Are we mad? (1 Viewer)

[Jesse Skeen]

I took a so-called film class at Sacramento State several years ago (before DVD was out, but I was still a laserdisc snob) where we watched several movies on VHS on a very bad projection system- the black and white movies all looked blue-tinted. The VCR was hooked up to a stereo speaker system but it was still mono; the only movie we watched that was done in stereo and available in widescreen on laserdisc was "Black Robe", I commented that it looked like a good movie but the presentation didn't do it justice. The teacher always shut off the end credits, which I chastised him for, and I often corrected him in the middle of lectures. He even suggested we go see movies at Sacramento's 'art' theater, which unfortunately is still open, which is an old tri-plexed theater with mono sound in 2 of its auditoriums.
One movie I wrote a paper on was "After Hours", in which I mentioned I was watching it on laserdisc, and the teacher wrote "Lucky duck!" next to it, I thought that was pretty funny.
We had a class evaluation at the end, and I made several comments about how it was a disservice to show sub-par movie presentations in class and to recommend bad theaters. One question was "Do you have any suggestions on film to show in this class in the future" and I wrote "Not on this equipment!"
This was still nothing compared to high school where we were forced to watch movies on mono VCRs; I always just went to sleep.