Watching The Adventures Of Robin Hood reminded me of all the great movies I saw growing up. As I mentioned in an earlier post, if you wanted to see big Hollywood releases you tuned into the networks major movie events. But there were also local networks and they showed hundreds of movies, some great, some good and many just plain bad, but always fun too watch. Growing up in NYC we had three local networks; WPIX Channel 11, WNEW Channel 5 (now Fox) and WOR Channel 9. These networks showed all sorts of movies. They had movies in the evening, on weekend afternoons most even had a late show. With the advent of home video and the popularity of cable, the local movie broadcast faded away and was replaced by syndicated TV such as People's Court and The Morton Downey Jr. Show.
WOR was famous for the Million Dollar Movie. They showed it in the afternoons and evenings. It opened with a montage of NYC and the theme from Gone With The Wind. Sometimes they would show the same movie a few times in a row and I would watch it every night.
The major networks also offered movies during their local syndicated hours. Every afternoon ABC offered up the 4:30 movie. I would rush home from school to catch whatever film was being offered. They often did theme weeks such as Godzilla or Planet Of The Apes. If the movie was long they would show it over two days. At some point they had the rights to air Ben-Hur and they showed it over the course of the whole week. At that age I was unaware of the editing that took place to fit a 2 hour movie into a 90 minute time slot, with commercials!!
Here are just a few films that made a big impression on me by the time I was 10.
I wonder if today's kids would be able to appreciate these great movies or would the black and white film and lack of special effects get in the way.
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