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Post by topbilled on Oct 28, 2022 3:27:47 GMT
I thought this might be an interesting topic...
I still remember the night I was channel surfing in July 2008 and watched TCM for the first time.
Sally Field was a guest programmer and she was talking to Robert Osborne about why she chose THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK. I liked her comments so much, I set the remote down and watched the whole movie (though I'd seen it several times before). And that was it, I was quickly hooked on TCM.
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Post by yanceycravat on Oct 28, 2022 4:32:25 GMT
I can't remember exactly but my earliest memory of TCM is seeing the Richard Dix movie, ACE OF ACES (1933). I thought he was particularly hammy. I wasn't aware of him before. I had to learn everything about him. I've been collecting movie paper on him ever since. I got to know his son Robert pretty well.
BTW - TCM also made me a fan of Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey. I also collect movie paper on them as well. I'd probably be debt free if it wasn't for those posters! HA! That's one way how TCM changed my life. |
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Post by Fading Fast on Oct 28, 2022 9:12:18 GMT
Great topic. Sadly, I can't remember my first TCM movie, but I was there very near the start. However, I do remember the first TCM movie that blew me away: it was "The Uninvited."
Yes, I had a VCR, but this was the early 1990s when they were still a bit clunky (at least mine was) and, as I did (and do) regularly, I had TCM on in the background as I was getting ready to go out. I was immediately sucked into the story, but had to leave.
We've all been there - you just want to watch the movie, but you have something else scheduled. Well, I called the friend I was meeting (and thankfully caught him as this was an era of landlines), cancelled our plans and sat down on the edge of the bed to watch the movie. I didn't even switch rooms from the small bedroom TV to the large living room one as I didn't want to miss any of the picture.
"The Uninvited" is still my favorite ghost movie as the story is very good (the ghost is almost never seen, which IMO, is usually more effective), the setting is incredible (love the village, the cliffside house and even the in-town house) and the cast is outstanding, including Ray Milland, Ruth Hussey, Alan Napier, Donald Crisp and the perfect-to-play-a-haunted-by-the-past Gail Russell.
And here's the best part, I'm not even much of ghost-movie fan. I'll take them or leave them, but my now girlfriend is a big ghost-movie fan. Well, I met her in 1997 and we immediately discovered we were both old-movie fans and started discussing our favorites, but somehow, she had never seen "The Uninvited," so I got to introduce a ghost-movie fan to one of the best ghost movies ever.
Ever since, "The Uninvited" has been a part of our wonderful twenty-five year relationship, as I always kid her about the irony of me introducing her to a classic ghost movie. Also, it's become part of our "relationship" language as someone will be "like the commander" (Donald Crisp's character) or "that house is like the one on the cliff," or one of us will say to the other, "don't go all Gail Russell on me."
So not the first movie I saw on TCM, but probably the one that's meant the most to me.
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Post by cineclassics on Oct 28, 2022 14:24:09 GMT
I'm envious of anyone who began watching TCM from the beginning. I can only imagine what changes you all have noticed from the network since its inception in 1994. Perhaps that is a topic for another thread.
I've only been watching TCM for 3 years or so and I believe I stumbled upon Eddie Muller and Noir Alley. I don't recall the very first film I saw but a little known film noir entitled "Conflict," from 1945 does stick out as one of the first. Starring Bogie and Greenstreet, it's a pithy and atmospheric noir with a rare post-Maltese Falcon villainous turn by Bogie.
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Post by CinemaInternational on Oct 28, 2022 15:01:58 GMT
Niagara, back in 2011. I didn't have access to the channel, prior to then. i still have a bit of a soft spot for that Fox noir because of it.
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Post by dianedebuda on Oct 28, 2022 15:36:58 GMT
I'm envious of anyone who began watching TCM from the beginning. I can only imagine what changes you all have noticed from the network since its inception in 1994. Perhaps that is a topic for another thread. I've only been watching TCM for 3 years or so and I believe I stumbled upon Eddie Muller and Noir Alley. I don't recall the very first film I saw but a little known film noir entitled "Conflict," from 1945 does stick out as one of the first. Starring Bogie and Greenstreet, it's a pity and atmospheric noir with a rare post-Maltese Falcon villainous turn by Bogie. Looks like you started watching about the time I stopped finding very many things being shown that I was interested in enough to record.  Until a year or so ago, I was still recording the beg/end commentaries for movies that I'd already captured even though there were many topic repeats. Every once in a while there'd be a new gem. So much of the commentary focus has changed that not even those are interesting any more to me and I rarely record or watch anything on TCM these days. I keep checking the schedule though. 
No idea what the first movie that I saw on the channel was. TCM launched April 14, 1974 1994. Cable was not available here for a long time. We bought a C-band receiver (big dish) in 1984 and got hooked on TCM then. We had to buy a descrambler in 1989 when the signals were scrambled; before then, the channels were shown in the clear. We were paying something like $28/month for a channel subscription package for HBO, TCM and others, so guess there was some sort of channel access fee/lock before the scrambling - don't remember much about that. TCM left C-band in 2005 and that's when I finally registered at the TCM Forum. Lucky for us, cable decided to extend its service right then so we didn't miss anything. I was in hog heaven when we could actually turn into more than one channel at a time on different TVs and had the web on something better than a dial-in modem.
