Childhood movies that inspired you

[Just Jim]

12 minutes ago, Red Shirt said:

Wish I had Netflix and a big enough data plan to watch Them. I remember loving it but it has been so long. 

I caught it on Turner Classics a couple months ago, and now have it on permanent save on my DVR.  I'm constantly scanning ahead on channels like TCM for old classics.

Edited August 8, 2016 by Just Jim

[razark]

12 minutes ago, Just Jim said:

I'm constantly scanning ahead on channels like TCM for old classics.

Every Sunday, I'll scan the week ahead to see what's on TCM.  That's where most of the movies I watch are from now.

(Of course, the wife likes to complain about all the stuff I have saved but haven't watched.)

[Xorth Tanovar]

Hell, I forgot another oddity, the animated movie "Fantastic Planet".

And probably my all-time "modern" favorite, Babylon 5.

[legoclone09]

My favorite movie (I'm still young) is The Martian but the book is much better.

[LordFerret]

Let's pull another one of those oddities out of the hat here ... Heavy Metal. Good animation. Good stories. Great soundtrack.

 

Edit:
Ok, last one. Really out on a limb here. This is actually a cult classic ... very small cult. This one's a parody of just about every SciFi movie there is, was, or ever will be. It's also the cheapest budget SciFi movie that's ever been made (that I know of). This is a must see if you've never seen it. Dark Star.

Let there be light.

Edited August 8, 2016 by LordFerret
last one

[Just Jim]

10 minutes ago, LordFerret said:

Let's pull another one of those oddities out of the hat here ... Heavy Metal. Good animation. Good stories. Great soundtrack.

Yes... yes... YES!!!!!!

[adsii1970]

Soilent Green wasn't too bad... in fact, found a copy in Wal-Mart's discount bin a year ago...

[Dispatcher]

8 hours ago, razark said:

Every Sunday, I'll scan the week ahead to see what's on TCM.  That's where most of the movies I watch are from now.

(Of course, the wife likes to complain about all the stuff I have saved but haven't watched.)

TCM is the most watched channel in my household.  We like the quality of most of the titles and love NO commercials (no DVR).  I mean, the offerings span decades, genres and the "hosts" always set up the movies with something interesting about the production or the actors.

A lot of the movies listed in the posts of this thread have been aired on TCM.

[Just Jim]

OK, I'm throwing out a rather obscure, but amazing film from 1957:

Throne of Blood
(Spider's Web Castle)

This B&W gem is not what you might first think. 
It was done by Toho Studios 3 years after the first Godzilla, and is a brilliantly creepy samurai version of Macbeth!

I don't remember how young I was the first time I saw it, but I was totally blown away, and never forgot it.

Here's a trailer of sorts:

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

[TheSaint]

16 hours ago, LordFerret said:

Let's pull another one of those oddities out of the hat here ... Heavy Metal. Good animation. Good stories. Great soundtrack.

 

Edit:
Ok, last one. Really out on a limb here. This is actually a cult classic ... very small cult. This one's a parody of just about every SciFi movie there is, was, or ever will be. It's also the cheapest budget SciFi movie that's ever been made (that I know of). This is a must see if you've never seen it. Dark Star.

Let there be light.

"Plutonium Nyborg, man...." One of my old high school buddies loved Heavy Metal so much he bought a bunch of the original cells when they came up at auction and he has them framed all over his house. Great movie. Did you ever see the South Park where they did the send-up of Heavy Metal? I was laughing so hard I couldn't breath, and my wife (who has never seen the movie) was all, "What's so funny?" Guess you had to be there. 

Calling Dark Star "low-budget" is a massive understatement. The bunk room in the movie was actually John Carpenter's dorm room at USC.  

[LordFerret]

4 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

"Plutonium Nyborg, man...." 

I was going to post the YouTube Plutonium Nyborg clip in here, but for sure I'd get a whacking from one of the Admins/Mods.

[TheSaint]

23 hours ago, razark said:

(Of course, the wife likes to complain about all the stuff I have saved but haven't watched.)

My wife complains that our entire Netflix DVD queue is taken up with my childhood memories. A typical conversation goes like this:

"Oh, man, I remember Movie X. Gosh, that was such a great movie. Did you ever see Movie X?" 

