Since we discovered about 9 months ago that our amazon prime membership gave us access to thousands of movies and TV shows from the last 70+ years, we’ve made a spectacular discovery:
Most of it is not worth watching. I don’t mean it’s not very good. I mean it is TERRIBLE and not worth your time. It’s especially fun to peruse “free” science fiction movies. Try it some time. It’s like the stuff was made for drive in movies and they expected that the poor quality would motivate the couple watching it to, after the first ten minutes or so, start making out and forget about the movie.
But it’s not just Sci-Fi.
Oddly, some of the old movies and TV shows are timeless and still excellent entertainment. The core stories in the old Twilight Zone episodes are not only excellent, but it’s pretty easy to see where some modern stuff has ripped it off. That being said, many of them were recorded on high quality black and white film but expected to be viewed on poor quality TV screens. Flaws in the sets, easy to see on a modern flat screen, become almost comical.
Dr. Who has the same problems in the modern Hi Def world.
We watched a classic on the big screen on Monday and the low budget build showed bigly. Par for the course with classic Who.
There was a short one on one with Tom Baker afterwards that was really good.
Leonard Nimoy on Futurama...
“So many cardboard sets...so many memories!”