Corona | Coming Attractions

Editor's note:

The mission: review at least one movie a week that came out in 1981. The reason: because he can.

The man to do the mission: Thurston McQ.

Prepare yourself for a trip back through three decades in time, to an era when VHS was king, video stores were popping up everywhere and movies could be rented by young, impressionable minds. What were movies like back then? And 30 years on, do the movies that were released in 1981 hold up to our storytelling standards today or fall down hard?

Welcome to a year-long column that will revisit those cinematic classics and not-so-classics from an era where CG and PG-13 didn't mean a thing to anyone yet. Welcome to Retro Review 1981 - The Weekly Column. Thurston, you have the floor. -- Patrick

The nature of progress dictates that we abandon old technologies for new.  The benefits are usually obvious, or we wouldn’t do it.  Right?  Some would argue this isn’t always the case, and have a handful of valid arguments for whythis isn’t so.  The arguments usually come down to superior marketing, product durability, or having convenience sold to us over quality.  Amazingly enough, the public hasn’t been fed that many video player upgrades.  We’ve gone from film, to tape, to disc, to (maybe) downloadable content.

You know all that already, of course.  If you're like me, you've welcomed each new format with a little unease, because you've noticed some movies don't make the transfer.  Some movies become canonized, and are going to find their way on to each new system no matter what.  You could stop me right here and say that most of what gets left behind is crap, and you’d be right.  Thing is, I like a lot of crap, and I like deciding for myself what I think is crap.

In 2003, I lost track of my copy of the '81 version of The Legend of the Lone Ranger.  If you've heard of this film, you've heard bad things.  If you've seen it, you've probably said bad things about it to others.  It wasn't out on DVD, which made me worry it never would be.  I went on a quest for a new copy.  I hit up rare video sellers in St. Louis and Chicago, and no one had it.  I was surprised.  I didn't expect to find it in the chain video stores, since most had abandoned tape at that point, and were only keeping newer releases on shelves.  I did, however, expect to find it somewhere.  I could have ordered it on eBay, but I've always preferred walking into a store and finding what I want.  eBay is a last resort.

My mother eventually found it in a rural Alabama video store, bought it, and mailed it to me.  After all these years, I guess I'm still something of a mama's boy.

The Legend of the Lone Ranger was released on DVD in 2008.  It's one of the lucky ones.  Lucky enough to find its way to Blu-ray, though?  Who knows?  So many movies never even made it to DVD.  Quite a few never made it to tape, and are likely lost to me forever.

1981 looms large in my development into a movie lover.  When I was three (mid-1983), the U.S. Military told my mother, my first stepfather, and me we needed to leave South Carolina for Frankfurt, Germany.  So we packed up our group, got a grip, came equipped, grabbed our proton packs off our backs, and we split.  My mother bought herself a couple VCRs, got a membership to some video stores, and started copying left and right.  A huge chunk of the video stores' individual catalogues was devoted to 1981 releases.

When we returned to the states in 1987, we had amassed a collection of somewhere around 1,000 movies.  I realized a few years later that, outside of the handful of '81 movies my mother had used as go-to babysitters over the years (among them The Legend of the Lone Ranger, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Excalibur [she was thoughtful enough to cut out the sex scene for me], Clash of the Titans, The Great Muppet Caper, Cannonball Run, Private  Eyes, Time Bandits), I wasn’t all that familiar with that year in movies.  The same goes for 1982 and 1983.  By 1984, I was conscious enough of my surroundings to follow along, and had watched the movies as they had been dropped into our collection.

In 1990, at the impressionable age of ten, I went through our collection one-by-one.  I came to the conclusion that 1981 was a weird and wonderful year for movies.  I was appreciative mymother had gone to the trouble to capture as much of it as she had. 

I still feel 1981 was a weird and wonderful year for movies, though it occurs to me people have been born and have grown old enough to drink alcohol in the time since I watched many of the movies I watched for the first time as a ten-year-old.  Also, I watched them as a ten-year-old.  Many times over the years, I’ve wondered what it would be like to revisit all those movies.  I've wondered what stuff sailed over my head, and I've wondered how good my memory of some of what I saw is.  (For years, I would whistle the end credit music for Saturday the 14th.  I rewatched it in 2009, and was amused to note that my version of the music had shifted slightly.  The meat of the original was there, but I had made definite changes.  Turns out my memory of the movie, itself, hadn't held up quite as well.)

I've also wondered what movies I missed.  My mother’s collection of '81 movies was vast, but it was by no means complete.  She recorded Inseminoid, but she either skipped Pacific Banana or had no access to it.  In fact, I hadn’t even heard of it until I went digging for other '81 movies.

The result of all this wondering is that I have decided to watch some of these '81 movies either again or for the first time.  I'll be making observations about my experience as I go along, and will be sharing them with you on as many Thursdays as I can manage for the rest of the year.  I will be watching each movie asclose to the thirtieth anniversary of its original release date as possible, and I will be watching them in a variety of formats (tape, DVD, LaserDisc, AVI, NetFlix Instant).

So here on Coming Attractions throughout 2011 we're going to go retro and pretend like it's the year 1981. Join me next week as I take a look at two sci-fi relics that came out 30 years ago, Hangar 18 and Inseminoid.