Before VHS, the only way to watch a movie or TV show was to watch it when it was available. For a movie, that meant seeing it in the theater when it was released – and maybe once more when it got a TV showing. If you wanted to see it again, well, tough: Buy the movie novelization. VHS changed all of this.
How did people watch old movies before home video?
There were only three networks: ABC, CBS, and NBC. Each had a version of showing old movies, sometimes as matinees, most times as late-night entertainment. At first, they were shown late at night: The Late Movie was shown on CBS tv. While in high school, there was a program called Million Dollar Movie.
The first was that you could record stuff from the TV (albeit 13 years late…) and rewatch it whenever you felt like it, the other was that you could go to a shop, rent a film and bring it home on a Friday night to watch with the family.
“When the movie production companies started selling movies on tape, we could buy them to watch at home, on our VCRs. We could also rent movies at Blockbuster (yes, they went out of business) to watch at home. It was a little bit like borrowing a book from the library, but we had to pay to borrow them.
Dedicated home cinemas were called screening rooms at the time and were outfitted with 16 mm or even 35 mm projectors for showing commercial films. These were found almost exclusively in the homes of the very wealthy, especially those in the movie industry.
As the popularity of “moving pictures” grew in the early part of the decade, movie "palaces" capable of seating thousands sprang up in major cities. A ticket for a double feature and a live show cost 25 cents.
Drive-ins gained immense popularity 20 years later during the 1950s and '60s with the Baby Boomer generation. There were over 4,000 drive-ins throughout the U.S., and most were in rural areas.
Patrons sat at tables and watched "flickers" projected onto a screen of muslin or bed sheets while a single musician played frenzied interludes, known as "the Russian hurries," on piano or violin. The first movie houses were dubbed "nickelodeons," combining the price of admission with the Greek word for theater.
By the mid-1970s, it was clear that videotape was the future of home theater movies. And in 1975, Sony released the Betamax as the latest videotape format. A better (and smaller) tape alternative to U-Matic, Betamax was a technological marvel of the time.
How did people entertain themselves before movies?
People found entertainment and information through various means such as reading, listening to the radio, attending live performances, and spending quality time with friends and family.
At first, films were very short, sometimes only a few minutes or less. They were shown at fairgrounds, music halls, or anywhere a screen could be set up and a room darkened. Subjects included local scenes and activities, views of foreign lands, short comedies and newsworthy events.
The last VCR was manufactured in 2016 by Funai Electric, the last remaining VHS player manufacturer after all the other major tech companies had stopped making them. They announced they were ceasing production that year due to poor sales, and there have been no new VCRs on the market since.
Dust off your VHS player, because tapes seem to be making a collector comeback. Just like vinyl records, VHS tapes have been a hot commodity in the realm of collectors of physical media. According to Screen Rant, in June 2022 a collector paid $75,000 for a VHS copy of Back to the Future.
VHS tape life expectancy varies from one VHS tape to the next. In general, VHS deterioration of 10–20% occurs over a period of 10 to 25 years. Better quality tapes have a slightly longer lifespan, as do VHS tapes that have been kept in a climate-controlled setting.
In the mid-1970s, videotape became the first truly practical home-video format with the development of videocassettes, which were far easier to use than tape reels.
The Hopalong Cassidy films were usually edited to fit, with commercials, into a one hour time slot, and Network television began televising these edited Hopalong films on June 24, 1949. We believe these Hopalong Cassidy films may have been the first series of films shown on TV.
They would sometimes show movies on TV. Also, some old movies would come back and make the rounds of theaters again. Clubs could rent out movies and show them if they were willing to sign the appropriate agreements and pay the fees and had a theater to show it.
In 1967, you would have paid just $1.20 to see a movie, but in today's prices, that same ticket would cost you $8.76 -- $0.11 more than the current average ticket price!
Movies were fun. They provided a change from the day-to-day troubles of life. They also were an important social force. Young Americans tried to copy what they saw in the movies.
As the 1950s began, studios were making fewer but more-expensive films, and innovative technology became a core strategy to get audiences back into theaters. Spectacular imagery and sound, it was believed, would dramatically differentiate the cinema experience from the black-and-white boxed image in the living room.
How often did Americans go to the movies in the 1920s?
During the 1920s, movie attendance soared. By the middle of the decade, 50 million people a week went to the movies - the equivalent of half the nation's population. In Chicago, in 1929, theaters had enough seats for half the city's population to attend a movie each day.
By 1910 the motion picture industry had run through a series of experimental terms and words. However, all those names turned out to be awkward misfits, and simpler terms like “moving picture” and “picture show” had crept into common usage.
Many of the defining features of modern American culture emerged during the 1920s. The record chart, the book club, the radio, the talking picture, and spectator sports all became popular forms of mass entertainment.
