EricJ

Well, Scrooge was an atheist. (No, really, Dickens says straight out that he went back to church for the first time in decades after his conversion, after he discovered that most of London wasn't "Fools that go about with 'Merry Christmas' on their lips", and who treated the holiday as "An excuse for buying things of which one has no need"--And who should thus be the butt of self-amused jokes about being boiled in plum pudding, who should just let him leave the holiday alone, then, rather than knock on his door like Mormons and barge into his private office asking for contributions for lazy homeless people that his taxes support..."An expression that warned humanity to 'keep its distance!'") Although clearly a Type 2 "Childhood-abuse victim" athie, from what we learn about his dad, and definitely some big ol' Type 1 after he lost his sister. As for Andy Hardy Christmas scenes, none spring to mind...Of course, I haven't watched the series except for the public-domain-revival "Love Laughs at AH" either. And that's considering that even "Meet Me in St. Louis" gets pegged as a "Christmas movie" despite only having one non-plot-essential Christmas scene in it.

...And other grownups who don't really use the Internet all that much to know better. (But then, if they did, would they have become Filmstruck junkies, either?)

Inter-library loan has pretty much taken the place of the old 00's disk-by-mail Netflix: You might not get your disk overnight, but at least they've got it, and you can click a rental from your keyboard. (Just this evening, I'd finally gotten around to ILL'ing a copy of "Gunga Din" that our local didn't have--Looked up, and the regional system not only had the movie on disk, they also had it available on TCM 4-disk collections of War Movies and Cary Grant, in case I wanted to check out a whole set of movies with my one rental...So, I can get my movie, or I can get my movie and "Arsenic & Old Lace" for free, or I can get my movie and "Dawn Patrol" for free.) And yes, like Hulu, Criterion is the only symbolic reason for being curious about Kanopy...Because they're Criterion, obviously. At least FilmStruck still had the benefit of the old Warner Archive classics.

Now, I know everyone always complains when I say "(snicker!) Kanopy?? Isn't that just the same cheap public-domain indie movies that Amazon got roped into showing, except that they fooled Criterion into thinking they were a big thing too, and got a big care-package of Criterion Channel--Just like Hulu did in the early days when they couldn't afford anything but public-domain either?" But this is what I'm saying--LISTEN to what you're saying, people: You're AT the LIBRARY...Telling us what movies you can get FREE with your CARD...And how wonderful it is that they gave us a new service to provide cheap public domain and obscure Criterion ones at home on streaming. ...What glaringly obvious element are we overlooking, here? And why are we, good people of 2018, just not seeing it? (No, really: I know I sound smug every time I brag about how our college town got on the big charity push to rescue the dear old closing downtown disk-rental shop by donating all the disks to the public library, and now we have a library's third-floor DVD section that's the size of a small downtown disk rental...But is everyone else's public library just not as good? Am I the sole, sheltered lucky one?)

That's the one I always bragged about seeing with our old college-town all-night festival audience (every President's February, there'd be a sleep-in all-night sci-fi festival, and things would get a bit punchy by 2am): 70's Andromeda Strain-era Crichton sounded good, until we got half an hour of medical footage, followed by an hour of Grandpa Goldberg, Drooling Serial Killer...And then, boy, was it Terminal. Every time the scene faded out, we'd cheer "Yayy!", and then "Aww!" when the next scene came on. At one point the heroine went out on the balcony, and we shouted, "Jump, jump! Save yourself!" (There's a great Forbidden Planet story too, but I'll save that for the appropriate screening.)

No, I was metaphorically saying that for a studio to sell its audience an Nth-dip DVD or Fathom-screening of Grease, Princess Bride or Labyrinth that they already can recite by heart is not selling them "Old movies". Nor is it "Watching old movies", if those are the only ones an audience knows. Do try to keep up. Yes, it IS a poor characterization: I was saying that the "Spoiled elite" were those who did know where to find the movies on Criterion or Warner Archive if they needed them--While the majority of FilmStruck fans were thumbing their spurned nose to the now almost movie-free Netflix they once trusted, and making a great show of mass lifestyle-embracing the channel that was TEACHING THEM about GREAT MOVIES, so there! And that once that intellectual umbilical cord was cut....it's the end of the world!!!! 😱 Because, like the silver-plattered Netflix fans they once were, If It's Not On Streaming, It's Not on TV. ...Me, I know another "Silver platter" you can get your classic movies served to you on.

