I have two. I grew up near Toronto in the 80s. Both were CityTV movies. They used to do a thing. I can't remember what it was called..

1 - SPACEBALLS!!!! ("F___! Even in the future nothing works!")

2 - Predator (there's a line where Arnold says, "That's one bad motherfucker." They only censored the word 'mother'. i was 8. best thing ever)

This wasn’t on tape, but this move is Shaolin Soccer for me. We watched it so many times. I watched a couple of times recently too, and it holds up.

Or catching the same movie in different places over the course of a month before HBO changed its lineup.

The daycare I went to after school when I was a kid had a few that got a lot of play, but the most obscure were a 1994 ABC Family animated rendition of The Secret Garden and a 1985 Hanna-Barbera Pound Puppies TV special.

Mine was Idle Hands, which my grandma taped for me when she noticed me watching an Idle Hands marathon. My love for this movie at such a young age really helps to explain my sense of humor as an adult.

The Thief and the Cobbler!

Idk how obscure, but "Puff the Magic Dragon" was definitely a weird one for me. Kinda glad it got lost (probably thrown out, who knows). Almost feels like a fever dream, so much so, that I had to double check the movie even existed

Oh my goodness, I remember for some reason people kept giving or lending my parents all these long play VHS tapes full of movies. Random video mix tapes where you didn't know what you'd get next. Now and then some of them had kid movies (like the Sesame Street movie, Follow That Bird and there was at least one muppet movie), but most of them were PG and occasionally R-rated stuff, and I still watched it (except the R-rated stuff, but thankfully they were mostly pretty tame as I recall). I think my fave childhood movie was always on TV though: The Goonies.

Not a movie, exactly, but we had the VHS of the extended version of Michael Jackson's Thriller and the making of the video. It was over an hour long. And amazing.

so true.
my uncle had a tv. and 2 movies on vcr. I saw "Smokey and the bandit" more then a hundred times. and "the sting" 30-40 times..

The weirdest one that comes to my mind, was a vhs tape of some stop motion lego stories that me and my brother watched a million times.

Surprised I just found the whole thing on YouTube

https://youtu.be/zJvu8X5OpT4?si=t89ja_1qtWt8ah14

I lived in an in-between, I have a lot of dvds (even 2 blu-rays I think) but they're not shitty at all, 90% were Disney films when original content was still a thing but we have rewatched them so many times, nowadays my little sister, born in the era of streaming can't handle not choosing what to watch on tv or not having a new film out every 2 months

Hellooooooo The Great Outdoors and Harry and the Hendersons.

I basically knew every line of Space Jam by heart. I even knew when to look for the funny parts of the VHS when rewinding it and watching the movie in reverse.

Idk about obscure, but OLD Looney Toons classics and The Land Before Time (recorded FTA).

Or something that came up while channel-surfing on TV and decided to leave it on for a minute, put the control aside, and ended up watching the rest.

Back while in high school, one weeknight I stumbled across Jean Luc Godard's "A Bout De Soufflé" ("Breathless") on our town's local channel, at just the right moment when it seemed like the film was skipping. Intrigued, I left it on, soon enough figured out that this was intentional editing. By the end, my mind was blown and my way of looking at film and art had changed forever.

You can recreate this by spending time working in a remote location, like a fishing vessel, that doesn't have any internet. All you can watch on your off time is what media you take out with you.

I watched "A River Runs Through It" probably 30 times one summer while commercial fishing, because it was one of the few movies we had that we all liked.

“The Cat from Outer Space” we used to rent it all the time from blockbuster for me and when they switched to DVDs we bought it

I had a VHS copy of the Empire Strikes Back that my uncle recorded for me when it played on one of our 3 local TV stations. For the holidays I had a recording of a bunch of the old holiday cartoons that would play in a marathon every Christmas, and one of Ghostbusters (for some reason it used to play every Christmas in the evening, so it became a Christmas movie for me).

Aside from that I'd mostly just rent the same VHS tapes from our local hole in the wall video rental place every weekend (Neverending Story and Inhumanoids) from the ages of 4-6. Then I think we got a real video store and my movie watching experience improved a bit. To be fair, the hole in the wall rental shop was probably only about 10 feet long and 6 feet wide inside, and the shelves of movies lined the walls, so there wasn't a lot to choose from.

Image Transcription: Twitter Post

Kris P. Bacon, @KrisWolfheart

kids today are missing out of the pre-streaming era, where your childhoold was at least partially defined by some semi-obscure movie your family just happened to own on tape and you watched several dozen times

Asterix. Doesn't really matter which of the 30+ comics, or the 5 or 6 movies. No one knows Asterix in The US.

Also: Flight of The Navigator, The Last Unicorn, or The Last Starfighter

Cats Don't Dance. 20 years later I'm a furry.

Cocktail with Tom Cruise, and Independence Day. I watched the fuck out of both of those movies in late Elementary/early Middle School.

For me it was The Boy Who Loved Trolls, The Boy Who Could Fly, Flight of the Navigator and the Rainbow Brite episode/movie that contained this song: https://youtu.be/zPRWuegS8l8?si=OYJ3x4vSSyWg2eNO

Honestly my plan is to try and get copies of my family's old home videos

Might be interesting to see if any kids I have being able to see when I was their age has any effect on how they see me as their parent

Homeward Bound

Mom and Dad Save the World and then finding out that Jeffrey Jones is a child molester.