When I was a kid, the way I saw most movies was via television broadcasts. There were occasionally video cassettes borrowed from the library, or the rare trip to the theater, but otherwise movies were only accessible via the television set. This was especially true of classic films, which were often treated as event programming. "It's a Wonderful Life" came every Christmas, and "The Ten Commandments" every Easter. CBS aired "The Wizard of Oz" yearly from 1959 until 1991, usually in February or March.
A popular movie airing on network television used to be a big deal. The two night NBC debut of "Gone With the Wind" in 1976 was the highest-rated program ever aired on a single network at the time. A record 47% of American households tuned in. During sweeps weeks in the '80s and '90s, it was very common to have regular programming pre-empted for broadcasts of "Star Wars," "Indiana Jones," or "E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial." Special presentations of movies like "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan" were heavily promoted and heralded with fanfare. My parents amassed stacks of VHS tapes with recordings taken from these broadcasts. In many cases, the edited TV versions of these movies are still the ones I'm the most familiar with.
For a good chunk of my life, a film that didn't air on television might as well not have existed, but the ones that kept coming back year after year, like "The Sound of Music" and "Mary Poppins," became my touchstones. The Hollywood studios were well aware of this. For a while, films were made with the future television broadcasts in mind. R-rated and PG-13 rated films would sometimes shoot tamer alternate takes to avoid content being awkwardly edited out. Running times were adjusted so that they could run in two or three hour slots with commercials comfortably. Francis Ford Coppola famously recut the first two "Godfather" movies to run as a miniseries event in 1977. As for the networks, large chunks of programming time were set aside for "The ABC Sunday Night Movie" or "The CBS Thursday Night Movie" for decades, and the most popular titles commanded hefty licensing fees.
Then came basic cable, which gave audiences more access to more movies. Ted Turner snapped up the rights to hundreds of old favorites, paying for exclusivity to "The Wizard of Oz" for a number of years, and creating TCM as a permanent home for the older libraries of cinema treasures. It was the constant basic cable broadcasts of "The Iron Giant" and "Shawshank Redemption" that made them favorites to my generation, while looser content standards and fewer time constraints greatly reduced the incidents of terrible editing. Well, for a while, anyway, until streaming started eating into cable audiences, and suddenly it became very important to stuff as many ads as possible into every broadcast.
Movies have been an important part of television for so long that I took it for granted. And it was only recently that I realized that they've been quietly disappearing. Oh, basic cable still runs plenty of recent films. Networks like TNT, FX, and USA are still heavily dependent on them to fill their schedules. However, fewer and fewer films have been airing on regular old network television. There's not as much cachet to a film premiering on ABC or NBC as there used to be. The movies that do air are often programmed in odd time slots, like Saturday nights. Older classic films are almost totally gone, with a few big exceptions. "The Ten Commandments" will still air over Easter weekend on ABC, as it has every year since 1973.
And that's a sad thing to see, with streaming services having consistently failed to make classic films more accessible, and cable rapidly becoming unaffordable to vast swathes of the public. There are still plenty of classics being programmed on the smaller over-the-air syndicated channels, and my local PBS station runs occasional double features on the weekends. It's not the same as being able to watch "Sleeping Beauty" or "Titanic" via a national network broadcast though. Sure, the commercials were a pain, but the networks were always good about making the classics feel like something special and important.
It's disheartening to imagine future generations growing up without Dorothy, the Wicked Witch, and Scarlett O'Hara the way I did. Then again, that probably is just the nostalgia talking. There are far better ways to consume media, and as we've seen time and time again, the truly great movies will always be rediscovered and remembered. And any cinephile worth their salt will go looking for them the first chance they get. Television introduced me to some of my favorites, but nowhere near all of them.
It's still nice to stumble across "Blue Hawaii" or "Victor Victoria" in a random weekend slot, but I much prefer watching older films on my own schedule in these days.
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