Does anyone have any recordings of King Kong, Son of Kong, Mighty Joe Young or the following days Godzilla marathon? I have a recording of King Kong from 1981 that is complete with commercials and I am looking for old VHS copies (with commercials)of the aforementioned movies to watch on Thanksgiving. Anyone?
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
I used to love watching these on Thanksgiving morning! When the commercials came on, I'd switch to the parade.
shareYeah, me too. I have a few parades from that era that I transferred from VHS to DVD. I am always on the look out for more old video footage from back then. Everything is so dreary now. So, watching things like that brings me back to a more simple (and arguably) better time.
Channel 9's Gorilla-thon was the best thing about my young Thanksgivings.
shareTo this day I watch my DVDs of these movies on Thanksgiving because of WOR.
WE GOT MOVIE SIIIIIGN!
Thank you for posting this. I was going to start a thread about it.
I grew up in NY and among my strongest memories of Thanksgiving are those of watching the King Kong films on TV. I never understand why they did this. Was there a specific reason? Could never figure out the relationship between King Kong and Thanksgiving.
They stopped showing the marathons mostly because of rights issues. Ted Turner bought the rights King Kong, Son Of Kong and Mighty Joe Young. So, starting in the late 80s those movies were only shown on Turner Network Television. I am not sure who bought the rights to air all of the Godzilla movies, but around the same time that WOR lost the King movies they lost the rights to air the Godzilla series too. It really is a shame as it was truly the end of an era. Network television is just dreadful these days. If you turn on any of the major stations during Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter or any other holiday they just air their usual everyday crap. It's like all of those major holidays are just regular days to the dumbasses who pick what programs to air. It's just so sad. I am glad I grew up when I did. These days everything is so bleak and depressing. Anyway, I hope I answered your question.
Thank you for the response. That explains a lot why it stopped. I just never how or why it started in the first place. Thanksgiving and King Kong?
You're right about TV these days. I don't know if you are from the NYC area but back in the late 70s, early 80s, WOR-9 and WPIX-11 were great stations. They were almost always airing something interesting, especially on weekends.
I do know a little bit about how the marathons started. Someone at WOR figured that they would air King Kong and Mighty Joe Young On Thanksgiving. What they didn't figure is that it would garner big ratings. So, they added Son of King to the mix. After a couple of years someone figured why don't we just make the marathon into a two day event and air a bunch of Godzilla flicks on the second day. So, it seems (to me at least) that it was a pretty organic process.
Yeah, I am from the New York area (I grew up on Long Island in Suffolk county). Pretty much everyone that I knew watched these marathons in the tri-state area. No matter who's house I was at on Thanksgiving there were monster movies playing. Back in those days it seems like there was a MUCH larger effort put into making programing fun for the entire family. I have so many memories of my family and friends making a big bowl of pop corn, gathering in our living room around our little Hitachi television to watch whatever the movie of the week was. Those days vanished a long time ago. It doesn't seem like any families do that type of thing anymore. And if they do they can do it at their own leisure and as a result the sense of community that we had back in the 70s and 80s is completely lost. It was so great to go into school, church, store or anywhere really and run into someone and start talking about what you watched on television the night before and it almost always turned out that they watched it too (the original Salem's Lot was one of those movies).
Sorry, I don't mean to be a downer :/ It's just that I am of the opinion that we lost something with all these modern gadgets and gizmos. I know that the time that I am referring to is gone forever and it cannot come back, but if I could I would trade now for then in a heartbeat. In my opinion it was just a time.
I'm here and my posts from IMDB are here too!
shareHey Enigmatic-Ocean! Nice to see you here. Are there any good conversations happening at moviechat.org? I have been hanging out on Themoviedb and imdb2 since the imdb boards died. It seems like all 3 of these boards have something to offer but so far none are as good as the old imdb boards.
Anyway, if you want to talk about anything from back in the day on WOR. WNEW, WPIX, etc. or any newer stuff, let me know.
Oh wow! You're here. Good to see you. We need to get the old conversations started again. The holidays aren't the holidays without Kong and Babes in Toyland. I will look for you over at the other sites. So far nothing is anywhere near what was going on at IMDB. So, we will just have to wait and see what happens. We lost a great deal of post history which is sad. Some people probably just called it quits in regard to posting about movies altogether.
shareYes things are pretty bad when it comes to movie conversations. We'll have to talk about Babes in Toyland on all 3 sites starting on Thanksgiving.
Have you seen Kong: Skull Island yet?
I had them all on VHS but threw them away years ago along with my VCR. No one still keeps these as they are worthless. Plus no store sells VHS tapes or VCR's anyways
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