Millennials May Actually Care About Classic Movies After All

The New York Post on August 16, 2017 did an article called Millennials don't really care about classic movies. It was based off a so-called poll conducted by FYE.com of 1,000 millennials and 1,000 people over the age of 50. Besides being fairly sloppily written, it asserted that millennials don't watch old movies and find black and white movies boring. Much has been written about this article in the past two weeks, with people offering up vigorous defenses of young people and/or offering up lists of movies that young people should see. That's all well and good but it doesn't address the basic problems with the article. The first of which is simply the fact that the definition of classic movie has evolved over the years whether we are aware of it or not.

Go back to the 1970s when the nostalgia rage kicked into high gear. In 1977, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was 40 years old, Miracle on 34th Street was 30, and Jailhouse Rock with Elvis was 20. It's 2017 now. At this point in time, Star Wars is 40, The Princess Bride is 30, and Titanic is 20. Show me a millennial who hasn't seen Star Wars and I'll show you a weird millennial. The goalposts have moved. Movies that we may or may not necessarily consider "old" are in fact just that. In a couple of years, the first Harry Potter movie will be 20. How many people really look at Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and think "man, that's an old movie!"? But it really kinda is at this point in time. I'm pretty sure there's millennials watching Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. Those are movies heading into the classic definition pretty rapidly, too.

Yes, if your definition of "classic movie" is only movies stops on December 31, 1959, you may or may not have a point about millennials. However, if you expand the definition of classic movie to anything 20 years old or older--which seems to me to be a good enough starting point--then yes, millennials are watching classic movies. Just not necessarily the type of classic movie you may be thinking of.

"Ah-ha!" Some old internet troll who hates millennials is probably thinking right now. "You've just proven the point of the Post article! The Post is right! Blasted young people are disemboweling classic movies!"

I don't know about that. And even if they are, I'm not convinced I want to totally throw them under the bus for it, either. But the other issue the Post article fails to take into account is a key one: availability.

40 years ago, you had independent TV stations. These stations would have an eight o'clock movie, a Late Movie, Saturday afternoon horror double features of Universal and Hammer horror movies followed by a Tarzan movie, Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto late night Saturday night, and comedies with the likes of Abbott and Costello, Blondie, The Bowery Boys, The Marx Brothers, Martin and Lewis and Laurel and Hardy. The Eight O'Clock movie and the Late movie were made up frequently of movies from the 30s through to the 60s. You would have an Alfred Hitchcock week or a Humphrey Bogart week or an Universal Monsters week on these stations. None of which happens anymore. There are few if any independent stations left. Those that are left are showing none of the above.

"Yeah," the same cranky old fart troll is saying, "but all that stuff is on DVD!"

Okay. So tell me where you can rent the DVDs of all this stuff. Oh, wait, that's right. You can't. Not really. Once upon  a time there were video rental stores that you could walk into and find this stuff on the shelf. 30 years ago, I could walk into Movies Unlimited and browse the shelves and find a Republic serial or a Hitchcock movie. Those type of stores don't exist anymore. Netflix is pushing streaming over disc and their streaming service mostly consists of their own product. You can't stream Burt Reynolds let alone The Bowery Boys on Netflix. Yeah, you can buy DVDs, but most of the time not in stores. Take a run over to your local Best Buy if you don't believe me. If the movie is more than a couple years old and not a mega blockbuster, you won't find it on the shelf. Seriously. You can't buy Mamma Mia--a movie less than 10 years old--in the store at Best Buy. So how is a young person going to find Charlie Chan? So that leaves ordering the discs through something like Amazon, which means you have to know exactly what you're looking for.

You can't really fault millennials for not watching what they aren't exposed to. The same thing holds up for TV and radio. 30 years ago, stations would show M*A*S*H and All in the Family at 7:00. Nowadays they show 2 Broke Girls or Seinfeld or The King of Queens. There used to be an AM station in Philadelphia that played Big Band music and OTR shows. That station is a Talk Radio station now. In 1987, the oldies station played Billy Haley and the Comets and Lesley Gore. Now they play Huey Lewis and the News and Belinda Carlisle. You can't shake your fist at some 20 year old for not listening to Shake, Rattle, and Roll when the stations won't play it anymore. You can't yell at a 20 something for not listening to Guy Lombardo when the station that played Guy Lombardo replaced him with Rush Limbaugh. And you can't look down on that same 20 year old for not watching Rear Window when Rear Window isn't as accessible as it used to be.

"Yeah, but there's things like the TCM Fathom events! I bet you millennials don't go to that!"

Okay, tell me this. Look at this year's list of TCM Fathom events and tell me how many movies of the 1930s and 40s are on it? Let me answer that for you: one. Casablanca. That's it. Everything else is 1950 on, with quite a few from the 70s and 80s.

This isn't the fault of millennials. If it's anyone's fault, it's the fault of the people doing the programming and running the stores. That's an older folks problem, not a 20 year old's problem. Which, by extension, means that it's not just millennials turning their nose up at older movies. It's people in their 30s, 40s, and 50s. I was in Best Buy when Sony released the 1943 Batman serial on DVD about 10 years ago. A guy in his 40s walked up, picked up the box, saw the year of the serial, made a disgusted remark about said year, and put the box back down. And that's Batman we're talking about. Imagine if Sony had released a serial like The Secret Code instead.

Of course, you also have the older folk who feel the need to apologize for old movies. Leonard Maltin did an introduction on the DVD of The High and The Mighty that was absurd in the extreme. He felt the need to explain that it wasn't like a modern movie and moved at a slower pace. Umm, Leonard: the people who are going to watch The High and The Mighty are already aware of that. You don't need to explain it as if you're apologizing for the movie not being like The Fast and The Furious.

So yes, if you want to blame the "slow death of movies from the golden age"--assuming there is such a thing going on--on anyone, blame it on the older folks. If you don't expose the young folks to that stuff, then yes, they aren't going to see it. Truth to tell, my parents didn't necessarily expose me to the old movies I watched. They happened to be on TV, so that's what I saw. If I was 10 now instead of 1980, I probably wouldn't have seen all those old movies because they wouldn't be on.

On the flip side, think of it this way. If the trend continues, in 40 years there will be 20 year olds who haven't watched Star Wars and cranky old people writing articles wondering what was wrong with them. Now that's something to think about.