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??
I have finally found it, thank you stranger.
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.
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.
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?
Standard vs Long play.
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?
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?
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 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.
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.
My parents made me a VHS tape with like 9 movies on it and I would watch it constantly. I was a sickly child, so I was stuck in bed a lot. That tape was great.
For me the more “obscure” ones were The Indian and the Cupboard, Small Soldiers, Jingle All The Way, James and the Giant Peach. Not that I referenced it hard or anything.
The VHS sleeve for Indian and the Cupboard just had the cupboard printed on the opposite side, so child me tried putting his toys into the VHS Clamshell to make his toys come to life.
Ok but the Indian in the cupboard came with a key for the plastic VHS case, and a couple of toys from the movie. So my love was justified.
Worst child actor ever though
Whoops Dad accidentally recorded over our bootleg copy of land before time with porn :)
Toooomorrow tomorrow I love ya, tomorrow, you’re only a day aaaawayyyyy -the song I hate yet is imprinted on me. Thank you younger sibling for that. It was also mom that broke that CD, RIP (Rest in pieces you over played movie)
I liked the VHS tape that had the naked women recorded onto it.
Several dozen? Rookie numbers.
My dad was a film historian. My entire childhood was filled with movies none of my contemporaries had seen.
My dad wasn’t a historian, but he loved old movies and made a point to introduce us to the classics. I’ve seen so many black and white films that I hardly get to talk about with anyone.
Watching older media is what got me into Star Trek though. TOS specifically, and then TNG much later.
Me too. I grew up on Fred Astaire, Buster Keaton and Eddie Cantor.
I used to have a party trick back in the pre-IMDB days where I’d bring out Leonard Maltin’s movie guide, have someone flip to a random page, start reading titles, and I’d stop them before they could get to the end by describing the plot of whichever one I’d seen.
My earliest memory is my parents projecting 2001: A Space Odyssey on our living room wall using a 16mm projector with a Cinemascope lens for a bunch of grad students.
He also had a reel-to-reel recorder that came specifically with one type of Sony Trinitron TV that predated VHS. Of course, once VHS came out, he taped everything. We had all the movie channels.
But my brother was the Star Trek person. My dad was pretty so-so about it.
I’m 19. Those movies are:
- “Konferenz der Tier” (“Conference of the animals”, some kinda obscure children’s movie)
- Bambi
- Lassie
- The wonderful adventures of nils
And later:
- Lucky number slevin
- Everything from Quentin Tarantino
All of those are in our possession in the form of optical media, as well as a 0% legal digital copy.
I haven’t watched Ice Age in twenty years but if you put it on the TV I bet I could quote every line from it. My mom loved that movie when we saw it in theater so we got it on DVD, then we must have watched it a hundred times after that. It was her favorite movie by far.
We also watched a good bit of Madagascar when that one came out but Ice Age was the enduring classic.
For me it was Cocktail. I was a latch key kid, and sometimes you just got bored and hunted around your parents shit.
Turns out 11 year old me was REALLY interested in watching a shirtless Tom Cruise throw around bottles of alcohol in a tropical paradise.
