Thursday, August 15, 2013

Ripping Good Yarns: I Expect You to Stream, Mr. Bond




I saw it in a fever.

Goldfinger.  Burned permanently into my brain.Only nine years old, I saw it with my family on vacation in the Little Finger of Michigan, near Traverse City.  It was a local theater that bragged that it the world's largest indoor theater mural.  I don't remember the mural.  I do remember the film.

I was very sick at the time.  Within a couple of days I would be hospitalized with pneumonia. But at the time of seeing the film, I didn't know that.  I thought it was the movie.

Ever since, I have been a huge James Bond fan.  I don't think I've missed a film.  I even took my son Greg to one was only about a year and a half years old (I believe it was Octopussy).

Sometime in my early teens, I had a dream.  In that dream I was in a record store.  But you weren't just able to buy musical records.  You could also buy movies!  Movies that played on LPs, and could be played through your television like actual movies.  YOU COULD OWN THE BOND FILMS.  I went thorough the rack of films and picked out all the Bond movies that had come out at that time, even the first two films that I had missed seeing!  It was awesome.

Yes, I had envisioned laser discs and DVDs a couple of decades before they came out.

And now, they've come out with Bond DVD collection that contains all 22 of the Bond films (not including the most recent, Skyfall, and I believe also Never Say Never).  I got Amazon gift card for Christmas and birthday, and carefully watched the price.  When it came to down to a certain level, I was going to snatch and make my childhood dream come true!

Well, last week, the price fell to below what I was waiting for.  I snatched and put in my cart, but I didn't have time to complete the order right then.  

And that's when I saw that the Amazon Prime service, which I have, was going to make twenty of the Bond movies available for free streaming to Prime members.  So, in essence, I already had them.  But not on a treasured disc, but floating in a cloud somewhere, just waiting for me to snatch and play whenever I wanted,

Huh.

Ain't technology grand?

A few weeks ago, Alison wanted to see the movie An Affair to Remember.  None of our streaming services had it, unless you were willing to pay more money.  So I just ordered her the DVD, and when we got it, it came with a note saying that we could now also stream the movie for free on Amazon Prime. She finally got to watch it last weekend.  And can you guess how she saw it?  That's right.  She streamed it.  Why go to the trouble of opening up a DVD box, putting in the DVD player and starting all that up, when you can just punch it up from the comfort of your couch, and be watching it instantly?

Oh yes, the times they are a-changing!  Even faster than my childhood dreams!

Take that, Mr. Bond!



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