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1d
Old Timey Nonsense
“Trick ‘r Treat” (2007)
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Anthology horror is the natural compliment to the Halloween season, and “Creepshow” or “Cats Eye” or one of the old Amicus portmanteau movies all work wonderfully this time of year, but “Trivk ‘r Treat” is a real gem and seems easy to overlook. It’s full of goofy fun, it doesn’t stick with anything too long, and it’s just mean enough. Looks like it’s streaming on AMC+ right now, which is a nice fit for it, and it also will likely go down smoothly on physical media.
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2
1
10d
Old Timey Nonsense
The Drive-In on the Outskirts of Town
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Maybe the next town over, these are now great mouldering monuments to their past selves, generally money-losing labors of love, and now is the time (it’s dark at 7 but not too cold) They are probably playing some generic first-run stuff but even that is great, I saw “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” at a drive-in and it turned what would otherwise been a walk-out bad movie into a nice memory all these years later.
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4
11d
Old Timey Nonsense
Bob & Ray - World Champion Low Jumper
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Radio comedy is so strange: rather, it’s so strange that there isn’t more radio comedy, and so strange that there was so much. It’s like that episode of the X-Files where everyone insists that Reggie, the third agent, never existed. Anyhow, here’s a champion low jumper.
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2
13d
Old Timey Nonsense
Burgess Meredith Teaches G.I.s How to Act in a British Pub
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Burgess Meredith doing his part for our boys overseas. A clip from a longer training film. Meredith is basically America’s dad.
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1
16d
Old Timey Nonsense
AV Club Undercover Series
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Pretty and sad and fun cover series. Dang this is some good old days stuff back when hamburgers cost a nickel and Savoir Adore covered “Get What You Give” in a real turn of the century office studio.
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4
1
19d
Old Timey Nonsense
Final Fantasy 9, With All the Little Cuties
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This game is great, and it’s all about lil’ cuties. The stakes work, there is real tension and surprise, but there isn’t a brooding teen or a world ending biological nightmare or even all that much foreground power fantasy. It’s one of my favorites, a sort of road not taken with the Final Fantasy storytelling, and I’d encourage you to give it a try.
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3
20d
Old Timey Nonsense
Final Fantasy III/VI
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The last one for the SNES. Final Fantasy 7 is a radical break with the past, but Final Fantasy 6 (3 in the US) is the perfection of what has gone before. It’s a demonstration of the potential of the first games, just with more (surprises, details, stories, you can suplex a haunted locomotive halfway through)
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2
21d
Old Timey Nonsense
Your Town Should Have a Super Hero
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Pittsburgh has Joe Magarac, who is essentially 1930’s fan fiction that escaped containment during the middle 20th century, but still. Joe Magarac is the “tall tale” Pittsburgh steelworker, our (fake) Paul Bunyan. Your town should have a super hero, and Pittsburgh does.
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5
24d
Old Timey Nonsense
Go to a Horror Movie Showing Presented By a Guy in a Dracula Cape
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They do this in Orinda, CA, and Pittsburgh, PA, and I’ll eat my hat if they don’t have this in NY and Chicago. In Los Angeles you probably get to pick which particular Dracula cape. If they don’t have one of these in your town you need to talk to the folks who run the theater (you know the one) ASAP or you won’t get things set up right by Halloween.
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5
5w
Old Timey Nonsense
This Accurate Post about Q: The Winged Serpent
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Read the post here. Full movie, both the gritty, performance-driven story of a hustler and addict trying to get his life right and the almost completely separate phoned-in nonsense about a stop-motion dragon eating sunbathers in NYC is free on Tubi at the link.
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3
5w
Old Timey Nonsense
Third Wave Ska
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Hear me out! 1) you’re not as angry as you used to be but 2) you still need to dance. Also 3) Horns.
