DVDs, UMDs, Blu-Ray, YouTube. Recent years have presented us with plenty of new and interesting formats for viewing films and TV shows at home or on the go. Still, it's important to remember that formats don't last forever. This week, Video Vulture takes a look at some nearly forgotten means of movie viewing from the past. Keep an eye out for these curios the next time you're at a garage sale.
• LaserDisc — Most of you probably remember this one. While the format was never a big seller in North America, availability of these unwieldy things lasted from the late ’70s right up until the year 2000, when the last two LaserDisc movies (Sleepy Hollow and Bringing Out the Dead) were released.
LaserDiscs were big silvery discs the size of vinyl records and were a lot like DVDs, except that you could only get an hour of material on each side. That meant you had to get up and flip the disc halfway through the movie. Films longer than 120 minutes had to be put on multiple discs, unless the manufacturer cheated. Star Wars (1977) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980), for example, run 121 minutes and 124 minutes, respectively. The LaserDisc releases of these classics sped up the running time in order to fit the films on single platters. As a result, Mark Hamill's voice is even squeakier and higher pitched on LaserDisc than it was in the theatres.
• Game Boy Advance Video — This was an early attempt to bring movies onto a portable video game console. A determined shopper can still find these little Game Boy Advance-compatible video cartridges, but they're becoming scarce. The idea was that parents would shell out $20 for two measly episodes of SpongeBob SquarePants or Dora the Explorer to keep their kids quiet in the car for 43 minutes or so. Almost all of these GBA carts were children's TV shows, but three full-length features were released as well (Shrek, Shrek 2 and Shark Tale), although the picture quality was downgraded significantly in order to suit the cartridges' tiny memory capacity. Kids quickly learned that actual video games cost just as much as these movies and were less likely to become boring after the first day of ownership.
• Fotonovels — Just before the arrival of home video changed everything, people were already buying home versions of their favourite movies and TV shows — in book form. Fotonovels were little paperback books filled with still photographs taken from the shows, with dialogue supplied by word balloons superimposed over the images. They were like comic books, except that instead of looking at drawings of Captain Kirk, you'd actually see photos of William Shatner wrestling a lizard.
I remember reading Fotonovel versions of Grease (1978), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975). In fact, I'm pretty sure my Mork and Mindy Fotonovel is still around here, someplace.
• Movie Hut — I can't find any info on these weird little coin-operated kiosks, and I'm not even sure that I've got the name right, but I remember them just the same. For a brief period, shopping malls experimented with placing these distinctive white-and-red plastic movie booths next to the gumball machines and the mechanical ponies. The kiosks were the size of a photo booth, with a single small door (no curtain) admitting the intrepid mall brat into a tiny chamber with a two-child-capacity bench facing a screen and a coin slot. Plunk in a quarter, and you'd be treated to a random four minute cartoon, featuring second-string characters like Mighty Mouse or Scooby-Doo. The sound of the film was generally drowned out by the whirring of the projector and ambient mall traffic passing by the Hut’s wide-open doorway.
• Fisher Price Movie Viewer — These handheld toys were extremely popular in the mid-’70s. They looked like eggshell-colored plastic 8mm film cameras, which was what they were modelled on. Shove a bright yellow brick-shaped film cartridge in the back, face a light source, turn the handle and you'd see a fragment of the Mickey Mouse cartoon Lonesome Ghosts (1937), or one of the other available ’toons. No batteries or light bulbs were needed; just a pint-sized hand to turn the crank. There wasn’t much film in these cartridges, so the viewing experience was not a long one. You could watch that film loop seven times in a row and still only occupy yourself for a few minutes. That's when kids usually started to experiment with turning the handle at different speeds or in different directions, making Mickey, Donald and Goofy speed up, slow down or walk backwards.
• View-Master — You know, those little plastic viewers with the 3-D pictures of the Grand Canyon on notched, rotating cardboard reels. The fun part was pulling the little lever to advance to the next image. Ka-click! Movies were (and remain) popular subjects for the enduring toy binoculars, despite the fact that 14 photos (combined into a measly seven stereoscopic images) are a tad insufficient to capture the intricacies of an entire film. But hey, they’re still making ’em, so check out the View-Master versions of Wall-E and Kung Fu Panda. I'm not kidding — you can actually get these.
