Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

What movies did you grow up with on TV that played all the time or you always caught it at one certain point. Maybe you still haven't seen it all the way through but you have fond memories of it. This is different from "That Movie You Always Rented on VHS" which I have another thread for. Off the top of my head I'll start with:

Surviving the Game
The Beastmaster
Office Space (later years)
Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie (on USA)

Moonfleet
Jaws
Vampire Circus
Salem's Lot

Actually various Hammer and James Bond movies as well as Miss Marple films. Do those Joan Hickson Miss Marple features count?

TBH, if I liked a film and it was on tv I'd record it and then watch it countless times, which I did with all the films I listed except Moonfleet, so maybe that's the only one that counts?

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

I grew up with 3 tv stations till I was 16, so the only movie I remember ever coming on was around Christmas, The Wizard of Oz would come on every year, probably why it's still one of my favorites.
Don't know what the hell that has to do with Christmas though.

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

Maybe, I don't remember seeing those but my titles were aired the 90's. I specifically remember those being aired on the same stations all the time that's why they called TBS "The Beastmaster Station" and HBO "Hey, Beastmaster's On". I guess my movies were continuously on TV for a couple of years and not just one-time airings. I'll add:

Pet Sematary II


It seems I'm going for movies that were on Sci-Fi (not SyFy), TBS, USA, and TNT.

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

Yes, this'll be a cultural difference for us. I had to rely on late night tv (especially at weekends as this is before 24 hour tv started over here) and BBC2 showing 'old' films. Nothing "played all the time" as there were only 4 channels. It was a very different world. I can only imagine how many films I'd have seen with movie channels or the internet.

Jaws
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Jason and the Argonauts
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
Warlords of Atlantis
The Spy Who Loved Me and pre 1980's Bond.
Our Man Flynt
The Silencers
King Kong (1976)
The Omega Man
Journey to the Far Side of the Sun
Planet of the Apes (1968)
Alligator
Poltergiest
Skin Game
The Magnificent Seven
The Prefessionals
The Naked Spur
El Cid
Spartacus
Battle Beyond the Stars
The Bridge at Remagen
The Dirty Dozen

and many more :)

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

I've answered this elsewhere but...

The Wizard of Oz (I thought it was on Thanksgiving)
"Peter Pan" (the Mary Martin TV version)
Ben-Hur (Easter)
Oklahoma!
Gunfight at the OK Corral
Spartacus
The Pit and the Pendulum (Vincent Price)
Jason and the Argonauts
The Alamo (John Wayne)
Lots of Disney movies on their Sunday TV show
Dozens of sci-fi/horror B-movies on "Creature Features"
etc.

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

when i was growin up, we had 6 channels...6!! and sometimes 2 from a different country.

wizard of oz {thanksgiving/holloween}
ben-her/the 10 comandmants {christmas thro easter}

the howling
various vincent price movies
jean-claude movies
steven segal movies

poltergeist
any cheesesy 80's horror movies
charles dickens christmas carol

The Yellow Submarine played every 4th of July during my younger days:

The Wizard of Oz, which used to come on TV once a year, when my sister and I were preteens.

Some Like It Hot was another one, which was funny, until the end, which was rather sadistic. I remember seeing it once, on the great big, wide movie screen, at the Coolidge Theatre in Brookline, MA, afew years ago, and I totally forgot about that ending!

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

Home Alone. Every christmas.

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

The Omega Man
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad
King Kong
Planet of the Apes

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

Jurassic Park
JAWS
Top Gun
Speed
Twister

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

Aladdin.

I remembered The Wizard of Oz playing around Easter every year, along with The Ten Commandments (ABC played the DeMille movie every year around Passover/Easter for DECADES). And through the late '70s and 1980s, It's a Wonderful Life must have played at least twenty times per season on my local TV stations from Thanksgiving through Christmas. At least.

But other than seasonal entries like that, I don't remember any of the D.C. or Baltimore stations (I lived in a part of Maryland roughly halfway between each city, so we got both metroplex's channels) being especially obssessed with programming a certain movie. Other than Christmas movies, obviously. And similarly the old horror movies that'd be shown around this time of year, leading up to Halloween.

http://www.moviegoods.com/Assets/pro...033.1010.A.jpg http://www.moviegoods.com/Assets/pro...635.1010.A.jpg http://www.moviegoods.com/Assets/pro...969.1010.A.jpg

