When I was a kid, my friend and I went to blockbuster and pulled a copy of Poltergeist from the store shelf. There must be a different movie that is also called Poltergeist, besides the most popular movie with that name. Anyway, we returned to my house, put the VHS in the tape player, and began watching it. Without giving too much away, it had some awkward scene between two of the adult characters in the film. It was so awkward, that my friend actually screamed, “this is not Poltergeist!” She had seen the popular film, before that day, and I had not. To this day. I have still not seen Poltergeist because I have this fear of finding, and playing, that awful movie by mistake.
Lol, it seems like there was a whole category of films made to ride the coat tails of better, more famous films by sitting beside them on the shelf at Blockbuster, waiting to be picked up by clueless parents.
My sisters still give my dad a hard time about all the knock-off movies he brought home when we were kids. To this day, a Gordy is family short-hand for a disappointing knock-off: “Hey, wait, this isn’t brie, this is ‘cheese product’…you got the Gordy cheese!”
Hahaha! Yeah, Gordy was no Babe. It’s funny that Babe was released the following year. It reminds me of the knock off Aladdin cartoon that was released before Aladdin was actually released. Walmart put it on the shelves at just the right height for little kids to see, while everyone was hyped about the new Disney movie being released later, in 1992. I don’t even think they included Apu in it!
Yeah, I remember that being a real thing: one studio would get wind that another studio was working on a film with a particular theme, and they’d rush to put out an equivalent movie. Later on, it wasn’t even just cheap knockoffs: remember when Deep Impact came out right at the same time as Armageddon? And then like…The 13th Floor, eXistenZ, and The Matrix all came out in 1999. I wonder how much of that was strict copying, how much was scripts influencing one another, and how much was just the zeitgeist.
When I was a kid, my friend and I went to blockbuster and pulled a copy of Poltergeist from the store shelf. There must be a different movie that is also called Poltergeist, besides the most popular movie with that name. Anyway, we returned to my house, put the VHS in the tape player, and began watching it. Without giving too much away, it had some awkward scene between two of the adult characters in the film. It was so awkward, that my friend actually screamed, “this is not Poltergeist!” She had seen the popular film, before that day, and I had not. To this day. I have still not seen Poltergeist because I have this fear of finding, and playing, that awful movie by mistake.
Lol, it seems like there was a whole category of films made to ride the coat tails of better, more famous films by sitting beside them on the shelf at Blockbuster, waiting to be picked up by clueless parents.
My sisters still give my dad a hard time about all the knock-off movies he brought home when we were kids. To this day, a Gordy is family short-hand for a disappointing knock-off: “Hey, wait, this isn’t brie, this is ‘cheese product’…you got the Gordy cheese!”
Hahaha! Yeah, Gordy was no Babe. It’s funny that Babe was released the following year. It reminds me of the knock off Aladdin cartoon that was released before Aladdin was actually released. Walmart put it on the shelves at just the right height for little kids to see, while everyone was hyped about the new Disney movie being released later, in 1992. I don’t even think they included Apu in it!
Yeah, I remember that being a real thing: one studio would get wind that another studio was working on a film with a particular theme, and they’d rush to put out an equivalent movie. Later on, it wasn’t even just cheap knockoffs: remember when Deep Impact came out right at the same time as Armageddon? And then like…The 13th Floor, eXistenZ, and The Matrix all came out in 1999. I wonder how much of that was strict copying, how much was scripts influencing one another, and how much was just the zeitgeist.