Lilith Rose

@lillithrose · 19 Mar 2022

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The Magnificent world of TCM

As a young child, we didn't have it wide, luckily we weren't so poor that we ate McDonalds tomato soup*.
But we didn't have cable TV. Our TV was such a big one with buttons that you turned in front of the channel.
1 of the things we had that caused the TV. not only served as a “stain in the wallpaper cover” was the Video Recorder, or as it was called “the video cassette player”
Next to the big thing, which was the player, who was standing next to the TV and not as in the house of classmates on the TV (no not on the TV. Put Lilith, ie piece of) stood a row of soft big “clam shell” covers with a key to a different world in each.

A world filled with smoky nightclubs, drinking men in rain coats with trouble, and “ladies”.
A world ruled by people such as Cary Grant, John Garfield, Ava Gardner, Ann Blyth and Lauren Bacall, an otherwise musical world where the service was created by Blues and Jazz.

A world where those covers with those big black Cassettes gave me access to, a world with a logo of the people of Turner Classic Movies or TCM.
An uncle didn't just have Cable TV, oh no he had something else, something better, he had Satellite, and that didn't come from a cable, oh no This came from space.
And he also had a Video Recorder, and was able to record things, but because RTL 4 movies were not allowed because they were too new, he recorded films for us from TCM, because they were old enough and so it was allowed to.

As a little girl for me it wasn't mornings with Telekids or Fox Kids on Saturday, oh no for me it was the world of

The Woman in the Window
The Big Sleep
Kiss Me Deadly
Sunset Boulevard
The Maltese Falcon
Stranger on the Third Floor
Elevator to the Gallows

Grainy movies sometimes with bits that missed because the video was watched so many times that the magnet band was bad or sometimes just broken, which was then pasted by older neighbor with a jeweler glasses and second glue, a man I knew “affectionately” as Falcon, this because this gentleman in the owned something even older than the videotape he had a projector with a movie role of The Killers, a movie my parents loved, and when I went along to watch the movie, I always got a bag of Maltesers.

When we got better financially, a bigger world opened up for me when we also got on cable and I hung out more often with classmates, who had parents who loved the worlds of “American Ninja”, a world of color, and action.

Gone were the evenings in Falcon's pantry, the bags of Maltesers, and dangerous women.
And instead came a world of women who had to be saved by muscle bundles, who didn't even have a cigarette in the mouth when they spoke, or in smoky Jazz clubs tapped whiskeys away while a man played with a coin and followed up his senses with “See”, where there was no more with the fish was slept.

And yet, in the attic with my parents he is still there, that old thing that started to “eat up” videotape more often at the end of his life but was never thrown away and in the same box where that thing is in there are the keys back to that world.

The wonderful world of TCM.





















*for those who don't know McDonalds tomato soup is what a school guy called it when she went to the McDonalds with just enough money to get a cheap thing and then a big cup of hot water with it early and with hands full of Ketchup packs filled the water until something looked like tomato soup arose. a cup that she then took home.