ArghPirate, I'm sure you saw Beastmaster, for example, on TBS over and over again. It was like a joke in the mid and late 1980s, that they played that movie probably a hundred times in six years. If you had cable, you couldn't HELP but run into that turkey (or rather, ferret) over and over again, so much so that you started to wonder if that's what the "B" in TBS stood for. But the age of cable TV is much different than those of us who are old enough to remember only what you could get over the antenna, with those independnet UHF channels that showed movies late at night and during the weekends. I remember Channel 20 out of D.C. for at least a year or two, say 1979 and 1980, maybe longer, every Saturday at noon showed old comedies. Mostly they were Abbott & Costello, Martin & Lewis, and Hope & Crosby. But over and over again. So if you saw Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy on a Saturday in June, it'd probably come around again in the rotation by the early Fall. Channel 20 also showed all the old Tarzan movies Saturday mornings. Channel 45 out of Baltimore showed old monster movies on Saturday nights, mostly the Universal stuff, everything from the initial Dracula and Frankensteins of the 1930s to The Creature from the Black Lagoon and on and on. And again, they'd simply be in rotation. And this wasn't only for Halloween, this was a regular "Creature Feature" that ran year-round.

When we first got HBO, Showtime and the Movie Channel in the early 1980s, inititally they had almost no original programming, save for the odd stand-up comedy special or sporting event, and even when they showed "new" movies (meaning stuff that was a year old or less), they might only have twelve or fifteen titles for the entire month, so the schedule would be overbooked with the same movies for a month or two at a time. HBO might show 9 to 5, when they first got it, sixty or eighty times in two months. Then after a month or two, they'd have a new batch of fifteen movies and show them in just as heavy a rotation. That was pay cable TV the first couple years we had it at my house.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGPRWePIUUI

After a couple years of that, the pay movie channels did start mixing it up a bit more, showing more older movies along with the newest ones available, and started really investing in original programming, both series and movies.

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

I'm really looking for the movies that you ONLY knew because it was on TV.

I guess don't know what you mean.

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

It's not complicated you must be reading into something that isn't there.

All I'm looking for are movies that you saw on TV and nowhere else. Movies you didn't know were in theaters and may never have been. Everyone knows Home Alone, Jurassic Park, Wizard of Oz, etc. I'm not looking for any random movie you caught once on TV or the James Bond marathon on Thanksgiving. With one of my picks, The Beastmaster, there's a reason they called HBO "Hey, Beastmaster's On" and TBS "The Beastmaster Station". It played all the time because a particular station got the rights for it and they wanted their moneys worth.

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

Hell, every movie I ever saw on TV I knew were in theaters even if it was before I was born except TV movies and I didn't grow up with any of them because I wasn't a little kid when they started those and they don't run TV movies a lot with a few exceptions like Duel.

I watched a lot of USA Network and Comedy Central movies, among other channels. What I can remember:

Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot!
Rocky movies
Polyester
The Addams Family
The Wizard of Oz (but I never cared much for it 'cause I had it on video)
Last Action Hero
Terminator 2

Rhonda Shear and Gilbert Gottfried's Up All Night late night movies: H.O.T.S., Surf Nazis Must Die, Friday the 13th films, loads of obscure B movies usually involving something crazy or sexy or both.

Think Big
Child's Play 2
Sixteen Candles
Jumpin' Jack Flash
Mannequin
Summer School
Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead
Psycho IV
Meatballs movies
Rock 'n Roll High School
Prom Night III
Back to the Future
Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death
Look Who's Talking
The Gate
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Moving Violations
National Lampoon's European Vacation
Encino Man
Coneheads
Not Quite Human 1, 2 and 3
Purple People Eater
Doin' Time on Planet Earth

Yeah, then you misunderstand yourself. I was never so uninformed that I didn't realize a movie I had seen on TV first was ever a theatrical release. I saw The Beastmaster in the theater, before however many times I caught fragments of it on TBS. I was a regular, very aware moviegoer from the age of eight or nine onward, so even if I didn't see something until it aired on TV or cable, I wasn't so out of it that I was totally unaware of its existence before I actually watched it. All four of the movies you listed in your original post were all theatrical releases, none of them straight-to-video or made-for-TV.

So if your question is which movies I had no idea were "real" movies until I discovered them on TV somehow, I suppose the answer is none. But as I tried to explain, other than the made-for-TV movies and mini-series from the three major networks, which were always identified as such with much hoopla and advertising, back when I was a kid there weren't straight-to-video releases (or home video at all) and when I first got cable TV in 1980/81 the major pay networks didn't have their own made-for-TV movies yet, either, much less the likes of TNT and Lifetime and the myriad of outlets available since the 1990s.

But thanks for asking!

I didn't get this at all. I thought what you meant was what, pretty much, everyone else here has posted. Film we grew up with.

