Shhhh....Listen...

[Patti Feinberg]

...do you want to know a secret?
Do you PROMISE not to tell (especially the 'cool/beautiful peeps', we'll say Midnite, MB, Josette, MsCrysede. Not that there are not ALOT of freeeeeky cool peeps, but, they are hmm...don't know how to phrase it.
We could say (((dom)), and I hope you'd get the point. Nancy too.

Anywho, here is my secret: [spoiler] I have not seen "House of Dark Shadows" in at least 30 years. [/spoiler]

Oh, the humanity.....

Remember, it was the SUBJECT, so no take backs....I'll know who's been writing about me on the bathroom walls. Wish I had a more shame VCR with a working remote.

Oish,

Patti

[MagnusTrask]

The one with Barnabas, I've only seen in the Elvira version, chopped up.  I've never seen the Quentin one.

[DarkLady]

I've seen the Barnabas one a couple of times. TCM occasionally airs it when they're having a Joan Bennett festival or around Halloween.

I've only seen the Quentin one once, an extremely chopped-up version. I don't think I could see it again, though, because the end somehow tickled my funny bone.

[Gerard]

I've got both movies on VCR tapes.  I've still got a VCR player.  A couple times a year, I pop them in and watch them.  VCR, which was all the trendy rage, came after Beta-Max, which was once all the trendy rage.  After VCR and Beta-Max, Laser Disc was all the rage.  This was all before Blu-Ray (which I don't have) which is now all the rage (along with downloading and streaming, which I also don't have).  DVD's were all the rage before Blu-Ray and downloading and streaming.  When I got my first VCR player, it was around the time when CD's were just coming out.  CD's were before LP's.  LP's were the rage with 33 and 1/3's for music along with 45's.  45's were these...oh, never mind.

Gerard  (Who Remembers Rotary Dial Which Was Before Push-Button Which Became - Oh, Never Mind)

[MagnusTrask]

Being on a low fixed income, my place is stuffed full of VHS mostly, and luckily I have a VHS player that works, still.  Most of my plasyable music is on cassette.

[Gerard]

Cassettes, Mangus?  Oh, you fancy, rich people!  What have you done with your 8-tracks?

Gerard

[Josette]

I saw both movies in the original showing at the theater and a couple of times on television since then, but it's been a l-o-o-o-n-g time since seeing either.

[Patti Feinberg]

"Well, we're cousins, (almost) identical cousins & you'll find,
they have old fashion technology, no $$ to buy the newest,
some have only seen the sights (ie calling them the 'Barnabas one' and the 'Quentin one') a
cousin could see from Brooklyn Heights,
BUT THEY HELP KEEP MY MIND.
Cousins, we're a bunch of a kind!"

I love you

Pati

[Patti Feinberg]

Gerard, you know when I have my first push button phone? When I got married.
I didn't have cable until I asked my mom to pay for it for my for a year as a Christmas gift, I was 25.

Any time a song comes on the radio (or, Pandora), I'll recall if I had it on 45.

I bought my first VCR when I was 24.

Patti

[Willie Loomis]

And  you call yourself a Dark Shadows fan.....

VCR.....(It's the millenium, you know....)   

Have you tried a universal remote?

[MagnusTrask]

Patti-- in what sense are yuou now Yoplait?

I first regularly used a push button phone in 1968, when my parents got them.  It wasn't digital, it had the same inner workings as a dial phone, it was more sort of decoratively push-button on the outside.... as does my bedroom phone from the 80s, still being used...

I have never had cable, but that's low Disability payments for you, not tech slowness.

"Any time a song comes on the radio (or, Pandora), I'll recall if
 I had it on 45."  I can picture the record label and where I bought it!

I bought my first VCR when I was 32.

Just thought all that might be interestingly perplexing.

[Gerard]

Patti, back in the 90's, when I came home on vacation, I got my parents their very first push-button phone.  They still had a rotary-dial.  Actually, I got them (and they were adverse to "new technology" - my dad called it "fancy stuff") a phone two steps up.  Not only was it push-button, it was cordless.  And it had the speaker-phone option.  I had to teach them how to use it.  My mom was resistant at first - she feared anything new (she almost had a stroke when I bought them a microwave as a present) - but eventually she was able to appreciate it.  She could take the handset into the basement when she did laundry instead of trying to race up the stairs to answer a ringing phone.  When her hands were wet, she could push the speaker button to talk when somebody called.  (And she also came to love the microwave - she couldn't get over making baked potatoes in 12 minutes.) 

I got my first VCR when I was 32.  It was about the same time when the Sci-Fi network ("SyFy") started rerunning DS.  I could tape it and watch it later.  It could tape up to 12 hours of programming on one tape (remember the slow, medium and fast taping speeds?) so when I went on vacation for two weeks, I pre-set it tape all the DS episodes and then watch them in a marathon when I got back home.  I ordered several DS tapes from MPI, including HoDS, NoDS, the documentary (which originally aired on Sci-Fi), the bloopers, the "Best of's...," etc.  I considered purchasing the entire series and I called MPI and asked if there could be a discount if I did so.  The person I talked to said:  "I don't know.  No one has ever wanted to buy it all at one time.  I'll have to ask and call you back."  He did, and I was offered a 20% discount if I did, but, unfortunately, I decided not to.  I still couldn't quite afford it.  I still have a massive tape collection, of professionally made tapes from several topics, to things I taped and saved.  I have classic sci-fi and horror movies that aired on AMC when it a commercial-free, authentic movie classic station hosted by people like Lauren Bacall.  The entire collection fills shelves and shelves I had installed in a huge walk-in closet.  I've archived it all and it's in catalogue order.

Gerard

[MagnusTrask]

I came VERY close to buying the whole series on VHS at a thrift store, $1.50 per tape!  I waffled for one day, came back, found someone else in this obscure holy roller suburb had bought a huge chunk out of the middle, starting where the tapes said Barnabas became a vampire (clearly assuming incorrectly that was the start of him in DS) in 1795, ending arbitrarily with tape #100!   I was still left with the majority of DS, and bought it and lugged it home on the spot.  I've filled in almost all of that since.

[Gerard]

Good for you, Magnus.  I rarely watch any of my VHS's (whatever is on them) because I'm so afraid now that the VCR will eat them.  We have one place left (ironically, Office Max) here that still sells blank tapes.  On occasion, I still set my VCR to tape a program to watch at a later time.  It's so nostalgic.  I can't afford that DMV or whatever it's called thing on Comcast because it wants almost 50 bucks more a month for it.  So all my friends know that when The Walking Dead is on Sunday night, I'm totally unavailable to go out or even talk on the phone (which is land-line, not cell).  I still use the refrigerator my parents bought back in 1966 - that's right, 1966.  It's now almost 50 years old and still works like a charm.  My mom decided to upgrade to a self-defrost freezer in the refrigerator because she was tired of having to carve out enough ice from the old one every few weeks to sink the Titanic.  So that year marked two milestones in my family's life:  my mom wanted something "different" and "fancy" and I started to watch DS from the very beginning to the very end.

Gerard