Yes, it’s 3:30am but I HAD to post this. Can’t believe I missed it. I now know what I’ll be doing for about the next 15 years. Siskel and Ebert, at one time, were THE reviewers that everyone paid attention to. The whole “thumbs up, thumbs down” thing became stuff of legend and is on countless movie posters and video boxes.
Everyone thought they were crazy back in the day for saving miles of footage of their TV show well before the home video age. Well not anymore. Now it is all online and archived for all to see. And the best part? It is completely free. Just head over to atthemoviestv.com to catch all their reviews from the early days and even including all the newer episodes with Richard Roeper (a critic I agree with quite often).
You can search the database by title, director or actor. It’s bloody amazing. Hours of fun right online and totally free. This just went online today, so have fun. So much for the Top 100 movies I was going to catch up on, now I have over 20 years of Siskel and Ebert to catch up on.
Unfortunately, it looks like most of the tapes pre-1985 were lost or destroyed to save space. but Buena Vista preserved everything from 1985 on. On the site, there’s a special introduction from Rober Ebert which explains the details…
“Gene and I knew those old shows would be worth saving, but for a long time nobody agreed with us. In the years before home video, it seemed like a waste of expensive video tape to preserve hundreds of episodes of our earlier incarnations on “Opening Soon at a Theater Near You,” “Sneak Previews” or “At the Movies.” After all, the movies we were reviewing weren’t going to be opening again, and who’d want to watch a show of old movie reviews? Right?” asks Ebert. “all of that changed, and the current era of DVDs and Blockbuster and Netflix and streaming online content began to unfold. Today, there would be an audience for the original Siskel & Ebert reviews of, say, “Batman” or “Jurassic Park,” or Ebert & Roeper trading opinions on “Crash” or “Brokeback Mountain,” or Martin Scorsese and I picking the best film of he 1990s.”
A big thanks to /film for pointing this out! Now, I gotta go watch their review of Back to the Future Part II
Shame about the pre-1985 stuff lost. That would be the shows I’d be most interested, the older the show, the better!
Still, I’ll likely browse the nice search engine and pick up on movies that interest me to see what the two thought of those films upon the time of their release.
Errr. Richard Roeper bugs me. A. Lot. Just doesn’t seem to really ‘watch’ a movie. that is just the vibe I get when listening/watching him talk about movies.