M is for Movies

As a participant in the A to Z Blogging Challenge, I will be making my way through the alphabet all month.

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I have loved movies for as long as I can remember. I grew up watching the Jerry Lewis/Abbot & Costello/ Bob Hope & Bing Crosby movies on Saturday afternoons. I was in high school in the 80's, so John Hughes teenager movies were in the theaters. It was a great time to be in high school.

• Sixteen Candles - "Can I borrow your underpants for 10 minutes?"
• The Breakfast Club - "Yo, wastoid, you're not gonna blaze up in here."
• Pretty in Pink - "We don't have none of this stuff in the boy's room! Wait a minute! We don't got none of this... we don't got doors on the stalls in the boy's room, we don't have, what is this? What's this? We don't have a candy machine in the boy's room"
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off - "Life moves pretty fast. If you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it."
• Weird Science - "So, what would you little maniacs like to do first"
• National Lampoon's Vacation - "She breathed on me! A dead person breathed on me"
• Home Alone  - "Keep the change, ya filthy animal"

When VCRs first hit the market, they were too expensive (about $800) for the typical family to purchase one. However, a local electronics store would rent them along with movie rentals. This was before video rental stores. Every Friday night, we'd rent a VCR and six movies to watch over the weekend and return when we came back into town for church on Sunday. Having the option to watch something whenever we felt like was so high-tech. We loved it.

This opened us up to all different types of movies. We were no longer restricted to whatever channel 11 wanted to show on the weekends. We could rent comedies, action, westerns, or my favorite horror movies. I loved a good scary movie.

A few years later, my dad splurged for a satellite dish. Not the little ones we have today, but the huge monstrosities of the 80's. They were well over 10 feet tall and over 8 feet wide. When positioned, they could only pick up 24 channels at a time (most of which were crap) and it had to be turned to point at other satellites to pick up other channels. It is so much easier today.

This gave us even more access to movies and we watched everything. My dad and I even competed to see who could find the worst movies. As bad as they were, we loved watching them and this love for movies has never left me.

In 2001, I became a Netflix customer so movies could just be mailed to my house. Today, I also have their streaming service along with Hulu and Amazon Prime. I even pay Amazon a little extra for Shudder to access their extensive horror movie collection. I love it.

As much as I love movies, you will rarely catch me in a theater. The theater experience is lost on me. People are rude and it's just not worth the extra expense. I just want the movie and am willing to wait for it to come out on video. Just let me see it.