At 28, I'm not really old yet, but I increasingly remember movies and series I watched 20 years ago (yes, I sound really old 😀 ). In this post I want to talk about the fact that media creators need to change something when it comes to licensing if we want to keep calling movies and series cultural goods.
Every now and then I want to watch old movies and thanks to streaming services it should be no problem to find movies, right? Or so you think!
More and more often I catch myself looking for old movies or documentaries and I don't find them anymore or even the first time. Reason, these are not so popular and I find that a pity.
Again and again anime appear, which are from the 90s and have interesting stories, but streaming? You can't find them on legal services, and in the shallows of the Internet, the selection gets smaller with every year you dive deeper. In a recent search or after researching 3 anime from the earlier 90s, you could find description texts, but no stream, partly short intros on YouTube, not to mention German translation.
And I think that's a shame, but not only anime are affected, from my childhood I can remember 2 series where I know of one that came from France and was translated into German. Skyland was the name of this series, that was 17 years ago and you can't find anything more about it. The difference to the conventional cartoons, was the then interesting 3D CGI application, so that it did not seem plastic, but was good. You can't find anything more in German except an entry at Nickelodeon, that they used to run this series, I even think I left a comment there where an eternity (only in the WebArchive). In the depths one finds to it only 480p recordings in English, a DVD in German I would buy, but there is not (more).
However, the WebArchive provides at least Skyland available in English, free of charge.
The other cartoon series is a story where a princess has to travel back in time to protect herself from an artificial intelligence to prevent its development, because the AI killed her father. And now with a friend fought against robots.
The story is not sooo great, but worth remembering. I could not find this cartoon series anymore. And also ChatGPT could not find it in its own database.
Another example is a film, with the German Actor Udo KierI always like his roles and that he even does the dubbing in German for international films. The film is about a climate scientist who realizes that the sun is cooling and so within weeks a cold wave overtakes the world, he must then make his way to a boat with other survivors. What the others only find out at the end, they are looking for a submarine, which appears at the end.
Halfway interesting movie, unfortunately with bad reviews, also more than 20 years old and due to the many B, C and Trash Movies, which also turn out to be Ice cream unfortunately, you won't find this film anywhere, at least not in German-speaking countries, where you can stream it. On Youtube you can watch ice from 1998 in english for free, 1 year ago this was uploaded there.
Another example is also German films, one example is "the hamburger disease"a film about an epidemic in Germany in the 80s. As a stream you can not find it even in the depths of the Internet, only trailers on YouTube. Buy, as far as I know, also no longer. But again, I then found it by chance via WebArchive, where the whole film was uploaded in good quality 2020. Here you can The Hamburg disease watch in German.
Or also "Plague - The Return" a German 3-part series from 2002, where the plague pathogen broke out of the laboratory in Germany. Can no longer be found, except for the soundtrack.
And these are just a few examples of old films or series, which I know and are aware of, but you can watch from time to time. Especially with the German films, where one always speaks of cultural assets in Germany, it is a scandal not to be able to get old works.
I'm glad to be able to watch Czech movies in my native language Czech again. Instead of relying on licenses and taking films or series offline, you can find hundreds of old Czech films on YouTube, films that are more than 40 years old, some of which belong to Czech classic works, where they are even today known to many and you can watch for free on YouTube. Movies that you can laugh at even after 40 years.
One of these Czech classics is "Byl jednou any polda (1995)"(Once upon a time there was a cop), which made it to 2 sequels and entertained well, also through these old movies you could see how prices have evolved, so a bottle of whiskey of the Czech brand "Gold Cock" in 1995, 300 CZK (After the 1995 exchange rate that would be about 9€), today a similar one costs Gold Cock bottle 689 CZKwhich according to the conversion rate is about 29€.
But also other great movies and series are on YouTube in Czech. No copyright infringement is claimed there, well, many actors of the films have already passed away, sad, but still these have left wonderful moments for eternity.
And today? How will the world remember or look at the works and humorous expressions in the future if we do not preserve them and make them permanently available to the public?
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[...] have the year 2024, already today it is difficult to get old movies and series from before 2000, for the living who have actively experienced these 24 years, it feels to me like a [...]