Goonies, but it was recorded from TV and you had to switch tapes at about the pirate ship.
My family was pretty poor growing up, but we had cable. Back in the day there would occasionally be free weekends of Disney Channel, HBO and the like. Whenever there was one of those free weekends, my parents would buy a super long blank VHS tape and record hours of random movies. So for years every movie that I watched had an 800 number that would pop up every few minutes asking you to call and subscribe.
The more things change, the more they stay the same i guess. Sounds like just anout every streaming service out there today.
My dad would rent movies from blockbuster then set up the camcorder on a tripod to film the movie off the TV. It was always a big to-do since we all had to be quiet so we didn’t ruin the recording…
I’m going to assume you’re joking so I don’t go outside and scream into the middle distance.
The motivation combined with the complete lack of understanding of the tech is certainly interesting.
Jus make sure to close the blinds on the way out. Otherwise, there will be a glare on the screen.
That’s what you get for recording in SP.
What’s SP in this context?
Tape speed / recording quality. Frames on VHS are diagonal stripes from one edge to the other. At lower tape speeds, those stripes get shorter and closer together. The horizontal resolution is unavoidably reduced. Color information gets muddy, because that’s some deep magic in a black-and-white signal. Adjacent frames can bleed into one another. Worst of all, you’re more likely to get tracking problems, where the ridiculous wheels-in-wheels of the diagonal / helical read mechanism get misaligned with the stripes, and the whole picture can drop out.
You wrote a really long and interesting response that completely failed to answer the question. What’s SP in this context?
… the tape speed.
EDIT: You did it again
Phrased directly: What does SP stand for?
Standard Play, I think. Versus Long Play and Extended Play.
No idea why EP is sometimes called SLP. Wikipedia’s right there if you’re curious.
Wait wouldn’t stripes get longer the lower the tape speed?
Nope. The tape travels a shorter distance in each 60th of a second, so there’s a steeper diagonal between the start and end of each frame. The whole magnetic pattern gets scrunched.
I don’t understand what you’re saying.
Why would the stripes be longer, if the tape travels less distance, in the time it takes to make one stripe?
I think we used a different term for it, so maybe that’s a regional abbreviation. But I’m thinking they were talking about the recording quality/speed. I remember there being two options, one gave you twice as many hours but the quality was lower.
From memory, SP was standard play, LP was long play, and SLP was super long play.
You could get 6 hours on a tape with SLP, but only 2 hours on SP.
Standard vs Long play.
This is the movie I thought of also. My copy was also from TV, but I did have it all on one tape with the exception that we were missing the first three or four minutes of the movie. Even today when I catch the beginning of the movie, I smile a little thinking of all the times I didn’t get to watch that.
Hey you guys!!!
Every few months, when the topic of obscure childhood bs comes up in conversation, my husband will always ask about my “made up dinosaur rock band show” from when I was a child.
I’ve asked so many people in my life, from different areas around the US, varying ages, etc, and only on the internet do I have proof that Denver the Last Dinosaur wasnt a fever dream. 😂
Thank you for my quarterly validation.
HE’S MY FRIEND AND A WHOLE LOT MORE
…wait what
DEN-VER! The last diiinosaur
My brain did the same thing. What the hell else is stored down in there??
He’s my friend and a whole lot more! Ew.
I have finally found it, thank you stranger.
Kyle Mooney made a show about this era of cartoons that everyone needs to watch!:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Morning_All_Star_Hits!
oh my god
Police Academy 1-7 but mostly 4.
Dont sleep on Police Academy 3: Citizens on Patrol
Edit: C.O.P was 4. I feel shame
Yeah. 1 and 3 were recorded during one of those HBO free weekends for us.
That was number 4. I used to think the skating and “robot” scenes were the coolest shit ever.
You are correct. How could I get this wrong???
I only had 6. All I can say is “cigar scene”
I still yell “they’re not yielding!” when I’m driving
I had the same thing with video games. My dad got a free promotional copy of Morrowind from Fry’s. I didn’t have a computer/ laptop, but every summer, my dad would let me use his on our road trips. That game made me want to learn so much about anthropology, biology, history, mythology, etc… I played for hundreds of hours and never even came close to finishing.
Morrowind is one of my favorites of all time. I was into nag champa incense at the time, and so that smell will always remind me of Morrowind. Singing about the ambiance of Morrowind was kinda incense-y anyway, so it was the perfect combo
I love nag champa! The og smells so sweet, and the ashes are pretty/ easy to clean. I always think of headshops, though lol. They taught me the bottle trick, though. I like to use a key ring to hold the insence upside down in a glass bottle. It’s super clean.
Never heard of that! Thanks for the tip. Gonna try it
never even came close to finishing.
It is an Elder Scrolls game, you don’t finish those, the existence of the main quest is merely a theoretical thing from myth and legend.
My dad got a PS2 when I was six. There was Jak and Daxter, and there was Colin McRae Rally. Later I also ended up with Sly Cooper.
I didn’t have many friends to compare with so that was what I played. Everyone else played Crash Bandicoot, Pokémon, Mario games, etc. and I was like “have you heard about Ratchet and Clank”? Those series eventually got more popular but no one I knew had them at the time.
