I was obsessed with the movie Short Circuit. I credit that film for my early fascination with electronics which later led me into IT work.
I really can’t stress the importance of having seen Star Wars in the theater in 1977. It was a mind-blowing experience.
I don’t think people who didn’t live through it can realize just how amazing it was.
Before Star Wars, science fiction movies were basically Plan 9 From Outer Space. Silly movies with bad acting and bad writing. No adult took them seriously. Star Wars came along and everything changed.
You only have to look at the response from studios, scrambling over themselves trying to find a “space story” they could rush into theaters.
Paramount shifted a planned Star Trek series to making, Star Trek the Motion Picture.
Disney dusted off the plans for The Black Hole
Alien
Battlestar Galactica
Star Wars showed studios they could make money producing serious science fiction.
My favorite movie as a child was probably either Babe (1995) or Space Jam. I’ve seen both of them at least several dozen times since I’d watch one of them almost every day. One Hundred and One Dalmatians (1961) and Paulie (1998) were also ones I watched regularly.
I basically just liked anything with animals as main characters.
I remember when I thought Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves was the best movie I’d seen. It’s still the best Robin Hood movie out there. Its parody, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, is also considered among the best, but it’s fourth for me, behind Disney’s and the Errol Flynn one from, I think the 1930s or 1940s? The Adventures of Robin Hood. The new ones suck.
Kevin Costner couldn’t get the accent right, so director Kevin Reynolds told him to stop trying and just use his natural American accent. This was controversial for people from the area, especially as everyone else was great (including Alan Rickman who IIRC is from the area? At least the country).
Fun fact: Kevin Reynolds went on to make (IMO) the best adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo about a decade later. I think he also made Waterworld and/or The Postman, both of which also starred Kevin Costner and were met with mixed reviews (but I enjoyed both). Reynolds’ Count of Monte Cristo, however, did not feature Costner (and he would have been a poor choice to play Dantes, and at that point I think he would only take starring/hero roles?).
I also liked Terminator 2, Stargate, Independence Day, and Starship Troopers. Plus most of the Star Trek movies, and all of the Star Wars movies (when there were just three of them, and we didn’t really talk about the Ewok movies — we still don’t). I actually am a child of the 80s, but I wasn’t watching movies when I was a child, most of them didn’t hold my interest. I wasn’t really able to fully enjoy movies until the early 90s. I do like some 80s movies, but 90s movies are the sweet spot for me.
When I was a child, obsessing over movies wasn’t really a thing like it is for kids today.
There were no home VCRs.
If you were seeing a movie it was either in a theater or on broadcast TV.
The thing we experience today where a kid will watch a movie over and over for weeks just couldn’t happen.
The one thing that did happen back then is movies would be repetitively broadcast on TV. So you’d be able to watch the same movie multiple times on TV. However, you’d have to wait until sometime decided to show it on their station.
One movie I remember seeing a lot on TV when I was young was Born Free. I’d watch that whenever I came across it.