Now, this is what I've been saying since the beginning, folks: THEY'RE NOT ****IN' "DISAPPEARING"!! They're still on disk, they're just not in your immediate in-reach remote-click environment of streaming! Or, like the days when nobody watched old movies on local TV stations at 2am, is that the same thing? You spent the last year literally singing the praises of a service that served them to you on a silver platter, and now you've got to go out to the garden and start picking those fresh titles yourselves--Sort of like the difference between people who know how to cook and go to farmers' markets, and people who praise Blue Apron boxes on their doorstep. What we should be mad about is that it's not "to save a few bucks", it's so that Warner can rebrand itself to sell "What the public wants", which is that they don't--meaning, they believe we "don't"--want to bother with any but a handful of easily marketable and overexposed "classic" titles we know already, and don't want to be curious to explore the inner reaches of the Warner Archive. Who wants Rebel Without a Cause, when you can sell one more copy of Wizard of Oz? What FilmStruck brought us was what local stations brought us forty or fifty years ago: Pot luck, and the curiosity to try a classic, or even a non-classic, that happened to be in reach, and discover something new. If movies have one enemy (and let's not just limit it to Warner, even though, in all areas, they're just about as close to THE enemy as you can get), it's studios who see old movies as an "obstacle" to what corporate identity they can create, anoint two or three dummy-overexposed token pop-icons as "Here's our vintage classics!", and the insecurity that they'd rather tread the safe waters of selling us a title we know by heart than spend a lot of charity money on hoping to sell us a title we don't. And no one ever learned anything from a book they'd read already. Hey, no fair! I already did the Fahrenheit/Truffaut metaphor two years ago (although also in reference to Warner trying to wipe physical disk sales off the market as well as broadcast movies, and replacing them with more "collectors editions" of Dark Knight and A Christmas Story)--Can I sue? 😡

(stock clip from The African Queen) Crosby: "The African Queen! Humphrey Bogart?" Hope: "Boy, is he lost!" Crosby: "Hey! Hey, Bogie!" Hope: "That was just a mirage!" Crosby: "Oh yeah? What about this? (picks up) Humphrey Bogart's Academy Award!" Hope: "An Oscar? Gimme that, you've already GOT one!"

I thought Road to Hong Kong--the illegitimate 1962 British Joan Collins "revival" picture--was the "lost" Road picture?

Or Ray Harryhausen. But those have mostly ended up with whatever of Columbia's films (Last Action Hero, Gattaca, Oliver, And Now For Something Completely Different) have fallen in with MGM's Orphans--And even then, they may show "Seventh Voyage of Sinbad", but not Golden Voyage or Eye of the Tiger.

And, of course, went on to be the most beloved Friday-night staple of every 10-yo. for two seasons in '74-'75--Also available on DVD series-boxset: https://www.amazon.com/Kolchak-Night-Stalker-Universal-Studios/dp/B00UGQC9BQ/ (The DVD seems to be OOP, but it's streaming on Amazon VOD, and surfaces on Netflix/Hulu frequently.)

They USED to, back in the pre-Netflix history ('08-'09), when Amazon and Hulu heard there'd be a market for these-here new "Digital movies" thing, but didn't know where folks would watch them--So they all tried to make desktop/smartphone browser-streaming sites, but Columbia reserved all their own material to create the studio-exclusive Crackle. ...(sigh) Yes. THAT Crackle. 😓 (Which was actually pretty good back in the early days when it was still just a slow, struggling Columbia Instant Archive site, with I Dream of Jeannie and Fantasy Island reruns, the 60's Stooges/Curly Joe features, Stripes/Ghostbusters, and of course, The Last Dragon. Until they decided to court the gamer/stoner demographic, and filled their listings with "Heavy Metal 2000", "Joe Dirt 2", and "Puff Puff Pass", and then pasted on cutesy "hip" movie listings and irritating "What's new this week" hosts.)

If she's just started watching "Cheers", I guess that can excuse my child-of-the-80's reaction at "...NEVER HEARD of Tom Selleck or Steve Guttenberg?? 😱 " Selleck, of course, was the real Magnum, P.I., not that shoddy pretender now airing on network nostalgia reboots--And while Steve Guttenberg's career has since fallen a bit from his high of "Cocoon", I'm hoping the "Heard of him yesterday" came from either the original Short Circuit or Police Academy, both "orphans" now airing on the Usual Streaming Suspects (including Vudu Free Movies On Us). Seriously, don't judge the first Police Academy by the crimes of its offspring, the 1984 original is one of the great screwball comedies of the decade, and yes, Guttenberg is hilarious in it. I still have no idea of it, apart from the usual excuse for 50's-60's sitcom characters to get together for no other reason, or from Chico & Harpo's version: (Watch Margaret Dumont's reaction to Harpo, forever destroying the myth that Margaret "didn't get the jokes"...) I gather it's something like a combination of four-hand Hearts and Liar's Dice, only with more wild suits, more competitive, and score-bidding options? I remember when they used to have tip columns in newspapers, next to the comic strips, asking "How should you play this hand?"

