You know those movies that are kind of a fever dream from your childhood? The ones you watched over and over again but somehow nobody else remembers or hasn't even knew it existed at all?
Picture this: it’s the early 2000s. Your dad comes home from work with a random DVD he grabbed from a discount bin at the supermarket for like, 5 bucks. You pop it in, and instantly it becomes one of your favorites movies, you watch it 20, 30, 40 times through your whole childhood, then, poof, it slowly fades from your memory as DVDs go out of style and you grow up go to college and move out.
Years later, you’re scrolling through YouTube, and suddenly a trailer for that same movie pops up in your recommendations, and all those memories your ADHD brain somehow made you forget come rushing back.
For me, that happened today with two movies: Secondhand Lions (2003) and Little Nicky (2000). Has that ever happened to you?
We’re Back A Dinosaur Story
I used to have the SNES game 😂
Omg this was one of my favs as a kid! Pretty sure I watched it 100 times or more
I adore We're Back. I can still hear miss Joy Of Cooking herself saying "Welcome, welcome," and have spent years trying to quote it with the exact right intonation.
Roll back the clock to the dawn of time..!
AND SING THIS SONG WITH MEEEEEEE
I had this on DVD!
Cloak and Dagger w Dabny Colman and Henry Thomas.
Loved this movie as a kid. It was all I thought about when I finally visited the riverwalk in San Antonio.
Did a nice older couple sit near you on the boat tour? Was the lady missing a finger?
That movie’s hardcore, Dabney Coleman’s character encourages the kid to shoot a guy!
On repeat on HBO or Cinemax or whatever the hell it was. My folks had an old school redneck 14 foot satellite dish whenI was a kid and I’d watch it on the east coast feed, then go outside and hand crank that thing to catch the satellite that had the west coast feed and watch it again.
The explorers
This is what I immediately thought of. I was fascinated and it got me dinking around with computers at a young age. I watched that movie so much, along with beast master and Neverending story
*Explorers
The Thunder Road
The Ice Pirates
The ship has herpes
Space herpes!
I had a long (8+ hr) drive the other day and listened to Bruce Vilanch’s new book It was a Bad Idea at the Time in full. All about his worst projects. He has a chapter about this movie, highly recommend the book (on Libby if you’re in the US and have a library card)
The Pebble and the Penguin. My childhood favorite movie
I have quite the fear of leopard seals thanks to this movie. …not that that should ever apply to me in my landlocked, non-arctic living situation 😂
Little Nemo: Adventures in slumberland
This movie gave me nightmares.
There was a fun NES game too based on the stories
That NES game is my video game equivalent for this thread. Played the shit out of it in kindergarten/1st grade. My dad would have to get me past levels that were too hard for me. The music is also amazing.
Loved this movie as s kid. Still have the VHS somewhere at my parents'.
I remember this film being oddly terrifying to me as a child.
The Last Starfighter. Eighties CGI, but it looked incredible at the time.
This movie was AMAZING back in its day. ALPHA CENTAURI!!! Plus most people who have seen it don’t realize the old man from Robocop was his partner Grig!!!
i think about this movie all the time.
This movie has a real interesting backstory where a couple of guys approached lucasfilm to use their new CGI tech to replace the practical models that George Lucas was using for the Star Wars trilogy. Lucas knocked them back, so they made their own movie using this new tech and Last Starfighter was born. Very simplified version, if you want the full rundown, google is your friend.
That was a massive hit, we all saw that.
Batteries Not Included
Love that movie.
Growing up, my local cinema held a donation/fundraiser using this movie when it was released. It cost me a can of baked beans to see it.
I loved this movie then I rewatched it like 10 years ago. It’s about gentrification and class warfare. Also adorable beep-boop robots
When Nope came out and someone I knew said the ship being the alien was the most original idea in sci fi in 50 years, I was like, “have you not seen Batteries Not Included?!” And apparently no one had.
I had this one on Betamax and damn near wore it out. I loved it.
