Movies news on the TV, while everybody else was sleeping

I threw out some of the last blank video tapes I had left the other day. I'd had them for decades, but hadn't watched them in years. I had to hold onto them because I used the tape space left after the movies I copied for all sorts of things and I was scared I'd left scraps of precious home movies on them, moments of personal history that could be lost forever if I wasn't careful.

I finally got around to checking them and there was nothing like that left there. Nothing irreplaceable, nothing really special. But there was a bunch of movie items taped in 1993/94 - mostly news pieces from late night TV - that is just a perfect snapshot of the things I was excited about at that age. 

I was 18, falling hard for all sorts of new movies, like you do at that age. And this was just before the internet came along and ruined it for everybody, and the only glimpses I could get of these forthcoming thrills was on the TV news, six months before prints of the films ever got to this part of the world.

There, after some much-loved and often-watched dubbed copies of Bram Stoker's Dracula and the David Lynch Dune - long since replaced by crispy DVD versions - was all sorts of cinematic nonsense, including:

• The first, dialogue-free trailer for Twin peaks: Fire Walk With Me trailer that I copied from the tape of trailers the local video store would give you for free ('Out in April!'). Still powerful as fuck.
• Several news items about Natural Born Killers that were deeply concerned about all that violence. Even legendary NZ entertainment reporter Dylan Taite got in on the furrowed brow action.
  
• A brief bit featuring Marcus Lush talking about Shafted, that the Back of the Y dudes did for Mothra  - and showing the bit where they shot Martin Phillips in the head.
  
• A 60 Minutes puff piece on Peter Jackson during the Heavenly Creatures era, which always bugged me, because they showed him directing on the set of Jack Brown Genius, a film he did not direct.
• Multiple clips of Tarantino love, with the only glimpses I ever got of Pulp Fiction six months before we could go actually see it at the movies. These include an effusive review of Pulp by the great Raybon Kahn, and Sam Jackson talking about it on set of Die Hard 3, which is very much dated by the way Leeza Gibbons asks Sam about the n-word.
  
• The most patronising news story about the Mary Shelley's Frankenstein possible, but at least it had some Forry Ackerman.
• Small glimpses of Interview with a Vampire; In The Mouth of Madness; Pret A Porter; Shawshank Redemption, Lord Of Illusions; Quiz Show and El Mariachi. That was my jam.
  
• Oh, and there's Barry Norman visiting the set on the first Judge Dredd movie, when it actually looked drokking amazing. That was a nice few months.
  

None of this was worth keeping, or even copying to a digital format (if I had more than five seconds of Shafted that wasn't scratched to fuck, I would have kept that, even if I might be one of 10 people in the world who actually give a shit about it). I gave it one last watch, and flung them into the bin.

They were only getting older and dustier and moldier, and I don't need them anymore. Because I'll never forget the excitement of recording them on the family video recorder, late at night, when everyone else in the world was asleep, and the world of movies was just starting to open up inside my head.