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As Uncle Joe described the movie he’d just seen – “The Thing from Another World” – my heart sank.
I’d seen the ad in our Times Leader earlier that evening, and of course I’d been hoping to … Well, it didn’t matter now because the sight of my father there in our living room shaking his head “no” told me that this movie would be off limits.
His ruling was that a mega-scary flick about a crazed space creature terrorizing an American outpost somewhere up near the Arctic Circle would be too much for my 8-year-old psyche to handle.
Well, I finally did see “The Thing” on TV when I was 24 years old. Yes, it was scary, but I couldn’t shake the regret that it would have been an even greater feast of thrills 16 years earlier.
Anyway, that visit by Uncle Joe and his detailed summary of the movie he’d just enjoyed was part of the social media of the day. Recommendation by kinfolk was one of several ways you learned what movies you should go out and see (or forbid the kids to see).
As for today, I’m not 100 percent sure how most people get the information that “Z-men and the Tomb of Terror XIV” is something they’d might want to go over to the theater and check out, or play the film on any of various techs.
No, I’m not going to say “bring back 1950.” But I do know that recently I’ve missed some flicks I’d like to have seen because I didn’t know they existed.
If you didn’t have a movie previewer like Uncle Joe in your family back at mid-century, here are the other parts of your social media that told you what was headed for your neighborhood screen.
Previews of coming attractions: “But we have them today,” you say? No, you don’t – at least not the kind of previews I enjoyed at the old movie house, with the narrator shouting breathlessly that the film starting Wednesday was “ripped from the headlines” or “reveals the incredible story of …”
Honestly, when I’d see a couple of seconds of a sheriff’s posse in hot pursuit of train robbers led by a guy named Bart or maybe a wave of Corsairs blasting off the deck of a carrier in the Pacific, I knew my calendar was filling up.
Newspaper ads: This, folks, was a huge way of learning what movies had arrived or were on the horizon. In those days of single-screen theaters galore, every daily and Sunday paper in America had a wildly exciting movie page.
Really, if you’d see a big picture of a giant scaly creature crawling out of the sea and terrorizing the streets of Los Angeles or maybe a taped-up mummy carrying the heroine off to his lair, you knew just about everything you’d need to know about this drama. Hey, block out everything else for that evening.
Well, to make a long story short, we had our own version of a social network to tell us what tickets to buy.
My favorite among them, though, was the relative or neighbor who always got to the theater first and seemed to have a photographic memory for production detail. I had an adult cousin who would even give us the plot of the Tom and Jerry cartoon that ran along with the feature and alert us to the laugh lines.
Uncle Joe, it’s time for the summer blockbusters. Where in the name of Errol Flynn are you when I need you?
Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history writer. Reach him at [email protected].
Tom Mooney is a Times Leader history writer. Reach him at [email protected].