I remember almost nothing about this movie, but I know I watched it a dozen times. I’m going to look it up now.
VHS not DVD, but The Secret of NIHM. I absolutely loved it and rewatched it endlessly and then watched it as an adult and holy sh*t is it dark!
The book was even more fucked up, it was so descriptive. Mrs Frisby and the Rats of Nimh, they changed the name for the movie, still an awesome movie
I swear I watched Ewoks a bunch when I was little.
The Caravan of Courage for me.
The Peanut Butter Solution
If you are Canadian, it just got added to Crave
The How Did This Get Made? podcast did an episode on this movie. Jon Lajoie told them about it, I believe.
Wow so surprised I didn't have to comment this. I watched this movie a few times and it gave me the worst feelings.
Was this an exclusively Canadian thing?
ETA: I’m Canadian and I remember trying and failing NOT to watch this movie once a month.
I saw it in the 80s as a kid in Missouri. I think it was on HBO, but it could have been Nickelodeon (they had a lot of Canadian content in the 80s).
Not much. My favorite was Escape From Witch Mountain (1975), and probably a whole generation of young kids (especially if they had a sibling) were influenced by it. And the other was THX 1138 (1970), which obviously people know about. But in the 70s the BBC was producing Shakespearean plays for distribution (eventually) to the States on PBS. (Anthony Hopkins as Othello was one I remember.) They were not flashy, but they were accurate. Probably the same level of quality and production value as I, Claudius and Upstairs, Downstairs. My dad let me stay up late on Wednesdays with him to watch them.
OMG I loved that movie. There was sequel too “Return to Witch Mountain”. Not as good, but same cast.
Tony & Tia!
I adore Escape to Witch Mountain! It was filmed at my elementary school and I got to see some of the props they kept 30+ years later
The Pagemaster(1994) I swear I watched it a hundred times and for years it felt like a movie I hallucinated until the internet confirmed it was real
The one thing I always remember about Pagemaster was how short it was. Even as a kid, it felt short.
I just remembered that the power rangers movie had a whole trailer before it started.
Loved the Pagemaster. I remember everyone in my family hating it.
I just came here to say The Pagemaster as well. It's currently free on Prime, and I showed it to my partner who'd never heard of or seen it before.
Do you remember the videogame?
YES. That just unlocked a whole other memory. I barely remember how it played, just that it existed and felt weirdly hard
Fievel Goes West
Give ‘em the LAAAAAAZY EYE!
I think I saw the first one once but I watched Fievel Goes West hundreds of times
That makes sense. The first one is the better movie by a mile, but the second one has that sort of Saturday morning cartoon feel to it that made it more kid focused.
The first one got "lost" from my house because we watched it so much. I think the same thing happened to Fievel Goes West eventually. We got that VHS from Burger King, I think. Maybe Pizza Hut. 1992?
This a thousand times.
And, of course and An American Tail.
I LOVEEEEEE this movie! I watched this and the original SO many times as a kid. I still think about it, especially when I see tumbleweeds.
not a movie, but the 1998 Merlin miniseries with Sam Neill. i loved the soundtrack, and how melancholy it was. i don't even remember how i saw it, must have been a vhs recording off the tv
I used to rent it from the library alot. It was on two VHS tapes. What a magical memory. Oh, and it had a great cast, including Helena Bonham Carter, Martin Short, Lena Headey, and Rutger Hauer.
Same! When I was a kid we'd drive 20 hours down to Gulf Shores for spring break, and my parents would strap a small TV with a built in VHS player between the front seats of the minivan, so my sister and I could watch movies. One year I must've watched that Merlin miniseries two dozen times. Oddly, nowadays I barely remember it at all. All I remember is Isabella Roselinni playing the Lady of the Lake.
I might be cheating since it was made for TV, but my answer is “the Paper Brigade.”
Good one. The kid from House Arrest
That gorilla alarm clock sound still pops in my head every now and then
Gonna go take a Gunther!
