Where One Channel Might Not Have Gone Before

After moving beyond the now-antique time-shifting technology of the VCR to a combination hard disk-and-DVD recorder, I found myself most often recording old movies off Turner Classic Movies; they didn’t have commercials in the middle to be fussed out with the editing functions. Over time, though, as those recorded movie DVDs piled up in plastic shoe boxes and the list of titles I kept up marched past six hundred, I began to think I’d recorded everything the channel showed that I wanted to see, and still hadn’t watched most of those movies anyway. The thought is getting stronger that I could cancel a cable subscription I’m not doing much else with and use the money saved for another streaming subscription or two.

However, I did happen to notice today TCM is planning to schedule science fiction movies on Tuesday evenings in July. Again, I have most of the movies that get my attention there recorded already (when I didn’t already have them on “official” DVDs), but Star Wars: A New Hope being in the schedule got my attention in a way a little different. Short of a hopefully “saga-positive” hosted introduction this wouldn’t offer me anything I already have on Blu-Ray (and at a much higher picture quality than my cable offers), but the thought of “a movie that appears on different channels now screening on TCM” does amuse me a bit. The channel’s corporate connections have always meant more MGM and Warner Brothers movies on it, even if it sometimes shows 20th Century Fox movies (and has scheduled “Disney vault” films, which is of course now more significant). Perhaps this leads to thoughts of “one last big fling before calling to (try to) cancel.”