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6
5w
Old Timey Nonsense
Movies that are not About Juvenile Delinquents
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The best movies have a character right up front assuring an authority figure that most Hot Rodders / Rock and Rollers / Skateboarders / Freestyle MX Bikers are law abiding teens before introducing some evil, non-law-abiding Hot Rodder / Rock and Roller / Skateboarder / Freestyle MX Bike antagonists. If a movie begins this way there will likely be a lot of people dancing in it, and they’ll also probably try to promote a new single at some point.
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2
6w
Old Timey Nonsense
Identical Cousins?
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Don’t think too hard about it, they made more than one whole show about a talking car.
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3
8w
Old Timey Nonsense
The Tales From The Crypt Series and The Long 1960’s
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Nothing is more 1990’s, by which I mean nothing is more about dealing with the 1950’s than “Tales from the Crypt”, a twisted triple time warp trying to untangle itself. Created by the most powerful producers in Hollywood, it featured a-list guest stars, a-list directors and America’s favorite animatron, all trying to figure out how they ended up middle aged. It was a much more complex but ultimately a healthier response to 1989 than buying a Camero. In addition to being a strange time capsule of America metabolizing its own childhood it’s also just a terrific show. It’s a crime that it has been so hard to find on streaming. The link is to a SD version on Tubi, which lower fidelity than it deserves, but we have to take what we can get, kiddies!
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5
9w
Old Timey Nonsense
Phantasm (1979) is a 1970’s Teen Fantasy
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It’s got pointless nudity, a pointless jam session, a pointless scene quoted directly from Frank Herbert’s Dune, and an older brother with a sweet muscle car he lets you work on and even drive. Also a dirt bike. If you were 14 in 1979 thinking up ideas for a movie, you would think of 87% of Phantasm.
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6
9w
Old Timey Nonsense
Old Timey Funhouse
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Look for these at state fairs and mall parking lot carnivals. Wonder how they deal with liability issues. Feel like you’re about to fight Batman in 1940.
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7
1
11w
Old Timey Nonsense
Sophea Paige
hackers
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There are a million movies written by clueless adults about completely misunderstood or downright imaginary youth culture scenes, but few that are so full of hope and joy about the scenes that they don’t understand. The world of Hackers may not resemble real 1995 at all, but it is a happy world where party teens can hack the planet. I love this movie. Caveat: I’d bet there are probably “Rock and Roll” or “Surf” movies from the late 1950’s that are both similarly absurd and inaccurate and also full of joy, but as a clueless adult I wouldn’t know them if I saw them.
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1
12w
Old Timey Nonsense
Carter Burke Action Figure
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There are many toy versions of Carter Burke from Aliens, I’ve chosen this one because it features both his yuppie roughing it outfit and he has a placid look on his face. More toy lines should have a conciliatory, considerate bad guy who just wants to make sure we’ve really thought about all of our options before we jump into anything. When they update GI Joe they should reboot Zartan to wear more L.L. Bean.
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3
12w
Old Timey Nonsense
Fantasy Casting Old Columbo Guest Stars
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It’s not sacrilege if they’re all dead. A lot of Columbo guest stars deliver performances that don’t make sense in 2026 even if they were perfect in 1974, so you get to think carefully about what worked for Jack Cassidy or Donald Pleasance and what might work for Hugh Jackman or Paul Giamatti. Anyway it’ll keep you off of your phone a bit while waiting at the DMV.
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4
12w
Old Timey Nonsense
Daniel Pinkwater’s “The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death”
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This is a children’s novel about nerdy kids in a fictionalized Chicago sneaking out to watch movies at an all-night theater. It also has a bunch of goofball Pinkwater nonsense (complimentary) but for kids of the right age its real resonance is a blueprint for a particular sort of rebellion-slash-individuation (sneak out and have your mind blown by an Laurel and Hardy marathon, make a speech about how stupid your school is, make a punk-rock new friend.) As a kid I loved all sorts of things Pinkwater did, but “The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death” turned out to be a sort of map to my future. And it’s got a great title.
