Finding Old Films on YouTube

One example - there's a 1981 made for TV movie called "This House Possessed" with Parker Stevenson that my mom had on VHS tape. We only had 3/4s of it because back in the 90s when we taped it, the tape ran out due to some timing issue. So we never ever got to see it again because it was never released or aired again (at least when we had cable).

So anyway, after looking online for long time (and never finding it) I once again ran a search for it and voila - someone uploaded the entire thing to YouTube.

Basically short story is music singer and his nurse/girlfriend move into a house that's "alive" and it turns into a horror thing. Pretty stupid stuff but the acting is pretty good by the two leads (Parker Stevenson/Lisa Eilbacher) [considering the material] and it's overall pretty entertaining. Slim Pickens is also in there.

There's also a really funny line about various music genres or what constitutes "rock" music at 1:02:30.

Anyone ran across any old movies they'd been looking for or had forgotten about?

 

Orson Welles' Chimes at Midnight is there.

I finally got to watch it a few weeks back...

Shalom, y'all!

L. Bangs

 

It frightens me that there are people who consider a 1981 TV movie an old movie. A 1930s-1940s movie is old; 1981 is not that far away.

 

1981 was 33 years ago. In 1981 I'm sure people would have considered a movie from 1948 to be old.

 

When I was a kid, we didn't have VCRs -- flibberdy gibberdy -- if you missed a show that was it!
I also had to walk 3 miles to school every day with 3 feet of snow on the ground year round! And I loved it!

 

I thought I was hot stuff buying a first off the line stereo VCR and telling my Dad about my purchase. His reaction"What are you going to do with that?"

 

What about: "You got to get a 4-head machine if you only have a 2-head?" I never noticed any difference. In fact, I have 35 year old VHS tapes recorded with a 2-head machine that play better now than those recorded 10 years ago on a 4-head machine.

 

Uphill each way?

 

Wasn't going to mention, but the VCR was a Sony Beta as VHS was still mono.
I still have it and watch my studio (mono) copy of Let It Be. My Dad was a sailing freak & I would tape the ESPN America's Cup from Australia. Sorta changed his mind.

 

of course

 

unfortunately i have never found any of mine...never showed up on any digital form!

 

when i went 4 head Stereo Hi-Fi I noticed a considerable difference from my 2 head machine.!!!! i paid $1,600 for it...what a rip! but it was built like a tank...mostly metal!

 

I consider a movie from the 30's-40's old as well...

 

Thanx to yt, I was able to watch and 'relive' 'House on Greenapple Road' and 'Cat Creature' -movies of the week. Enjoyed both.

 

I used to enjoy the 1985 Bliss movie. Never been on DVD for this region

I think I found it on You tube a year or so ago, but when I am looking for it now, I'm only getting partial excerpts from it

 

Actually, I think it's all there - just in 3 parts. Must watch soon!

 

Let's agree to disagree. Pop culture is an interesting thing: today, it's very easy to listen to 1960s music. There's thousands of radio stations just in the U.S. that are playing 1960s music, and that was 50 years ago. But in the 1960s, there were almost no radio stations playing music from 1914. Why is that? Because the paradigm shifts over time. What's considered "old" in one era may not apply to another era.

 

Easiest way to find a lot of these movies on Youtube, is to make sure you include the full date in parentheses along with the the title of the movie. Example: Dark Night Of The Scarecrow (1981). Sometimes including phrases like "Full Movie" or "TV" will help in a search.

 

Today, I looked up on YouTube to see if they had clips of the film, Deadlock that Can wrote the soundtrack to that showed up on their Soundtracks album. I found the entire movie. It was a West German spaghetti (sauerkraut?) western.

I had always imagined something a little grander than what I saw...

 

The number one rule with Youtube -- If you find a movie you like, watch it now, before it gets pulled.
Oh yeah, and a movie made in 1985 is not old.

I agree with Vidiot.

With music, I think it's a couple of things -- high-fi era vs. low fi, type of music. Today's kids will probably consider most classic jazz "old" regardless of when it was recorded. And just about anything recorded in low-fi (circa pre-1950) they will consider "old".

 

I'd agree in general with that. I'd say by the 1980s, music from the 1950s was considered quaint and old by the mass-market -- though I loved a lot of it (still do). It's interesting how you can put on (say) Little Richard's "Tutti Fruiti" and that sounds pretty slam-bam happening, but then you put on (say) Perry Como, and I think an average modern audience would start snoozing.

Ted Turner was convinced in the 1980s that any film in B&W was automatically getting lower ratings than more modern films, and that's what led him to try to colorize 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s B&W films -- to try to hype the ratings up. Unfortunately, after a few years they realized that there's plenty of old color films that get no audience because they're old. It's about the hair styles, the culture, the language, the subject matter... there's a lot of factors involved that make a movie old. I would argue once a movie becomes a bona fide classic, a lot of the rules no longer apply; Casablanca and Citizen Kane are still movies that are very fast moving and (I would hope) not boring to a modern audience.

Now, I worry that the 1.37 aspect ratio will make these movies look "old" on a modern 16x9 TV set. It's not so much true for movies, but it's definitely true for TV series. There's a lot of shows from the 1980s and 1990s that I think are going to do a quick fade, simply because they're doomed to being 4x3 forever. I personally have no problem watching 4x3 if that was the original intended aspect ratio, but I think the vast majority of people under 35 associate that with "old shows."

 

Do a search for "hui brothers movies YouTube". Classic Hong Kong comedies from the 70's. Absolutely side splitting

 

Nothing you did with VHS made it any better. Beta had the pro Beta formats, but Sony deliberately kept them incompatible with consumer Beta. Best of all was U-Matic, but it cost a fortune. We had open reel monochroem Ampex VTRs and later U-matic in the house from when I was about seven or eight.

 

Well, in music there was pre-rock pop and then there was rock and roll era pop, there was a clean break, sort of. With movies you had a little bit of a break when the studio system people went out and then the newer wave of indie trained directors and actors came in, but it wasn't as severe. Still, most films of the early 70s would have been unthinkable ten years earlier.