Questions about rewatching movies before betamax vhs etc

There were 8mm and super 8mm films in the 60s. Some shorts and clips were available. You couldn't get the full length High Noon or The Wizard of Oz.

We used to borrow 8mm movies from the library. There wasn't much of a selection.

You wait for it to come on the telly. I remember the first time Dr No was shown, the first Bond film ever shown on the telly. People were incredibly excited, then on the night itself there was a power cut, just as Bond talked to Moneypenny, and the power didn't come back on until he was fleeing the island.

Keep in mind that in the early years of VHS and Betamax, they were very expensive and not really available to mainstream audiences (and the very wealthy were more interested in LaserDisc). The first TV video rentals that were realistically available to most people were the CED videodiscs that first came out in 1981. It wasn't until the late 1980s that VCRs dropped enough in price that people started buying/renting VHS videotape instead of CED videodisc.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc



From what I know of Super 8 home releases (which isn't much), they usually contained only a cut-down version of the movie.

Note how the descriptions for these vintage home releases all start with the words "selected scenes from":

http://super8warehouse.com/?product=star-wars-8
http://super8warehouse.com/?product=airport-1975
http://super8warehouse.com/?product=the-bridge-on-the-river-kwai-4
http://super8warehouse.com/?product=lawrence-of-arabia-4
http://super8warehouse.com/?product=mary-poppins-the-super-nanny-2
http://super8warehouse.com/?product=ben-hur-5


Note also:

"Castle Films changed its name to Universal 8 in 1977 and experimented with longer-length films, but the era of home video brought an end to Universal's home-movie enterprise in 1984. Universal 8 dealt mostly in excerpts, but Universal Pictures Home Entertainment (founded in 1980) offered feature films in their entirety on videotape. Collectors abandoned the excerpts in favor of the complete movies."

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Films