Movies You *Won't* Watch Again ...

[AugieTN]

Back in the day, every kid who had a hot car would have a Craig 8 track player. They were famous for eating 8 track tapes. The one 8 track you had to have if you had a hot car was Deep Purple Highway Star

 

[nickdalzell]

No, the TC8 has weak construction all around. The splices, tape cart itself, and spools are super cheap (some without lubricant to prevent binding even).

Most re-releases were also prone to being split between programs while much-older ones had more tape and were not affected by that, such as my longplay cart of Gordon Lightfoot that has no program splits at all and more songs.

The TC8 also feels cheap, and is of much lighter weight. Finding the non-TC8s is getting extremely hard these days. TC8s are quite like syndicated runs of shows being released on DVD vs. the original uncut versions. Many have less of a selection and being split between tracks.

**CLUNK** now back to our scheduled program topic

 

[mikedt]

The original 1973 Harvest 8-track release of Dark Side Of The Moon has three edited, split, and butchered tracks on it. And is a bit of a mess on 8-track IMO. They even faded, chopped, and mutilated Money, which is the beginning song on side-2 of the LP and cassette releases.

Dark Side Of The Moon has a total playing time of just under 43 minutes. So the 8-track release has probably about 11 minutes of tape in it, that goes around 4 times to play the whole album. That's why edits, cuts, song order changes have to be made with works like this.

An artist like Gordon Lightfoot, AFAIK most of his songs are quite short, and don't have things like 20 plus minutes running times without gaps.

 

[nickdalzell]

No, my Gordon Lightfoot cart is a 90 min cart. It's one of those rare 8-track types. I also got a few blank 90 min carts with Kmart branding on them (I just got them for the nostalgia, my recorder isn't working on record)

That said, sometimes artists got creative with program switches, such as my John Denver Aerie cart having some otherwise lost audio/music during the program switching times between songs.

The only way to hear the complete Pigs on the Wing song from Pink Floyd was on 8-track. That extra part never got added to vinyl much less streaming.

Mods: Sorry I've derailed this topic. Another reason I hope for a retro tech forum since this is the type of discussion more fitting to one.

 

[mikedt]

My favourite album seems to be messed with on Learjet Stereo-8. Moonchild is chopped in two, and The Court Of The Crimson King should be the final track.

 

[nickdalzell]

Does the song order really bother you that much? I just put everything on shuffle when it's CD or playing on my phone/Nintendo 3DS, so they're always random. I don't even notice the order on any format nor care. Heck, many CDs only two songs are worth a crap which was why I started using MP3s.

I'm not going to debate whether or not 8-tracks are superior. They're obviously not, as the quality of audio is lacking, they fall apart and are a total pain to fix if you can fix them (they just explode in a ball of tape for me) and compact cassette won for rewinding, dolby support and longer life.

But there are many songs I love that are unobtainium on any other format except 8-track. I got a Johnny Lee album that isn't available on any other format and I've checked Apple Music, Amazon, Google Youtube Music, the works. You can't buy 'Bet your heart on me' from Johnny Lee at all. I got an 8-track copy and that's it.

I also don't do LaserDisc, RCA Selectavision discs (yes those were a thing), or Betamax. There are some formats I let die and don't care for.

 

[mikedt]

Well something like Dark Side Of The Moon or Animals I'd never want to listen to in shuffle mode. But on the other hand compilations and greatest hits type things, I often play those in random orders. Some albums like Rick Wakeman - Journey To The Centre Of The Earth or The Who - Tommy, that tells a story, again I always want to hear the songs in the order and manner the artists originally intended.

As for 8-track only unobtaniums, I'm pretty sure that never happened in the UK. Anything that was on 8-track was also available on vinyl record and/or cassette in my home country. Mainly due to the format's fairly limited success and availability there. From what I can remember in UK record shops, 8-track was only in small sections, compared to LP records. And by the 80s, 8-track was nowhere to be seen in UK shops. The Michael Jackson - Thriller cartridge I posted earlier, that would only have been available by mail order in 1983. The few people I knew who bought and listened to 8-track, only had them in their cars, and not at home. Our family never bought into it, but we did have many records and cassettes.