I'd watched part of My Amityville Horror (2012), the documentary about grown-up son Danny Lutz--one of the real-life sons who doesn't seem to be in the film--who still stubbornly claims the events were "real" and traumatized him into dysfunctionality for life, even though it's been pretty well and thoroughly busted by now, and from the results we see, it was a pretty messed-up family to begin with. The dramatic subplot in the '79 movie has Brolin struggling to adjust to being a new stepfather to someone else's kids, and we're not supposed to know whether it's dysfunctional-family pressure, or sinister forces making him act irrationally, but in hindsight, we have the feeling the book and movie gave us the tip of the iceberg for just how messed-up. The other events in the movie seem like what was accused in the book of being just standard paranormal incidents embellished for tabloid value, but when we get the plot point about Brolin unable to find the money for his son's wedding caterer--sinister forces must have hidden it!!--it suddenly becomes very hard to take seriously at face value without psychoanalyzing for deeper motives behind writing the book. I'm not fond of "The Graduate", either, but Catch-22 was the movie that officially put me off late-60's Mike Nichols satire for good--The late-60's/early-70's counterculture was just starting to discover Angry Satire, and while Robert Altman could turn it into a "M*A*S*H", Nichols in most of his "rebellious" 60's dramedies was just too counter-cultural to be subtle. (And yes, even the Mad Magazine satire had Donald Sutherland and Elliot Gould showing up at the end saying "We did the crazy-war bit first!") I can take Vietnam-era war satire, but when we see hospital nurses discussing recipes between themselves while treating a burn patient, you realize that this stuff must have been bold and hilarious back when the Smothers Brothers were being kicked off the TV networks.

Not even Amarcord, considered his most accessible, where all the circus-y over-the-top Fellinics can be excused away as the character's sentimental boyhood-memory spin? (And which Woody Allen also ripped off, as "Radio Days".) Again, Ginger & Fred is a little closer to the TV Hell idea of bizarre pop-culture Italian entertainment-industry, and probably makes a better transitional bridge between the two movies. I'm not a Fellini fan (even he admitted he was as much of a pervert as old-school Italians can get ), but it's not hard to understand his style and licks after one or two.

And other tech-clueless grownups who think Change.org is an actual site. Say "PetitionOnline.com" to those of the right generation (say, those who were around in the '99-'00 rise of DVD), and wonder why they suddenly snort their milk and break up into giggles. There were some genuine online petitions, way back in those rise-of-the-Internet-too days--Amazon briefly hinted at trying it for requested titles--which created the myth that if you signed your name on the Internet, you were Striking a Blow For Change...Until every fanboy took every whiny knee-jerk complaint to PO, and destroyed the myth: No executives read the Internet, and unless you take the actual step of submitting results to the specific parties, saying "Me too!" turned out to be nothing but an act of angry foot-stomping fanboy-bation, to the point that even THAT became a hilarious fan-baiting punchline. And which PO soon infamously became after the N-00th "Petition for George Lucas to release that original Theatrical Cut of Star Wars he's been hiding!" PetitionOnline isn't around anymore, and Change.org IS. And those of the right age still snicker, snort milk, and wave off to those other folk who wonder why, every time someone says "This is an insult to the fans!...I'm starting a petition on CHANGE.ORG!" (Now, if they'd tried addressing snail-mail letters directly to Warner, Warner management might have a more direct view of customer response...)

