Growing up in deep Southeast Texas we didn’t have cable or satellite. Looking back through things these past few weeks put me to thinking about the things we watched. We weren’t exactly a sit and watch television together as a family type with my father working shift-work. There are a few things I do remember though, mostly any National Geographic Special, and I remember seeing more than a few made for tv movies through the years. Maybe it was just the time I was coming up, but it seemed like there were more options than you’d expect for people limited to the big three network tv.

This is the last of the lost posts to be restored from the Great Wipe of 2021. I don’t know what all commentary was lost for each of these entries but I do at least have the list of clips/trailers that I went searching for to share with each one. I’m sure most of the musings will be the same. It was more of an exercise in aggregation anyway. So, here we go again.

I suppose the best way to do this is chronologically. Roots aired in 1977 and the Thorn Birds in 1983, but I didn’t see either of those on the first run-through. Though there is a chance I did hear The Thorn Birds as it broadcast a few months after I checked into my existence on this planet.

The first one I remember watching and it being an all hands, sit down make sure you are there early, people coming over, blank tape in the VCR for it was Lonesome Dove. CBS ran the miniseries across four nights, February 5-8, 1989. Remember when things could end on cliff hangers and you couldn’t just select “watch next episode”? I was in six years old, enamored by Captain Call, oblivious to Gus’ favorite past time, and like everyone else traumatized by the snakes in the river scene.

We rode horses then, trail-rides and whatnot, and Louis L’amour was on the shelves (and frequently in my grandfather’s hands or pocket). It’s been a while since I’ve watched it but I when I used to rain out of work and had an unexpected day off I’d settle in and watch it all in one stretch. I can’t find the original television promo, but this nice trailer announces two discs, surround sound and widescreen format. The first one I saw was “Formatted to fit your tv screen” that is 4:3.

March 25, 1990. Anthony Quinn cast off and brought Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea to the small screen. I do remember watching this one and the quality of the video promo is exactly how I remember every one of the things on this list being advertised.

Stephen King’s It aired on ABC November 18-20, 1990. I was in the first grade and having an overactive imagination, was scared of practically everything. There was no way I was going to watch a scary clown movie. I do, however remember everyone talking about it at school.

I have a blind spots in 1991 and 1992. Surely something aired, but I can’t draw anything up for the moment.* Maybe they just went into production mode, which is possible as the next one I remember was another adaptation of a Stephen King novel: Tommyknockers. Running from May 9-10, 1993 it hit with just enough time for kids in school to obsessively repeat the “Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers, knocking at the door.”

Another Stephen King faire, The Stand, hit the airwaves in May 1994. This one ran five nights premiering on (what I am assuming is the contract station) ABC Sunday the 8th and concluding on Thursday the 12th. I didn’t watch this one either.

Sticking with a working formula, ABC gave yet another Stephen King the 4:3 treatment the following year. The Langoliers ran two nights, May 14th and 15th, 1995. Now this one I did watch, but, hey I was almost 13 and maybe not quite as scared of horror as before, but it was mainly because I recognized the guy from Quantum Leap (Dean Stockwell) in it. I often think about this one from time to time when people talk about time and where it goes.

Now the last half of the 1990s were stacked with network broadcast movies filled with well-known actors and varying degrees of computer animation. These are the ones that I really remember and have watched more than once (except maybe Creature).

Premiering on February 4, 1996, and running for two nights on NBC, the bartender from Cheers (Ted Danson) starred in arguably the best adaptation of Gulliver’s Travels to be filmed. This is one of those that I will recommend people finding to watch. It really expanded the character as it had been know on video at the time, with most animated features focusing on the titular character as a giant. This one follows him through the adventures, the floating mountain, back home where he is judged as insane. It’s one of my favorite stories and one of my favorite adaptations and the special effects hold up pretty well considering when they were produced.