"Uh, no." 

"OH MY GOD! YOU NEVER SAW MOVIE X!" <Fires up computer and brings up Netflix> 

"Oh dear Lord...." 

We have like sixty movies in our DVD queue, and it keeps getting longer. A while back she started getting clever and trying to claim that she'd already seen them. 

"Oh, yeah, honey, I saw that with you." 

"Oh no you didn't! I haven't seen that movie in decades!" 

(Heartless woman, trying to take advantage of my creeping short-term memory loss. LOL) 

We just sent back Mister Roberts (Because my wife had never seen Mister Roberts!), and now we have Sparticus waiting to be watched (Because my wife has never seen Sparticus!). 

[razark]

2 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

We just sent back Mister Roberts (Because my wife had never seen Mister Roberts!), and now we have Sparticus waiting to be watched (Because my wife has never seen Sparticus!).

I have both of those on the DVR right now...

[LordFerret]

1 minute ago, TheSaint said:

.. Mister Roberts ...

Not SciFi, but Mister Roberts was an excellent movie (among many).

 

14 hours ago, Just Jim said:

OK, I'm throwing out a rather obscure, but amazing film from 1957:

Throne of Blood
(Spider's Web Castle)

This B&W gem is not what you might first think.
...

 

Now you've gone and reminded me of an old B&W I had as a kid, on 8mm films no less, a 15 part series called "Bat Men of Africa" (1936). Talk about cheesy movies.

[adsii1970]

Yeah, but those cheesy movies did have some pretty good looking sci-fi ships. Think about what we saw in the original Planet of the Apes movies or even Glen Larson's Buck Rogers in the 24th Century

 

[TheSaint]

1 minute ago, adsii1970 said:

Yeah, but those cheesy movies did have some pretty good looking sci-fi ships. Think about what we saw in the original Planet of the Apes movies or even Glen Larson's Buck Rogers in the 24th Century

 

The best sci-fi ships were in the Gerry Anderson shows. I had all of the Dinky Toys models from Thunderbirds, UFO, Space 1999. I remember watching Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, then going into my room and trying to rebuild the ship and its shuttle in minifig scale with Legos and being remarkably frustrated because I didn't have enough pieces. 

But I loved all those 70s-80s sci-fi TV shows: Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, Starlost. Can't even watch them any more, they make no sense at all. But as a kid they were awesome! 

[adsii1970]

6 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

The best sci-fi ships were in the Gerry Anderson shows. I had all of the Dinky Toys models from Thunderbirds, UFO, Space 1999. I remember watching Journey to the Far Side of the Sun, then going into my room and trying to rebuild the ship and its shuttle in minifig scale with Legos and being remarkably frustrated because I didn't have enough pieces. 

But I loved all those 70s-80s sci-fi TV shows: Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, Starlost. Can't even watch them any more, they make no sense at all. But as a kid they were awesome! 

I agree to a point. I still watch the old sci-fi shows in spite of the cheesy special effects and bad acting. With the exception of Battle Beyond the Stars. Cannot stand that movie.

And yes, I also tried hard to rebuild them out of Legos (young people with Legos have a better time. Back at that time, there weren't as many specialized parts). I also became the king of the wooden matchstick space fleet - it was easier to make space ships out of paper towel and toilet paper tubes, tape, and match sticks than Legos at times.  Ah, the days where the imagination knew no bounds...

[TheSaint]

2 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

I agree to a point. I still watch the old sci-fi shows in spite of the cheesy special effects and bad acting. With the exception of Battle Beyond the Stars. Cannot stand that movie.

And yes, I also tried hard to rebuild them out of Legos (young people with Legos have a better time. Back at that time, there weren't as many specialized parts). I also became the king of the wooden matchstick space fleet - it was easier to make space ships out of paper towel and toilet paper tubes, tape, and match sticks than Legos at times.  Ah, the days where the imagination knew no bounds...

Oh, paper airplanes. I remember one summer I got a hold of an old appliance box and crafted it into a four-foot-long aircraft carrier, painted it battleship grey, white hull number on the side, island with little radar dishes made out of toothpicks, the works. Then I made about fifty paper airplanes for the air wing and painted them all camouflage with watercolor paints. The driveway was the ocean and the planes flew air strikes against my little green army men on the lawn. Played with that thing all summer. Good times. 