The rumor is supposedly that, back when Disney--briefly--bought Robert Zemeckis' CGI mo-cap company, they had only ONE purpose in mind: Wind up the key in Zemeckis's back, so he'll grind out more Christmas-season Polar Expresses on demand. So they got him to direct the '09 CGI "A Christmas Carol", and...so much for Zemeckis' usefulness to the company--Mars didn't even have time to Need Moms. But supposedly, the next project Disney had lined up for Zemeckis was, surprise, another big Christmas tentpole, a CGI Nutcracker story. (Oh, and then Bob would finish his "Yellow Submarine" remake somewhere in between there.) So, basically, we're looking at the abandoned Something to Do With Nutcracker project sitting around on Disney's desks that they didn't know what to do with for eight years. And when they have a big-budget fairytale that they don't know what to do with?...That's right!: Pretend "Tim Burton's Alice" is still popular eight years later! (That's okay, we didn't remember "Alice Through the Looking Glass" either. ? ) I remember saying that Linda Woolverton's Alice scripts sounded like Woolverton had put them together by scrambling a set of Lewis Carroll Refrigerator Magnets on the table: "And so the [Queen of Hearts] picked up her [pig] [footstool] and accused the [Frog Footman] of [stealing the tarts]..." Here, Disney tried to apply the same "hit" formula by giving the screenwriter a special holiday set of Nutcracker Refrigerator Magnets: "[Clara] has to help the [Army of Mice] by [throwing her shoe] to stop [Mother Ginger] attacking the [Land of Snowflakes], so she can get [Drosselmeier's clockwork key]!" It wouldn't bother me so much, except that EVERY SINGLE person I've talked to has gushed about "Ohh, did you hear Disney's doing a Nutcracker movie! I'll start my Christmas shopping this weekend while I see it!", having never subjected themselves to the horror of the trailers. PEOPLE: If you want the Real Nutcracker, it's been on film...Twice. Once in the weird but gorgeous-looking 1986 Maurice Sendak version from the Seattle production, and once in the harmless/kid-friendly 1994 Macaulay Culkin version from the New York production. (In fact, the 1986 Sendak version has joined the MGM Orphans, and is available at pretty much all the Usual Streaming Suspects.) ...Oh, and saying "But this is the REAL BOOK version!"? Yeah--Tim tried that too.

Back in the early HDTV days of '08-'09, new flatscreen sets were "QAM compatible", meaning you could plug your cable (the actual cable, not the box) into the sets, get the HD affiliates along with all the basic channels, and pretty much tune them as "regular" TV channels on your TV remote. One odd little tech-glitch I discovered was that a twenty-channel "blank" space was actually reserved for all the VOD movies that customers ordered, and with no box to block them, whatever anyone in town was ordering would show up on one of those channels whenever I surfed. I might sit down on a Saturday night, turn on Ch. 20.7, notice "Oh, lookit that, someone decided to watch Spiderman 3...", and watch a few random minutes out of curiosity to see whether I wanted to check it out on disk. Naturally, Comcast had to put a stop to that, and they soon sent installers to customers' houses to install "descrambling" cable boxes--that you could only view on Ch. 3, with their own cable-box remote--which also included only the 4:3 SD-upgraded network affiliates on the Basic service, and blocked all the local HDTV channels to the $99/mo.+ Premium Digital tiers. And tack on the $5 extra box-rental fee, of course. ☠️☠️☠️ ?

Although accdg. to the documentary, Richard Dawson was never happy on the panel--he was pretty much the smartest one for answers, and contestants routinely picked him for the bonus round--and kept pressing producers Mark Goodman & Bill Todman to get off the show and get a hosting gig instead. When G&T eventually came up with "Family Feud", they gave Dawson the host slot, and the rest is TV history. Even so, you can see a bit of snarkiness every time Dawson has to do a "funny" one-liner, and keeps delivering it in a Paul Lynde Center-Square imitation. (The same way Gary Burghoff would do Charles Nelson Reilly imitations since he was in the same top-row corner...Yeah, they knew back then, even if we didn't.) Used to have that bad impression too, but watching the show now, he's basically bringing the audience into the panel's own kick-back goof-off fun. If the housewife contestant had a clueless response, the audience would boo, and Gene would mercilessly rib the contestant's embarrassment with "Are we really going with that answer?" (Sometimes the joke questions would be just a deliberate one-liner, with the punchline blanked: One question was "A riddle--Q: What goes 'Ho-ho-ho...(whssht!)...Ho-ho-ho...(whssht!)...Ho-ho-ho'? A: _(BLANK)_ caught in a revolving door." The entire audience, panel and contestant pretty much knew the answer, and Gene joked, "Well, y'knoww, it could be anything...Could be the Jolly Green Giant!" ) Of course, we now know today that Bob Barker was the #MeToo-violating slimeball on "The Price is Right", and in the episodes where Barker was a Match Game celeb, we get the chance to compare Rayburn and Barker back to back on the same screen. And Bob still comes off with more creepy insincerity.