Catching up for lost time, NBC brought another multinight feature to our flickering sets in April of the same year. With King’s books sewn up by ABC, NBC scoured Peter Benchley’s repertoire bringing us an adventure of colossal squid size: The Beast. You may remember Benchley from his other, more famous ocean horror: Jaws. Incidentally, Jaws aired on ABC on November 4, 1979 right after it was released in theatres. I missed that one but saw a later afternoon movie feature of it that instantly ridded my room of the 3.5 feet long inflatable shark I had hanging above the window. The Beast is a good watch, a fun (if predictable) film.

The TV promo slots are the best, but also having the option to buy it and watch again is nice. I wonder what the revenue from made for TV movie DVD’s looked like.

The end of April and the first of May (4/27-5/1) 1997, ABC is back with a television version of Stephen King’s (surprise!) The Shining. This time with Steven Weber (Wings) as Jack. Again I opted out of this one having heard enough about Kubrick’s version through popular culture along to give my seat to someone else. But, the timing hits right before school lets out and it’s all a buzz among my classmates–even the ones who have cable and can watch not made for network tv programs.

Spring 1997 brought an embarrassment of other riches (two, it brought two more). But they were classics. And thankfully they didn’t air at the same time since they were on two different channels. But they were stacked in tandem weeks. The first was ABC’s May 11th and 12th feature of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. I can’t even tell you why I liked this one so much, and it’s not just because Michael Caine was Nemo or that it was a brilliantly done period piece. There isn’t a promo around so here is a poster and a like to the Ai (blech!) upscaled version on youtube

The following week (5/18-19) was one of NBC’s major epic events: The Odyssey featuring, to my homeroom teacher’s chagrin, Armand Assante. Much like their work on Gulliver’s Travels (both were Hallmark films remember) they pulled out all the stops, and this version has yet to be beat in terms of visualization. One of the few times something lived up to the “movie event” promise. The change scene when Odysseus shoots the arrow through the axes along is worth watching it. The aftermath is like watching a Bronze Age version of the taking the building scene in The Matrix. It’s a masterpiece.

If we are keeping score here NBC is obviously coming out on top. April (26-27) 1998 brought another famous story to the screen, this time in the age of Arthur. Merlin was another Hallmark to broadcast movie, with Sam Neil as the title character and a wealth of supporting cast (including Martin Short and Helena Bonham Carter) to usher in the reign of the true king. This is another that I have watched a few times since first seeing it, and it might be time to go through these again. As odd as it is, and was, I think this version of Merlin is almost as equally called to my mind as Disney’s blue robed long white beard version (which I still dearly love).

In May that same year ABC brought another Peter Benchley ocean creature out to get you book into our living rooms with Creature. This one, which terrorized out sets on on May 17th and 18th is much more H.G. Wells than annoyed nature run amuck. Think Coach (Craig T Nelson) visits the Island of Dr. Moreau for this one, which is probably why I think about it from time to time, too. It wasn’t bad and the creature effects were pretty cool. While putting this together I read that the original book White Shark (1994) was republished as Creature in 1997 to release concurrently with the tv movie. I might track this one down and read it.

As the 90s came to a close NBC was still swinging for the fences, with a Hallmark bat. You are going to be hard pressed to find a better live action Alice in Wonderland than the Hallmark one that NBC debuted on February 28, 1999. I hold this one higher than the Depp one; Head and shoulders. The cast alone is worth the time. Martin Short as the Mad Hatter has the same sort of freedom of existence that Robin Williams got when voicing the Genie. It’s delightfully bizarre. Though I wonder what it will be like for someone watching it who doesn’t recognize all the big stars that were in it. The effects hold up and it’s definitely worth watching or watching again. How could you not want to watch this from the promo? And they started advertising for it 3 weeks before broadcast!

