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Author
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Topic: What was your FIRST EVER Super 8/Standard 8mm film?
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David M. Ballew
Expert Film Handler
Posts: 113
From: Burbank, CA USA
Registered: Nov 2009
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posted October 24, 2011 12:14 AM
The first digest I ever saw would have been in October of '77, at a church Harvest Festival (Halloween carnival). For a dime or maybe a quarter, you could go in a little room in the church basement where they were showing the 200-foot digest "The Giant Behemoth." (They used the brief mention of an animal called Behemoth in the book of Job as a pretext to show a monster flick at church.)
In February of '78, for my seventh birthday, my parents let me buy "War of the Planets" from Captain Company. I would have chosen a different film, but the only Warren magazine I could find on short notice was one of their "Star Wars" special editions, not an ordinary issue of "Famous Monsters." This particular magazine listed only a handful of 8mm science fiction pictures, and "War of the Planets" seemed the best choice at the time.
Eventually, my granddad gave me his old Mansfield 8mm projector, and we must have watched that one digest forty or fifty times before it completely wore out. But over the next five years or so, Captain Company (and later Blackhawk) got a lot of my business, that's for sure!
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Laksmi Breathwaite
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 771
From: Las Vegas
Registered: Nov 2010
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posted November 10, 2011 08:49 PM
Super 8 didn't have any of those hassles and provided great image quality, revolutionizing the amateur film genre in the process. Kodak launched Super 8 mm film in May 1965, along with two cameras, the M2 and M4. Super 8 was cheaper and more convenient than the previous, cumbersome Normal 8 format, since all you had to do was pop the film cassette into the camera, take it out after recording and turn it in for processing.The advent of the Super 8 cassetted film really helped spawn the home movie rage in the '60s and '70s was an easy to use and affordable option for consumers."
To get an idea of what Super 8 movies looked like, recall the opening credits of the late-1980s and early '90s TV show, "The Wonder Years." Each Super 8 cassette packed only enough film to create three minutes of colorful, soft and somewhat grainy footage, but it was enough time for amateur filmmakers to pan around their living rooms or back yards while everyone waved at the camera.
Watch "The Wonder Years" Super 8 film-style opening:
I was that little kid in the show. I started useing Super 8 in my family movies with no sound on my daddy's camera. And my first Hollywood film on a 50 foot reel was The Creature from the Black Lagoon. And it was a wind up projector my dad bought me in 1965. My next film was silent and was Mighty Joe Young 200 feet. Wow! I fell in love with Ray Harryhausen after that.
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" Faster then a speeding bullet, more powerful then a Locomotive "."Look up in the sky it's a bird it's a plane it's SUPERMAN"
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