Anyone who lives in my freakin' town, where mountains block the big-city HD free-broadcast network affiliates thirty miles away. ? Of course, I don't watch TV on it anyway, I just have it as the only way of getting basic streaming-friendly Internet in the area of $40, and that by packing on one of their packages. Anything, and literally anything else they offer, including getting to watch those thirty-mile-away stations in HD, starts at around $99/mo. ☠️ (<- closest I could get to a "Pirates!" emoji) Seriously, with or without the "Tech For Dummies Who Like Spending Lots of Money To Admit It" assistance, it's so easy, it's embarrassing. After all the low-tech ranting and raving at the cable companies and trend-media for "What's with this new streaming thing, anyway?", we will afterwards be happy to provide you with the iron-tipped boots necessary to kick yourself. You may need some Geek/teenager help with "What is this 'Rau-Turr' you speak of?" (again, consult your provider's page for support), but anything after that can be picked up at Wal-Mart, let alone Best Buy.

That the only people who stlll remember how good Free TV used to be (and remembering that is the only chance we have of saving it) are, unfortunately, those who never had much choice? Ah, Match Game... I used to think the 70's version was moronic and sniggering too, until I watched a GSN making-of feature on the show, and you have to appreciate that the appeal of that show is not about the game. How could it be, the contestants were routinely unimaginative facepalm-worthy housewife dolts who couldn't think of another answer besides the obvious lead-in tease of "Boobs". But you have to remember that in 70's TV, five days of shows were filmed in two days (contestants and panelists were asked to bring three changes of clothes, to make it look like they were there "every day"), and as they were trapped there for hours, the show basically became a chummy little kaffeeklatsch for host Gene Rayburn and the celebrities. Brett Sommers recalled that the cast usually downed a few drinks with lunch break on the second filming day, so if you watch them in sequence (as on Amazon), the Thursday and Friday episodes would always get rather, erm, lively. And unlike other hosts--he never had another one--Rayburn knew how to play along with the chaos, and stoke it, while the contestants just sort of sat and stared in blank confusion from the side. You just didn't get that from Tattletales or Password Plus. That's the appeal of watching a game show for reasons other than "I wish I could get money tomorrow TOO!" (Of course, if you want socially progressive Hollywood Squares, there's always the 90's one that Whoopi Goldberg produced just to put pal Bruce Villanch's gay-innuendo in the center square, as both their memories of the old show selectively didn't go much beyond Paul Lynde either.) No, I'm talking about the one where Kenan Thompson is now the promotion-ready "Lorne's Favorite Child" lead performer that Will Ferrell used to be, making "Black Jeopardy" the new marketable running sketch (like the late-90's days of SNL Movies, Michaels is still interested in what parts of the show he can commercially market), and reducing most of the sketches to the sort that Thompson used to make on Nickelodeon's old "Kenan and Kel". Or maybe I'm just still disgruntled about having to switch to John Oliver, after Trevor Noah pretty much let the black comics take over "The Daily Show". ? Oh, and name the wisecracking black female performer SNL had back in the Joe Piscopo/Eddie Murphy mid-80's. As with most of the B-cast performers in that era, I can't.

Not "gossip", just that nobody today remembers the horrendous Johnny Depp movie. (And rightly so.) If you want "gossip", you could speculate over, ahem-cough, why Burton had originally wanted to do his Addams Family movie (at, ahem-cough, the same time Bryan Singer wanted to do a new Addams series), and after the rights were tied up, turned the gothic Collinses into the goofy Addamses instead. Even having the Collinses do Charles Addams' "My Family" pose on the poster.

Where he turns Edgar Allan Poe's "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" into a Fellini satire of 60's Italian TV/entertainment culture--Pretty much going over early drafts for what would eventually become "Ginger & Fred".

Now that we actually have them, I, the Playstation 4 owner, can tell you for a fact what is keeping the Virtual Reality Headset industry alive. And yes, Brainstorm does spring to mind whenever I use it...I may take up golf. But yes, new technologies are subject to one of Scott Adams' Dilbert Principles, namely that any new technology, business model or political system MUST take into account that its users will be A) Lazy, B ) Greedy, and C) Hornee: A means they don't want a complicated setup or the system to interfere too much with their own lives, B means they want a low price, be able to get as much of it for free as possible, and figure out how somebody can make money off of it, and C, in technology's case, means someone will immediately figure out how it can be applied to Porn, just, well, because...Yep, they even tried with Google Glass. And Bitcoin. (Unless it's Blu-ray, 4K or 3D's case, in which case physical-media porn has long since been doomed by the ephemeral Internet.)

They tried, but Tim Burton made a pigs'-breakfast out of both that and his career, in one shot. One might just as well ask why they don't bring back the Lone Ranger.