Bonus promo with more mad effects

Three months later NBC dropped the wettest story every told. In Noah’s Ark (May 2-3, 1999), John Voight starred as Noah building his ark to save humanity. I am going to go ahead and hot take this as being better than the 2014 film Noah in substance if not SFx. Even with Hallmark’s all star casting possibly not holding the pull it had 20 years ago, it’s still a good story done well. One of the things I remember about this coming out was how upset the preacher’s son I went to school with was about the merchant (James Coburn) meeting the ark during the flood.

and from the producers of all the NBC movies I have written about above:

I don’t know if 2000 is where this genre ended or where I left it off and started buying the Hallmark DVDs (like 2004’s King Solomon’s Mines also great, but out of scope here). But the final two I distinctly remember came in January and April of that year.

The first, The Spring, I remember watching with my grandfather one night when I stayed with him. It was a great little fountain of youth story and I think about it often. I am not sure that the whole evil in the spring is warranted, but it pulls on the paranoia of people and what I like about aspects of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s stories, that is, that the white picket fences and clean houses are always scarier than the haunted house on the hill. It also has aspects of Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery in it.

April 24, 2000. I bit over 11 years under the bridge, or over the airwaves, since Lonesome Dove aired in February of 1989. I am capping this one off with the telepic biography of The Three Stooges. The imaginatively titled The Three Stooges was a single night, 88 minute broadcast; two hours with the commercials. I’ve always enjoyed biographies and this was a nice little slice of what it was like in Hollywood during the 30s and 40s if not a deep dive into what made the Stooges so popular. It starred the Commish (Michael Chiklis) before he moved on to The Shield and later become Ben Grimm in the Fantastic Four.

I never watched much of the Stooges, once set of my grandparents couldn’t tolerate such silliness. I knew them from popular culture, had seen an animated clip or two with the live setups for the shorts, and Scooby and the gang hung out with them on no less than two occasions. I enjoyed this and remember making sure to clear the time to watch it (remember when you had to do that?). Two scenes remain in my mind from this film. One, they are in a train station and some fans show up and talk to them but then start poking them in the eyes and hitting them like they saw on television, not knowing the tricks to keep it from hurting. The other is the ending with Moe and Larry walking along the beach in the final scene.

Watching this again it’s interesting to hear Larry point out that people aren’t watching two-reelers anymore. “They’ve got television.” After rightly lamenting that everyone else got features and they stayed iwth shorts, though in hindsight a feature of Stooges would have been either exhausting or filled with a lot of dull exposition between the hijinks. Probably both in equal measure.

And now, television is a different from what I wrote about here as television was from film. Everything is on demand, watch whenever, which usually means always. Bingewatching whole seasons. There is no external factors putting us down at the same time to share the same media. Kids in school today aren’t talking about these kinds of things together, or hearing about it from a larger group like I did with It and Tommyknockers. Sure they may be watching the same streaming show on Netflix, but it’s a smaller circle and we’ve lost another node of shared cultural consciousness on our way to being a nation of individuals, lone and separate from all.

Even the ads have gotten worse. They’ve been commoditized as much as what they are selling, buy ad space, as many as you can, repeated and recycled. No originality, not jingles, no slogans. Just bland rapid (and rabid) homogeneity. Even though Netflix started in 1997, it wasn’t until 2001 when it really took off. Coasting, as it did, the dot-com bubble and surviving without Blockbuster buying them when offered. So, here’s a good place to stop, and I think with the same reminisces of Larry Fine. It’s a new world now–even newer than it was in 2001 when made for tv movies were already dinosaurs relegated to lost continents like the Hallmark Channel and TNT.

This concludes our broadcast day. (I do remember waking up and turning on the tv before the stations began broadcasting)

Author’s note April 24, 2025: Even though this was one of the lost posts and I didn’t have the text saved anywhere else (which I started doing after) I did have the names of the movies and the later list of the Western TV shows still in one of my old notebooks. It’s good to have this one back again.

*PS. For completion sake I did find a 1991 and 1992 entry that I might vaguely remember. But I am putting them down here all the same.

Dillinger was ABC’s January 6, 1991 Sunday Night Movie. It’s worth adding just for that promo.

CBS had a a three night “miniseries of a lifetime” covering the live and times of Frank Sinatra. The TV promo (the second in this short video) can be summed up in one word (which they kept repeating): seductive.