Maybe a better title would've been "Happened Upon Movies" or, more blatently, "Movies You Only Saw On TV" or "Movies You Didn't Know About Until You Saw Them On TV".

Actually, Moonfleet still works with this 'new' criteria.

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

Even when I was real little watching Laurel and Hardy I knew they didn't just make it. They had old Popeye movie cartoons and new ones made for television and I knew which was which (TV ones hardly moved).

This has nothing to do with being ignorant of a movie's theatrical release!!!
I'm 25 so as a kid in the 90's, The Beastmaster was and is synonymous with TBS. This thread is more than likely irrelevant to anyone 30+. Another example would be Tremors. It played on USA and then Sci-Fi and when I talk about it with ANYONE I know in "real life" we reminisce about watching it on TV, not in theaters. I think the thread is properly titled because I'm asking for movies you grew up with on TV not movies that were merely on TV when you grew up.

That's not what you said before. Even in my day there were movies like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz that had long network contracts that were shown annually and even I was too young to have seen them in theaters and I certainly watched The Wizard of Oz every year so I grew up with it.

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

My mom and dad were big fans of a movie called The Shakiest Gun in the West so I saw that a lot growing up.

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

The more I think what you wrote, the more I think you have tunnel vision about what it was like watching movies on television BEFORE you were born.

We all grew up watching movies that were shown endlessly over many years.

Apparently this thread is irrelevant to anyone else dumb enough to post here at this site or isn't part of your "real life" who understands "clear" English and knows what's really going on. Better be careful because you're getting to be an old fart yourself and will soon become irrelevant even under your own specialized criteria.

What's your problem? If you don't like this thread go to another one instead of bashing mine. I never said anyone was an old fart but apparently you were offended since you're apparently over 30 and you're taking out your old age syndrome on me. Go away.

This wasn't intended to be a "any movie shown on TV" thread. I meant the phrase "grew up w/ on TV" to mean movies most people grew up knowing it only from TV. You'd be hard pressed to find someone that saw Tremors in theaters but EVERYONE has passed by it on TV. That's all I was going for but I guess nowhere on the internet is civil anymore.

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

You keep redefining your terms. Now it is movies hardly anyone saw in theaters, but saw on television. Well, the rest of us have seen those movies also. For me it was the original Little Shop of Horrors, which was a second billed B when it came out in theaters amd was not there very long (so I hear). Before the musical we would all talk about that movie, which would show up a lot on local channel horror movie themed shows like Science Fiction Theater. So why are you trying to narrow the definition to movies only you grew up with?

Super Fuzz (Corbucci, 1980)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngvYJtpXkM4

Supaa, Supaaaaaaaaaaa

Oh yes, it's Super Fuzz. Just LOOK OUT! Terrance Hill, Spaghetti Western regular, does an action/super hero flick that is straight up CAMP. I used to watch this thing constantly on either HBO or American Super Channel, whichever it was at the time. My friend Ian and I would ride our bikes and cause trouble out side for a couple of hours, always making sure we were home in time to watch this gem.

An average Joe police officer is exposed to nuclear energy, granting him super powers. The only issie (and clearly ripped off) problem, is that if he sees the color red, he loses his powers. Yes, it's The Green Lantern in a police uniform.

Terrible stuff, and man, do I love it.

I'm not following these guidelines, because you can't seem to follow them for one paragraph. You claim the guideline is "Movies you didn't know were in theaters and may never have been", and then you immediately list The Beastmaster, which obviously ran in theaters and wasn't "just on TV."

The Beastmaster was certainly in theaters, because I snuck in to see it when I was 11...three times.

The film I listed above, now that's a film I only recall seeing on TV...

This is over the top - If anyone isn't being civil, it's you. No one is bashing anything, and this is not your thread. People are replying with on-topic posts concerning the original post that started the thread. All the posts have been in line with with the parameters stated in that post. Your later posts seem to want to restrict the topic to something that only applies to you and the time you grew up, but that is just silly.

Here, let's take a term from the post I quoted above:

"I meant the phrase "grew up w/ on TV" to mean movies most people grew up knowing it only from TV"

You must realize this is always, always going to be relative to the person posting. People ARE listing the films they grew up with on TV. Some of us grew up before TBS, TNT et al. even existed, so it's impossible to consider a programing paradigm like that when listing our favorites. When HBO was the only "cable" in town, TV was the only place we saw many, many films.

The discourse in this thread has been civil, with many people (Holden, for instance) going out of their way to explain why they posted the films they did and what things were like when THEY grew up. That's totally on topic.


