Grandpa's Old Movies
Eric is madly searching for Charlton Heston’s “The Ten Commandments” for his sermon this Sunday. He is introducing the book of Exodus, and he wants to show a few clips from the movie. The problem is, we can’t find it anywhere [any suggestions?]. After making various dead-end calls to numerous stores to see if it’s in stock, I start suggesting different options, like Netflix or the video store or maybe his dad or my dad. Nothing comes with a readily available option, however, which is imperative at this point, and neither of our folks owns the movie, anymore anyway.
So I begin racking my brain, Who would have this old movie? The only person who instantly comes to mind is my sweet grandpa, who is no longer living. If he were still alive, he would have it. It would be smartly catalogued alongside his 35- to 40,000 other movies, but it wouldn’t be the best quality, that’s for sure. In fact, it would be recorded on VHS -- an old, almost antiquated VHS -- and it would probably be a little warped with age. It would be on a cassette tape shared with 7 other movies, so you'd have to stand and hold down the fast-forward until you found it. When you'd try to play it, it would probably have a slightly warbled sound and boast a line of static at the lower half of the screen. You would try to adjust the tracking, to no avail, and then you would realize this is it; this is your quality. You can’t blame him either, really. He did his best with the equipment he had at the time. He was not what you would call a digital native either, that’s for sure, but not many people were back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when cell phones were as big as shoeboxes, and the best computers were operating under DOS with Fortran and Pascal as the programming languages, you know, input, output, etc…
Still, I remember how much we enjoyed watching those badly recorded movies. We’d sit down as a family, popcorn bowl in hand, and watch them with great delight. They were mainly the old black-and-white varieties, with the exception of a few tacky ’70 movies thrown in, you know, the ones with bottle-green trouser suits and earsplitting soundtracks. “Get Smart” was my grandpa’s favorite TV show to record, so we watched, I believe, every episode. He was usually pretty faithful about pausing the recording during the commercial breaks in an attempt to provide us with commercial-free bliss, but sometimes he’d fall asleep toward the latter half of the movie, and we’d have to get up and push fast-forward or, in later years, use the remote. Two or three of us would usually yell, “Uh, Grandpa fell asleep again!” to which the rest of us would laugh.
He was a doctor, and why his passion in his off time was to sit in that dimly lit back room -- the dungeon, we called it -- and record old movies onto VHS, I’ll never know. Perhaps he knew how much his family enjoyed them.
The videos are all gone now, finally tossed out after having sat in a hot garage one-too-many summers, so they’ll be of no use in our search, but the memory of my sweet grandpa lingers still.
So I begin racking my brain, Who would have this old movie? The only person who instantly comes to mind is my sweet grandpa, who is no longer living. If he were still alive, he would have it. It would be smartly catalogued alongside his 35- to 40,000 other movies, but it wouldn’t be the best quality, that’s for sure. In fact, it would be recorded on VHS -- an old, almost antiquated VHS -- and it would probably be a little warped with age. It would be on a cassette tape shared with 7 other movies, so you'd have to stand and hold down the fast-forward until you found it. When you'd try to play it, it would probably have a slightly warbled sound and boast a line of static at the lower half of the screen. You would try to adjust the tracking, to no avail, and then you would realize this is it; this is your quality. You can’t blame him either, really. He did his best with the equipment he had at the time. He was not what you would call a digital native either, that’s for sure, but not many people were back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, when cell phones were as big as shoeboxes, and the best computers were operating under DOS with Fortran and Pascal as the programming languages, you know, input, output, etc…
Still, I remember how much we enjoyed watching those badly recorded movies. We’d sit down as a family, popcorn bowl in hand, and watch them with great delight. They were mainly the old black-and-white varieties, with the exception of a few tacky ’70 movies thrown in, you know, the ones with bottle-green trouser suits and earsplitting soundtracks. “Get Smart” was my grandpa’s favorite TV show to record, so we watched, I believe, every episode. He was usually pretty faithful about pausing the recording during the commercial breaks in an attempt to provide us with commercial-free bliss, but sometimes he’d fall asleep toward the latter half of the movie, and we’d have to get up and push fast-forward or, in later years, use the remote. Two or three of us would usually yell, “Uh, Grandpa fell asleep again!” to which the rest of us would laugh.
He was a doctor, and why his passion in his off time was to sit in that dimly lit back room -- the dungeon, we called it -- and record old movies onto VHS, I’ll never know. Perhaps he knew how much his family enjoyed them.
The videos are all gone now, finally tossed out after having sat in a hot garage one-too-many summers, so they’ll be of no use in our search, but the memory of my sweet grandpa lingers still.
Comments
And I like your recollection of old OS's and watching VHS stuff. =)