The younger people today just don’t have any idea how it was back in the day. They’ve got it made today, as far as television. All of the cable channels, movie channels, streaming services like Netflix, Disney, Hulu, etc.
I was telling a friend about how it was for me back in the 70’s, as a young teenager, and that spurred me into writing this Blog Post because it was so interesting.
In the 70’s, when HBO launched, they only played one movie a day at 7pm. And it was the same movie for a week. I shit you not. I remember a movie called ‘An Unmarried Woman’ starring Jill Clayburgh. She was in a scene in her panties and I waited around every day that week for 7pm to see her in her panties again. That’s what teenage boys did.
Then HBO upgraded and started showing movies around the clock. That was amazing, considering regular TV used to end around 2am every night. The 3 TV stations, NBC, CBS & ABC, had a way of making every TV lover hate the Anthem because when programming for the day ended, they played the Anthem over a video of a waving American flag. And when a TV lover saw that, there was usually a “Fuck” uttered.
When HBO started round the clock programming, on the one channel they had at the time, they mailed out a monthly guide for all of the movies playing that month. It was awesome. It had color pictures of the movies to entice you to watch it and descriptions of each movie, complete with the times it was playing on the daily schedule.
The reason I mention this HBO guide is because it has an impact on entertainment history. Every month, when the guide arrived, guess what I did?
I, like every other red-blooded teen, looked through the guide and read all of the descriptions of the movies to see which ones had Nudity in them. I made sure to watch those movies.
As I said, ‘every’ teen did this, boys of course, and one guy in particular that did this was the founder of the website MrSkin.com. On his site, he has cataloged every nude scene any Hollywood Star has ever done, plus many other categories. He said in an interview that he scanned the HBO guide for the movies with nudity in them and that’s where he got his start.
The movie Knocked Up references MrSkin.com as a subplot in the story. It’s a funny turn of events, if you’ve never seen the movie.
So when you hear people bitching about ’nothing on TV to watch’, tell them to kiss your ass and try only 3 networks and they all stop at 2am every night.
Until next time, be safe and have a chill day.
Spider Michaels