Actually, Tremors was pretty well reviewed by critics. It currently stands at a whopping 88% Fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Oh, I saw it in theaters, too. I went with a whole bunch of friends and we had a blast watching it. I think it's a fun little monster B-movie that hits all the right spots.

http://thepinksmoke.com/images/tremors.jpg

"That's why we moved to Perfection - geographical isolation!"

Sedai you're ignoreing a key word in my phrasing. "MOST PEOPLE". Most people heard of Wizard of Oz before seeing it on TV. Most people would have no idea what Tremors is had it not been on TV. That's why I said if you're over 30 this is irrelevant because TV was totally different and only on a movie forum will you find someone that happens to remember Tremors in theaters. MOST PEOPLE that are old enough to remember any trailers from that time wouldn't remember it. Critics review everything and most of the reviews on RT were written much later than 1990. AFTER IT'S CULT TV FOLLOWING!

I never once changed the criteria. If I had, why do all my movies seem to magically fall into the same category? Office Space is a perfect (though more modern) example. Don't you dare tell me it was a blockbuster in theaters. Nobody knew of it until it played over and over on Comedy Central in the early 00's.

You can't give one example of how I've been uncivil but you're the people calling me an "old fart", calling anyone that continues this thread "dumb", and you still want to argue over MY thread. Yes it is MY thread, I came up with the topic and you aren't welcome anymore. You've ran it into the ground and no one would want to participate with your pretentious comments.

DO NOT REPLY, I DON'T CARE IF YOU DON'T GET IT OR DISAGREE!

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

Look, I don't want to fight and I'm willing to write this all off as a misunderstanding. It's just that sometimes every single person has a desire to say what they feel. I'm way past it at this point.

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

I am replying to you anyway. So what you are really talking about are cult movies, movies that were BO disappointments, but became popular on television. They have always been with us, including:

Little Shop of Horrors (already mentioned)

Carnival of Souls

It's a Wonderful Life (such a BO disaster nobody bothered to renew its copyright and became hugely popular in the early eighties because any channel could broadcast it)

Gun Crazy

Night of the Hunter

Sweet Smell of Success

Rocky Picture Horror Show


The list is endless. Some were low budget, some were not, but they either died big time at the box or were programmers on the bottom half of a bill. They developed their popularity by being show frequently on television. Cable, Showtime, Sci Si Channel, is irrelevant. Old movies have been a staple of television programming since the fifties. And certain ones, the ones people like, get shown more than others, irregardless of how popular they were in theaters.

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No, he doesn't mean that. That's the problem. We have a big misunderstanding because we took the words literally and didn't figure out that the movies mentioned in the first post all fell into some kind of time frame. I think the thread is fine, but we could ask for some posts to be deleted. For example, I could delete mine but it wouldn't make the thread any "cleaner" or easier to follow. Shut up, mark!

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

If this was supposed to be about movies only HE grew up with he should say so. Instead he keep posting contradictory posts about what he is talking about. Every time he tries to redefine his terms to restrict it to movies he grew up with he can't because those movies have existed before he was born.

This thread looks a little inflamed. Here's some Advil.

http://usermeds.com/static/0dd3e19e3...35470aa24f.jpg

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

Thanks, Sexy!

I think it's gonna cool down.

For the record, I saw Tremors in the theater during its initial run. Twice. Office Space, too. That you and your circle of friends and family weren't aware of these movies until they played on television and had developed cult reputations hardly makes them obscure. Only to you, personally.

But if that is what the topic was supposed to be about...way to go?

I won't even satisfy will.15 by reading his reply because he was one I specifically asked to leave. But it looks like the ridiculous confusion is still lingering.

Holden, congratulations, the entire internet thinks you're the greatest hipster ever because you knew of the cool movies before they were cool. You're a real pop culture wiz and we all care. But don't be surprised that more than 99% of people and their "circle of friends" also feel the way I do.

I think the only thing I would change about my original post is that I would have titled it "Movies WE Grew Up w/ on TV" with the hopes of posts with titles that everyone (as a collective group) recognizes as movies that became popular through constant TV airings.

Dear God I hope I'm not on any internet forum when I'm 30+. I'm just here to stimulate discussion to inspire myself with my writing for my movie blog.

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It was first when I was a teen I really got into watching movies.

But from my childhood I remember:
The Police Academy movies
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
Home Alone 1 & 2

Besides that I mostly saw danish movies from the 50s-70s.

It's a Wonderful Life was a forgotten movie until it was aired constantly on television.

The proper title should be I, not we, as you think any movie that didn't affect you growing up worthy of mention.

I'm not welcome anymore?

I WORK HERE. It's my JOB to moderate these threads! Did you not notice the Mod tag next to my name? This thread belongs to Chris Bowyer - See the copyright at the bottom of the page? Just so we are clear on that.