I had Sly as well! The soundtrack was awesome.
Me and the other Brave Little Toaster kids ended up a bit weird.
We just rewatched this with our daughter the other day and it is rrrrrough.
Yeah… yeah we did I guess. At least a bit
The Craft. I’m pretty sure Fairuza Balk is responsible for awakening my goth fetish.
Have you seen Return to Oz? It’s a hell of a ride. Disney wants everyone to forget this exists.
Her character in the Waterboy was it for me.
Waterboy? Did he solve puzzles in temples with his partner Firegirl?
Heh heh this guy was feeling light as a feather and stiff as a board!
The Sandlot for me
“you’re killin me, Smalls!”
FOR EV VER
Short Circuit and Flight of the Navigator. Had them both on one tape and I’d sit down and watch it all in one sitting.
Add Batteries Not Included to the list and that’s me.
Just in case you needed reminding how good Flight of the Navigator was:
My brother and I loved this movie so much and must’ve watched it 100 times.
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Uncle Buck Great movie.
When I was a kid I wanted to grow up to be uncle Buck. Unfortunately my brother took that position (down to driving a shit car that randomly backfires) and I’m just a normal dude 😕
Yeah, being the slightly dangerous uncle is a pretty sweet gig, NGL.
And it was recorded off the tv so you had to fast forward through commercials about clap-on clap-off lights
And the beginning of films were cut off. Big Trouble in Little China starts at the poker table for me-- I never realized Jack Burton (😍) had a monologue at the start.
My dad would pause the recording when commercials started and resumed recording when the commercials ended. It was funny when he was 15 sec late on both accounts lol.
I would tell people about Death Race 2000 and they’d look at me like I was crazy.
But have you seen its sequel?
No. I will not see it. They cannot improve upon perfection.
“Its a hand grenade.” Made me almost leave the room.
And I’m actively trying to go back to that. I ripped all of our old DVDs and Blurays and cancelled most of our streaming services. I told my kids that we can buy pretty much anything they want (so they don’t miss out), provided it’s not an exclusive.
The net result is that my kids really like Clue (1985) and Avatar: The Last Airbender (2005-2008).
my kids really like Clue (1985)
One of the best movies ever so that speaks pretty well to their tastes.
Tim Curry is a gift to humanity that we don’t deserve.
It has a great cast overall but he definitely carries the movie, just like most things he’s in.
Yup, once they’re a little older, I’ll introduce them to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it’s fantastic.
You’re raising them right. Lol
Do you have the ripped movies on a Plex server or something that’s easy for them to use?
Yup, Jellyfin. Unfortunately, my youngest kept watching even after I said no, so it’s locked behind a passcode. But when it’s watching time, I unlock it and let them pick. We have some Pokemon seasons, Studio Ghibli animations, and a bunch of other kid-friendly shows and movies for them to choose from.
That’s awesome. This is my next project. I want my kids to have a library of movies/shows that I’ve personally curated, instead of letting them loose on a handful of streaming services.
Do it! It’s a bit tedious to rip everything, but you can always “rip” things by looking up whatever you need on the internet from less… copyright approved sources, which can help to seed the collection.
We happened to have a bunch of movies and shows, so I went ahead and ripped everything, and I ended up buying a Bluray drive and flashing open firmware onto it to rip those properly as well.
I’m planning to combine this project with learning how to set up a Linux machine (thanks Lemmy) as the media server and local backup storage for pictures/videos. Might as well learn how to do some safe sailing at the same time, I suppose.
Check out the servarr stack + jellyseerr for your sailing activities. It is very nice to have one ui to search in then everything is sorted and just appears in jellyfin when it is ready! I set it up on a home server running TrueNAS recently. The only thing i might have done differently is run proxmox as os and set up a TrueNAS as a VM for my storage needs instead.
Saving this, thanks.
Do you by any chance use AppleTV to watch jellyfin media? If so what app do you use? I couldn’t get the only jellyfin app I was able to find to install for some reason.
No, just the app on my smart TV (LG). I’m considering getting a “dumb” TV to replace it, at which point I’ll probably use a Raspberry Pi instead.
My daughter liked both of those a lot.
But then she also really loves Forbidden Zone and Killer Klowns from Outer Space.
She’s a weird kid. Like her mom and dad.
I had an aunt with the Disney channel and HBO that recorded almost everything. It was like a home video store at her house, probably hundreds of tapes that she let friends and family borrow. She have me a spare copy of the Disney animated Robin Hood with all the animals and I must have watched it a hundred times.
My great aunt had 101 Dalmations. Just that film. Every time we visited, we would just sit there for an hour watching it. Over and over. It was great.
My “rich” aunt (relative to my family) had a laserdisc player. I would watch the Disney Robin Hood, as well as Star Wars and Star Trek The Motion Picture.
Damn, your aunt had a laser disc setup? Not only was she ballin, but she was cool, too.
Surf ninjas. It was the best kind of b movie fever dream.
Several dozen? Rookie numbers.
Yeah. My VCR TV would automatically rewind and start playing again. I have no idea how many times some of those tapes were played but it definitely broke 100.