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2
1
12w
Old Timey Nonsense
Theater of Blood (1973) Is Violent Vincent Price Silliness
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More Dr Phibes than Dr Phibes, Vincent Price is a Shakespear-inspired serial killer of theater critics. Quoth Price in the linked interview “You try to play things … with a bit of good taste, but it’s awfully hard to saw somebody’s head off with the very best of taste.” I strongly and unironically recommend this movie as Price’s best work. The movie is available to stream for free on Tubi. Please note that there are no literal Muppets in the movie, and a lot more gore than would make it onto the Muppet show.
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5
13w
Old Timey Nonsense
The Black Metal Episode of “Bones”
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… or any episode of a cop show where they explore some subculture recently in the news, extra points if the nerdy lab tech reveals that they’ve always been into black metal or BASE jumping or cooking exotic animals or what-have-you. Watch the thru-hiking episode with your thru-hiking friend to see how they react!
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6
13w
Old Timey Nonsense
1980’s Evil Real Estate Developer Stock Villains
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Even more common than evil record executives and maybe even evil fraternity guys, consider for a moment evil real estate developers who want to bulldoze the community center to build a mall or whatever. I don’t have anything in particular to say about them, I’m just glad they were around to motivate the various talent shows and treasure hunts. (The linked scene is from 2002 but is too perfect not to use)
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8
1
13w
Old Timey Nonsense
Watership Down (1978) Traumatizes America’s Children
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This animated rabbit movie ran on PBS at a time when “animated movie” meant “Disney” and PBS meant “Mr. Rogers”, so parents made a bunch of unwarranted assumptions about a movie that is a lot closer to “The Shining” than you’d think. There were a couple of scenes involving torrents of blood, death itself hopping around in rabbit form, generally more than your average six year old in 1980 could just take on the chin. If you know ten Americans of a certain age, you know one who had a year of “Watership Down” nightmares.
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10
13w
Old Timey Nonsense
Lords of the Deep on Mystery Science Theater 3000
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Sometimes what makes a bad movie great is ambition. An off-brand version of “The Abyss” is kind of a sweet spot: it requires elaborate sets and effects and it has to take itself deeply seriously. It’s one thing to fight a cheap sea monster puppet, it’s another thing entirely to have a cheap sea monster puppet open your cosmic third eye to the oneness of all things. I feel like the latter day MST3K episodes have smaller followings, and this one deserves another look. It’s #18 on the current Paste Magazine episode rankings and it’s available on Netflix, for free with ads on Pluto.tv, and wherever else you get your episodes.
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14w
Old Timey Nonsense
Johnny Staccato, TV’s Jazz Detective
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The most 1959 thing that exists: Johnny Staccato is a hard boiled jazz detective (jazz!) whose adventures can pass a 1959 NBC censor and take 30 minutes with a music break and commercials. The creators take this seriously (starring John Cassavetes!) and everything is almost hard-boiled but either alluded to obliquely or magically resolved or both. The whole series is available on YouTube here. It’s a real puzzler.
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4
14w
Old Timey Nonsense
Ross, the Worst Friend
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That guy is the worst.
13
14w
Old Timey Nonsense
Magic Eye Posters
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These are fun in the same way PlayStation one intro graphics or early DVD menus are fun. They work on computer screens and phones ok, more or less. Enjoy a little slice of the retro future when you can suddenly see the sailboat.
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6
15w
Old Timey Nonsense
The Brain-Bats of Venus! (Basil Wolverton)
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Say it with me! This whole six page story is available for free on the Internet Archive. In the 1950’s Basil Wolverton drew stories like this for magazines with names like WEIRD TALES OF THE FUTURE and MISTER MYSTERY. These were the even more lurid and quickly produced knock offs of the EC horror and science fiction comics, places where stories like “Nightmare World” and our friends the brain bats fit right in.
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2
16w
Old Timey Nonsense
“Flash Gordon” (1980) and “Dune” (1984)
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Dino De Laurentiis produced two big space operas chasing “Star Wars”, they’re both highly stylized epics where some Earth doofus shows up to liberate space and maybe does some sword fighting. From a pitch perspective they’re basically the same movie. Neither of them really landed and they’re both deeply weird, and make a killer double feature.
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