Also, I would appreciate it if you didn't attempt to ascribe ideas and stances to me that I have not personally articulated. I haven't called you anything. I never called you an "old fart", which would be silly, seeing as how I am older than you. I have never called anyone on these boards "dumb" in my entire tenure with the site. I may call an IDEA or a STATEMENT dumb (which I did not do here), but I wouldn't personally attack anyone in such a manner.

I'm sorry, but you are making claims for large groups of people that you just aren't in a position to make. You don't know what "most people" think, when they saw what films, or where they saw them.

"Office Space was released on February 19, 1999 in 1,740 theatres, grossing USD$4,231,727 on its opening weekend. It went on to make $10,827,810 in North America.[7] On the Monday after the opening weekend, Judge received a phone call from Jim Carrey's agent. The comedian loved the film and wanted to meet him. Chris Rock called two weeks later.[6]" - wiki

Oops, wrong again. 11 million isn't bad for a B-comedy like office space. Also, apparently some people named Jim Carrey and Chris Rock heard of the film immediately, so I am guessing lots of other folks might have seen it as well, hence the 5 million dollar opening weekend.

You seem to want to make claims for the world based on your personal experiences and opinions. You will find that reality will rarely align with your stances while using this method.

The criteria was kind of confusing, dude, and yeah, it did kinda shift over time: Sedai specifically mentioned why, I believe.

But here's the thing: there are several perfectly intelligent people here who apparently misunderstood what you were asking for. So the reasonable response to that is to realize that all these people are probably not being dense or stupid or rude or whatever, but that it was a little confusing. No big deal; just acknowledge it could have been clearer, clarify it, and then move on without being confrontational about it. Saying someone has no life or is grappling with being older is completely unnecessary. It only becomes a big deal if someone digs in their heels and insists there was nothing confusing at all to begin with.

Also, just to clear something of my own up: nobody owns any thread and general discord is pretty much everyone's business as long as it's posted publicly. A thread starter is completely within their rights to insist that people try to stay on topic, but that's the extent of their jurisdiction, really.

Anyway, trying to answer what I think the thread is about is hard, because the only things that come to mind are things that were on TV, but we taped them off TV and onto VHS and watched them that way. If that still "counts" then the original Star Wars trilogy was among them. Not because I would have only learned of it from TV (is that the rule?), but because I saw them so young that I don't even remember them being new, so it was very similar to "discovering" them on TV in that I was too young to even really think about what it would mean for something to be in theaters, anyway.

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He could have seen what I actually look like if he took a second to hit the picture thread up. Why bother though, just better to make more stuff up, I guess. *Shrugs*

This was the funniest part. And most pathetic.

All in all, I learned a lot from the 4 "old men" on these two threads, so kudos, more history for meeeee

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Well, I guess we can all now talk about the movies we grew up with watching on TV without worrying about the ground rules.

I guess he doesn't have to worry about being on a forum when he is over 30 becuae he will be banned on all of them by then.

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Holden and Mark especially, who are towering tomes of cinematic knowledge personified!

Anyway - I have Super Fuzz coming in from Netflix. Time to revisit it - I am sure it won't be anywhere near as fun these days, but I just can't resist.

The Wizard of Oz, which came on television at least once a year, and Some Like It Hot were two movies that I grew up watching on TV.

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just curious... why did the guy get banned? i must have missed something, cause i know he was kind of a dickweed, but he didn't do anything ban-worthy in here that i saw.

Did he/she really call you an over-thirty-douchebag? Or is that a wonderful jab of your own? I thought he/she called you a hipster?

Re: Movies You Grew Up w/ on TV
 

The post where he had a meltdown is missing, the one that got him banned. I didn't see it, but he must have called him something worse than a hipster. That won't get you banned, you hipster you. (Guess I'll find out.)

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I'm over 30, irrelevant, and on a forum to boot..... but I enjoy it ;)

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Walt Disny's Alice in Wonderland.

When I was growing up all the old Disney animated features would be reissued in theaters every five or six years or whatever it was and that is where I saw them with one exception.

Alice.

It was such a box office stinker Disney dumped it on television, on the show he hosted, either the ABC or NBC one and that is where I saw it. They probably showed it annually for awhile.

Looked okay to me. Making the Mad Hatter look like old time comic Ed Wynn and getting him to do the voice was neat. I never could remember the rest of the movie, just the Tea Party.

I remember watching The Conversation late one night on TV when I was a young teenager, it left quite an impression on me.

The Ten Commandments and A Charlie Brown Christmas. Those two films I would watch on tv but never considered even renting or buying them. Ever.