Hacker News Reader

Comment by FredPret | Hacker News Reader

> “ she had gone to a drive-in cinema with her husband and children to see a double bill of Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day and 2001: A Space Odyssey”

Bizarre choice - apparently they marketed it as a family movie

View on HN

That was normal in the 60s. Scifi was encouraged. They wanted kids to be inspired by space and technology. Star Wars changed things, driving a wedge separating what would eventually be "kids" movies from hard scifi, but that wasnt always so. Movies like 1953's War of the Worlds were very much all-family affairs.

She had a valid complaint, putting pooh at 11pm after 2001

And honestly, thinking back, the end of 2001 is pretty nonsensical to most normal people. I remember watching it when I was young and it was hard to figure out what the trippy stuff meant, let alone the end.

In comparison, 9 years later Star Wars was completely approachable to the entire family.

> She had a valid complaint, putting pooh at 11pm after 2001

Mr. Kubrick's programming choices are, indeed, bizarre. ;-)

I doubt that was Kubrick's choice. It was the theater or their parent company that made the programming decision.

The letter was complaining to Kubrick, not to the cinema, which I personally find bizarre.

The identification of the movie with Kubrick was very strong, as I think was pointed out in the paper. And it's much more satisfying to address a complaint to a person rather than a faceless corporation.

I can’t imagine an atomic family from the 60’s rolling up to this and getting caught off guard like that XD

The ending is one of the scariest moments in cinema for me. I remember watching it in the middle of the night on PBS I think. I was absolutely terrified about what was in that room with him as he was aged and kept looking over his shoulder.

I feel like we all have a “I saw it in middle of the night on PBS and it really screwed with my head” movie.

For me it was being maybe 13 and tuning in to the last half of Lord of the Flies at about 1am. Those kids abandoned on a lonely island, followed by the rescuer showing up, followed by credits, followed by the national anthem and test colour bars will forever be burned into my brain.

For me it was the first letterboxed thing I had ever seen on TV and I asked my dad what was wrong with the TV. Feels like it was on A&E? At least 30 years ago.

My parents had recorded something on our VCR and "to be safe" it recorded the first half hour or so of the following movie. The following movie was the original Alien. It stopped around the dinner scene before it gets really going. I must have watched that part of the movie ~20 times when I was around 10. I'd be constantly afraid about facehuggers hiding under the bed or behind the shower curtain when it was dark.

For me that was Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Roger Ebert was not just a movie critic... And it inspired Austin Powers as well!

I can see it easily happening. People were not "tuned in" back then as we are now. People used the newspapers to see what was playing and what times where available. Trailers weren't available 24/7 for instant viewing. You saw previews before the movie you were about to watch. The TV advertising wasn't so prevalent for movies. My parents would go to the movies and see whatever was playing on the one screen the theater had when they were kids, not just go to see a specific movie at the cineplex with 30 different screens. Things were very different back then.

This was still somewhat the case in the late 90s and early 00s before Youtube and IMDB were really big. We'd go watch Star Trek Nemesis because it had Star Trek in the name or watch whatever looked good in the trailers last time we went. What was your alternative? Watch it on your CRT tv a year later, probably with ads? Rental existed, but at least where I lived it was very uncommon. I honestly miss it. Driving to the cinema with a bunch of friends, sometimes not even certain what we'd watch and how it would turn out. Really great! Recently I visited an old friend at his new (to me) apartment and it came up that he had kept all his cinema tickets from back in the day. We went through all of them swimming in nostalgia, a little blurry-eyed, while our wives laughed at us.

> late 90s and early 00s

I remember going to Moulin Rouge without knowing it was a musical!

The Barbenheimer of the 1960s...

“Poohthousand and one”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com