Yesterday I was talking to my son about some movies. He has been finding and downloading movies so that we could watch them at home, and he asked me to suggest some of them. I was obviously suggesting movies I’m familiar with and wouldn’t mind seeing again.
He has a problem with the quality of those movies. One, for all of these older movies he mentioned that they did not have captioning capabilities. The other had something to do with the picture quality. I believe pixels were mentioned and the older films have fewer pixels than the newer ones he is more familiar with.
Anyway, while we were discussing these movies, he said that the year 2000 was twenty years ago.
I told him he was born after that year, and he is over 20 years old. Obviously. I didn’t understand his point.
He pointed out that all the movies I’d recommended were, well, ancient, and apparently that means the quality was lower. He went on to comment that one of those movies was so old that he really had to search for a digital copy and it wasn’t for sale anywhere on the internet.
In fact, most of the movies I suggested required quite an internet search simply because they are old. Folks, get this, most of the movies he was complaining about came out in the 1980s. The 80s! I was an adult when they came out.
Though I have to admit, one of them was even older than that.
In our discussion about movies that I’d like to watch again, I mentioned one that I know has a much more recent remake. One that came out in the late 90s. One I don’t happen to like. One of the things I don’t like about remakes, is they change some of the details, which the remake clearly did.
(This is also why I won’t watch Steve Martin’s versions of Cheaper by the Dozen or Father of the Bride. Particularly Cheaper by the Dozen. For that one he changed the entire story, including the number and gender of the kids. Making what was a true story, very fictional, which I really do not like.)
Anyway, I told my son I wasn’t going to watch the remake of The Parent Trap, so he had to really search for a digital version of it.
Now this is a movie I’ve known since I was a kid. I honestly don’t know the first time I watched it, but I was clearly in school, somewhere between 3rd and 7th grade. I’m choosing those years simply because of where I was living and the fact youth of that era had a great deal of freedom. That and I’m pretty sure the first time I saw it was in a theater.
Back then a local theater would offer a series of child friendly movies over the summer as matinees for an extremely reduced price. Some years you could get tickets for the entire season through your school, sometimes for free.
Our mother always took advantage of programs that would entertain us over the summer months that were either free, or very inexpensive. Like buying a family pass to the local swimming pool every single summer. She rarely went, but we would be at the pool most days.
So anyway, thanks to these free/reduced priced tickets, we were able to see a lot of movies in the theater growing up. And the kid friendly movies they were showing weren’t brand new. I’d say they were all around 10 to 20 years old.
So yeah, in the early 70s, The Parent Trap was around 10 years old. It is actually older than we are, well except our older sister affectionally known as Dictionary. She was several months old when it came out.
So, this whole discussion about the 2000 being over 20 years ago, was about these movies being made before the technology to put in captioning or use more pixel quality was available. And apparently anything, especially technology, over 20 years old is ancient.
I’d hate to point it out to my son again, but he’s over 20 years old and still born in this century.
I even watched Battle Beyond the Stars last night instead of working on this post. My son came in while I was watching it and asked me about the video quality.
Yes, it’s just as good as it ever was. His expectations are based on his experiences from this century. My expectations are based on my experiences from the 70s, roughly 30 years before he was born.
Anyway, I might watch The Parent Trap today, simply because I can.
Also, happy birthday to my youngest grandchild and her mother, my oldest child.
Smile. Make the day a brighter day.
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