the TV set. Movies were much the same way. Any movie of the week was watchable no matter how bad it was simply because it was on TV, and for a limited time...that was it. With so many movies and channels available today, if it's not interesting in the first 10 minutes, or less, it's easy to change the channel, pop in a different disc, or stream something different. I sat through many movies when I was young I wouldn't have the patience for today. In the late 90s NBC had a Saturday morning line-up of teen oriented shows they called TNBC, of which the most popular of those, for reasons I cannot grasp, was Saved by the Bell. Until they came up with a new show when one ended they would rerun it making it seem like the show lasted longer than it did. Some of the live-action Saturday morning shows in the 70s as you said got plenty of play well beyond their original runs. Not many TV shows that only ran for a single season are remembered like they are for that very reason. I think because we were kids had to do with it, not so much the times. As kids we would watch and re-watch anything on Saturday morning, no matter how many times we had seen it. The Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Hour was a prime example of this. How many times had we seen every cartoon on that show and watched them over and over as though they were brand new? It's the same with kids and videos. You can put a favorite movie on the DVD player they've seen like a hundred times and they'll watch it. Hard to do that with an adult. As we get older and get more experience in life, meaning more going on in our heads, it takes a lot more than a pretty rattle to get our attention. The dog in the bun now looks a little perverted, but yes I do. I don't think the drive-ins, the ones I went to anyway, ever changed the intermissions but were using 30 year old intermissions...at least. Some shows that stick with me are The Ghost Busters from 1975 that starred Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch as ghost hunters who fought with silly ghosts then zapped them back to the netherworld. Sound familiar? Ark II was a pretty cool post apocalypse show with a neat land rover as the crew roamed around dealing with survivors. Other shows I recall were Far Out Space Nuts, Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, Bigfoot and Wildboy, Dr. Shrinker, and Land of the Lost. All of these were live action shows. Lots of times. Well before they started just playing the same movies the walk-ins are playing. Have seen lots of slashers and eurotrash at drive-ins. Love the intermissions too. The Creature from the Haunted Sea comes to mind.