When I watched part of Real Genius a week ago, it got me thinking about the movies I watched the most between 1985 and 1994.[1] These were the glory days of movies on TV, a time when there was a great chance you would find one of, say, 40 different movies playing on one channel or another. There was no better way to waste time than flipping through your cable dial to find one of your favorites, then not moving until it was over.
I’ve always argued that was cooler than today, when you can stream pretty much any movie you want at the time of your choosing. There was the sheer randomness of coming across Just One of the Guys or Airplane! on a rainy Saturday afternoon. There was the joy of tuning in just in time for your favorite scene, or the agony of missing the line you love the most by a few minutes. And then the utility of knowing that Ferris Bueller’s Day Off was on TBS while you were watching football on NBC, allowing you to flip over during commercials.[2]
Anyway, here’s my best guess at the movies I watched the most during this period. Once again I’m wishing we could access the metadata in our brains so I could get exact counts. I will include one of my most quoted lines from each movie as a little bonus content.
Beverly Hills Cop
“Is this the man who wrecked the buffet…”
Real Genius
“You know, you’ll rue the day!”
“Rue the day? Who talks like that?”
Naked Gun
“Nice beaver!”
“Thank you. I just had it stuffed.”
Sixteen Candles
“No he’s not retarded.”
Better Off Dead
“Now that’s a real shame when folks be throwing away a perfectly good white boy like that.”
“Gee I’m sorry your mom blew up, Ricky.”
“Lane Meyer, the kid from Green Bay…”
“You’ll make a fine little helper, what’s your name?
“Charles DuMar.”
“Shut up, geek!”
Caddyshack
My top two picks are very tough to select a quote from, as I recited damn near every line of them endlessly with my fellow cinema aficionados. It seems like this is the one we did most from Caddyshack.
Fletch
My unobtainable metadata might show that I quoted another movie more (although not much more), but I would almost guarantee I watched no movie more during those ten years than Fletch. This quote is the one that even people who never saw the movie used on a regular basis.
“It’s all ball bearings nowadays.”
I pick that range because we first got cable in 1985, and capping it at ten years seemed about right. Swingers and Office Space would enter the conversation if we extended the range out further. And I’m obviously not including Christmas movies. ↩
RIP Picture in Picture, one of the greatest inventions ever that was, for reason, largely killed off when the world moved to digital cable. Now PIP means being able to watch the NCAA tournament while still working on your TPS reports on your work computer. ↩