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Have a soft spot for The Univited too, particularly the score.
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Post by BingFan on Oct 28, 2022 17:51:45 GMT
Because we live in a semi-rural area without cable service, we couldn’t get TCM when it first launched in April 1994. We had to wait to see the new channel until 1996, when small-dish satellite service first came to our area.
I don’t remember the first movie that I watched on TCM in 1996, but I remember distinctly that the first week we had TCM, it was showing a week-long, non-stop marathon of Bogart movies. As Bogie has always been a favorite in our house, we had a great time seeing some of the less well-known Bogart movies that were difficult to find anywhere but TCM.
It was a great way to start out with TCM, because the marathon emphasized that TCM was going to show movies that I couldn’t see anywhere else. I think the channel has lived up to this promise, more or less, since then.
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I’m glad to see there are other fans of The Uninvited here! I’m not much of a watcher of movies that focus on horror or the supernatural, but this movie, with its somewhat light-hearted attitude (the characters aren’t really scared of the ghost), stands out as something different. My wife and I look forward to watching The Uninvited each year before Halloween, as we’re just about to do now.
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Post by dianedebuda on Oct 28, 2022 18:32:43 GMT
Boy did I get my years mixed up. So I guess I was in at the beginning. 
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Post by Andrea Doria on Oct 28, 2022 21:38:27 GMT
We sometimes go for days without turning on the TV so we didn't get cable for years and when we finally did TCM wasn't in the package. So the first time I saw it was at the YMCA. Just outside the big room with the workout machines was a small lounge with a sofa and a TV that was permanently set to TCM. Soon I was spending much more time on that sofa than on the elliptical. Right from the start I was struck by the beauty of the re-mastered black and white films.
I couldn't say exactly what movie I saw first, but, like TopBilled, one early one was The Miracle of Morgan's Creek. I was totally surprised by everything that happened in that film, simply delighted.
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Post by BunnyWhit on Nov 10, 2022 8:19:04 GMT
Gone with the Wind (1939), of course!
I was there for the very first film aired on TCM in 1994. (I also was there for the very first video aired on MTV in 1981, the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star". But I digress.)
Not braggin'.... Just sayin'....
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Post by Swithin on Nov 17, 2022 14:18:39 GMT
I lived in Long Island City, Queens in the 1990s. Cable came rather late to that NYC neighborhood. I'm pretty sure the first film I must have seen would have been a Bette Davis movie, as part of a comprehensive series of her films on TCM in the late 1990s, including some rarities. Not sure exactly which film I saw though.
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Post by umopapisdn on Nov 25, 2022 4:55:01 GMT
The first movie I saw on TCM was Gaslight not long after I saw my first movie on AMC which was Reap the Wild Wind. I've been hooked ever since. I have largely abandoned AMC and all of the erstwhile film channels of the early 2000s such as IFC and Sundance. I pretty much only watch live sports especially baseball and TCM. I watch documentaries from time to time, but most channels rarely show them anymore except for BBC America.
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Post by Fading Fast on Nov 25, 2022 9:24:29 GMT
The first movie I saw on TCM was Gaslight not long after I saw my first movie on AMC which was Reap the Wild Wind. I've been hooked ever since. I have largely abandoned AMC and all of the erstwhile film channels of the early 2000s such as IFC and Sundance. I pretty much only watch live sports especially baseball and TCM. I watch documentaries from time to time, but most channels rarely show them anymore except for BBC America. |
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Post by umopapisdn on Nov 25, 2022 15:00:04 GMT
Our TV habits are very similar as I mainly watch TCM, baseball (recorded and turned on an hour and half after the game starts so that I can fast-forward through the endless commercials), the few remaining channels that show good documentaries and, for me, the one-off show on BBC or from one of the streaming services that my girlfriend finds and say I have to watch because it's that good (and she's usually right). Sadly, my favorite team, the Chicago Cubs, decided to start their own channel in 2020 and it won't be carried by Dish. I really don't want to switch providers since I have so many movies recorded off TCM stored. I pretty much listen to radio broadcasts now and watch terrible national coverage when I can. Because the Cubs were not great for most of my life and because my favorite player, Greg Maddux, left for the Braves, I became a fan of the entire sport and not just my team. WGN and TBS were a godsend in growing the fanbases, and now the blackout rules are terrible. I will gladly watch any teams play. For my documentary fix, I usually head to the YouTube blackhole and get sucked in. But I really miss what History, H2, Discovery etc. used to be. I also love watching older British miniseries adaptations of literature. I re-watched the newer Bleak House last week with Charles Dance and Anna Maxwell Martin and it was still as good as I remembered it. |
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Post by tijuanataxi on Nov 26, 2022 3:25:05 GMT
I can't remember the first movie I ever watched on TCM, but the first one I recorded was John Garfield's "Out of the Fog", on August 27, 2009, in celebration of a newly acquired DVD recorder. The only other movie channels I ever watch are HDNet, HBO and PBS, though in the latter two cases it's mostly for the documentaries. Sports and the PBS News Hour make up 90% of the rest of my TV viewing.
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Until a year or so ago, I was still recording the beg/end commentaries for movies that I'd already captured even though there were many topic repeats. Every once in a while there'd be a new gem. So much of the commentary focus has changed that not even those are interesting any more to me and I rarely record or watch anything on TCM these days. I keep checking the schedule though. 