[adsii1970]

1 minute ago, TheSaint said:

Oh, paper airplanes. I remember one summer I got a hold of an old appliance box and crafted it into a four-foot-long aircraft carrier, painted it battleship grey, white hull number on the side, island with little radar dishes made out of toothpicks, the works. Then I made about fifty paper airplanes for the air wing and painted them all camouflage with watercolor paints. The driveway was the ocean and the planes flew air strikes against my little green army men on the lawn. Played with that thing all summer. Good times. 

I did something similar to that! Although it was the "Galactica" (or some strange variant of it). I remember when I was 10, I turned a washing machine box into a Gemini capsule. Even cut out a hatch with window, put a folding chair inside, and colored buttons and readout screens (like Star Trek) all inside. I think that was the first summer I went to the Moon, Mars, and Venus in the same week!

[LordFerret]

4 minutes ago, TheSaint said:

Oh, paper airplanes. I remember one summer I got a hold of an old appliance box and crafted it into a four-foot-long aircraft carrier, painted it battleship grey, white hull number on the side, island with little radar dishes made out of toothpicks, the works. Then I made about fifty paper airplanes for the air wing and painted them all camouflage with watercolor paints. The driveway was the ocean and the planes flew air strikes against my little green army men on the lawn. Played with that thing all summer. Good times. 

Wow. Did I know you?!? lol

We did the same, the whole gang. And then somebody found a book of matches.........

 

Realism at its finest.

[TheSaint]

2 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

I did something similar to that! Although it was the "Galactica" (or some strange variant of it). I remember when I was 10, I turned a washing machine box into a Gemini capsule. Even cut out a hatch with window, put a folding chair inside, and colored buttons and readout screens (like Star Trek) all inside. I think that was the first summer I went to the Moon, Mars, and Venus in the same week!

And now all my kids want to do is play Minecraft. I weep for them. 

Just now, LordFerret said:

Wow. Did I know you?!? lol

We did the same, the whole gang. And then somebody found a book of matches.........

 

Realism at its finest.

LOL 

I don't remember how the aircraft carrier died, but I'm sure it went out in a blaze of glory. 

[adsii1970]

3 minutes ago, LordFerret said:

Wow. Did I know you?!? lol

We did the same, the whole gang. And then somebody found a book of matches.........

 

Realism at its finest.

Still laughing at this... I would have been the nerdy kid worrying that someone's mom was going to find out we were playing with matches!

1 minute ago, TheSaint said:

And now all my kids want to do is play Minecraft. I weep for them. 

[edited by adsii1970 for relevant content]

So do I. Oh, the dragons we slew with stick swords, the towers we climbed. Oh, the epic battles that in our minds were as serious as the Normandy invasion. Oh, the trouble we got in when we made a cannon out of some old bottle rockets, a 4" piece of steel pipe, and dirt clods...

[TheSaint]

2 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:

Still laughing at this... I would have been the nerdy kid worrying that someone's mom was going to find out we were playing with matches!

So do I. Oh, the dragons we slew with stick swords, the towers we climbed. Oh, the epic battles that in our minds were as serious as the Normandy invasion. Oh, the trouble we got in when we made a cannon out of some old bottle rockets, a 4" piece of steel pipe, and dirt clods...

Oh, my brother and I were the junior mad scientists. We did all sorts of crazy stuff. There was a company a couple of towns away that sold bulk chemicals, my dad would take us there every couple of months and let us buy whatever we wanted. We made smoke bombs, we built our own model rocket engines, we tried (unsuccessfully) to corn our own gunpowder. My mom and dad were a strange mix of proud and terrified. They actually went out and bought a steel garden shed and made us move all our experiments out there so that we wouldn't burn the house down. We'd wind up in Gitmo these days.  

[LordFerret]

Trust me when I tell you, dad wasn't too happy about the big burn mark in the driveway (melted asphalt). "You trying to burn down the house? "

Sticks for swords, or for guns for that matter... these days they're throwing kids in jail for pointing their finger like a gun. People don't know what fun is anymore. (political stuff yada yada yada)

I'm a survivor of all these "bad things". So are ya'll.

[Vanamonde]

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.