 

[nickdalzell]

As for the remark about Tiger Hitclips, anything made by Tiger Electronics, Inc was junk. In the UK they called them Pop Stations, and Ashens' Youtube channel goes into full detail about the crap those were.

Sadly, Tiger has started bringing them back, the games, the clips...Called 'From the Tiger Vault:

Apparently, the phrase GLaDOS said in Portal is true..."If at first you don't succeed, fail five more times!"

 

[mikedt]

Yeah, I know what PopStations are. Crappy cheapo LCD games. While Tiger's HitClips was a music thing intended for kids, that played part of one song in dreadful crunchy 8-bit quality. And was sold in the UK, circa 2000-2002. Techmoan made a video about them.

 

[nickdalzell]

There was also something even worse, also marketed by Hasbro (who also owns Tiger), called VideoNOW!. Nothing more crazy than black and white pixelated 320x200 style episodes of random TV shows! On proprietary format, nonetheless.

I do remember HitClips. They spent more time being attached to the zippers of JanSport backpacks in high school than in actual use. Some people reverse-enginnered them for cheap flash storage. They were a product that proves my point that catering to Millennials and Zoomers over adults is a bad idea.

 

[Milo Williamson]

Anything that Bruce Campbell stars in, I got into living hell with my ex, and his production company popped on and said to me "You are dishonest, and just one of the most stupidest kids ever I have ever come in contact with, I honestly do not see you in any future with this production company, please be kind and carefully just mute us, okay? Do not ever come in conact me or Bruce personally."

That was ages ago, and the last time I have ever seen Bruce in was the Aqua Teen Hunger movie..

 

[Inborn trazic]

and are sorry you watched the first time.




In contrast with the "movies you watch again and again" thread I though it would be helpful to have a thread where we ward off people from wasting time and/or money on movies that are just awful for one or more reasons. You know the ones I'm talking about, they lure you in with the trailer, tag, cast, something, but it's just rotten from the beginning and then gets worse from there.

Here are two that easily fit that bill. One I just saw yesterday, and the summary of it and cast highlights (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, John Turturro and Richard Jenkins) caused me to watch it: "God's Pocket." A complete waste of talent, poorly scripted (but then it's a cruddy idea as well) and improperly billed as a "comedy-drama." There's virtually nothing funny, just a couple of quick jokes here and there; the theme is dark and dramatic throughout. It starts with a funeral and ends with a corpse in the street and in between is just layers of cinematic putrefaction. Indeed, the only good thing I can say about it is the running time is under 90 minutes.

The other I think I've mentioned here once or twice: "Nothing Lasts Forever." This movie had an amazing cast, but it went absolutely nowhere. Indeed, the subtitle for it should have been "except maybe this movie." I saw it the week it was released and the word was already out; there were only maybe 15 people in the whole theater on a Saturday night. It closed the next week. My GF fell asleep about twenty minutes in, and the only reason I stayed was because I kept trying to figure out why so many talented people had lent their name to this complete waste of celluloid. This is the single worst movie I've ever seen, hands-down.

There are others, but that's enough to get us started. What's the worst movie you've ever seen?

Sholay

 

[mikedt]

Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

CGI filled fantasy claptrap. Don't bother.

 

[nickdalzell]

I hate CGI these days. Laziness. Practical models will always look far better. See: Star Trek II vs. Star Trek: Discovery for comparison. They could do realistic battle damage in the former.

Same for animation. While I despise flat UI in software, I loved traditional, 2-dimensional animation. That seems to be dead or dying. Even the famous Studio Ghibli has gone CGI (right in the face of Hayao Miyazaki) with the latest being "The Earwig and the Witch"

 

[Milo Williamson]

Yeah I rarely soak in CGI movies these days.. I love how traditional 2-Dimensional films of animateion is pretty amazing... I rarely watch anything with CGI in it these days.

 

[mikedt]

I totally love the traditional hand drawn cel animation, like the original Tom & Jerry, and Warner Bros cartoons.

For CGI, well I did like Avatar, and Avatar: the way of water. I only went to see the terrible Dungeons & Dragons movie, because it was an outing from the school as a "treat" for the top students.

 

[Milo Williamson]

For me, it's Deadpool - a waste of time.

Whhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhatttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt?????????????????????????????????????? I happen to enjoy Deadpool.