Heidi but this was way before DVDs were invented. It was shown on network TV a couple times a year
Enemy mine
Everyone who had HBO in the 80’s has seen that
Yea that one had a huge influence on science fiction.
Daaaaallllllwiiich
Rocketman with Harland Williams. I watched it enough to wear out the VHS, and still find it hilarious to this day.
He's got the whole world in his hands
Drop Dead Fred
Team Fred.
With Phoebe Kates AND Carrie Fisher! Such a perfect
80s90s movie.It’s a 90s movie though. Either way it’s a banger!
No panties!!
Or my favorite, “you look like a big bruise!”
"Goodbye forever! I hope you die horribly!" is a movie quote I use often, and no one ever gets it lol
That movie made me laugh like nothing else when I was a kid.
Young Snot Face looked exactly like me at that age too -- like, it's fucking uncanny. So I subconsciously related to her a lot I think.
This is what I came here to say! RIP Rik!
My creative writing professor wouldn't stop talking about how her friend wrote that movie.
My wife got me into this, pure chaos but I was tearing up at the ending scene.
Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins
Krull.
Maybe not "countless", but I didn't count them.
Flight of the Navigator. I think it's on Disney plus now though
I mentioned The Pagemaster in another reply, but I also want to mention Small Soldiers. No one I grew up with watched that movie for some reason. I was obsessed.
Pippi Longstocking
The film??? I loved the scrubbing day song
I watched Legend as a kid on TV once and never knew the name of it but always remembered the horned devil looking bad guy. Years later as an adult I saw it somewhere and was so excited
You know that that horned, devil character was played by Tim Curry, right? I just watched that movie the other day, and I was most confused by the fact that no one thought to buy Tom Cruise any pants.
Best. Devil. EVER.
And scariest fuckin swamp witch of all time. 🤬
A Troll in Central Park.
Rented it all the time. Nobody I have talked to remembers it. Troll has a green thumb that grows plants and the evil witch has a purple thumb that turns people to stone is all I really remember
The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
One of my favorites! I can confirm that almost no one has heard of this.
Indian in the Cupboard! Kinda want to watch it now
OP, thank you so much for posting this! My Friendsgiving crew all agreed this year that we'd get together once a month to watch a movie, and each time would be someone's turn to pick. The theme is, obscure movies from your childhood that you loved and no one you talk to has ever heard of them. I had some ideas, but I know that by the time it's my turn the chances of them all being done already is pretty high.
ETA: to contribute to the thread, here are some I haven't seen mentioned yet:
Willow
Simon Birch
Shipwrecked
Thumbelina
Willow!
The Hidden
Spacehunter - Adventures in the Forbidden Zone
Innerspace
Firestarter
Time Bandits
Time Bandits
Was a banger! Thank you for the reminder. Short guys got so much more love back then. Seems like we’ve only got one since with Dinklage.
Lol I came to say Time Bandits. Absolutely adore that movie. Feels like it deserves a higher spot in the 80s canon.
Damn I loooooved innerspace!
+1 for Time Bandits
I haven't thought about Innerspace in decades
So many dumb comedies that no one talks about anymore. Bushwhacked and Celtic Pride, both with Daniel Stern. Blankman, In the Army Now.
We fucking loved Sgt. Bilko and My Fellow Americans too but those have a higher pedigree.
It’s been a minute since I’ve heard someone mention Celtic Pride.
I didn’t watch this very much, but just enough to have vague, surreal memories of it. The Witches, 1990. Based on a Roald Dahl book.
Apparently the last movie Jim Henson worked on before his death. I remember the costumes creeped me out. Now I want to watch it again, I barely remember anything else about it.
That movie terrified me to the point of turning it off. I also remember the girl in the painting moving around which seems like a cool concept but I don’t think it went anywhere.
She grows old in the painting and eventually disappears! Dark!
Quest for Camelot & The Swan Princess. Oh and lots of Land Before Time… but I feel like way more people know those movies.
We’re Back! I swear no one I know has even heard of it which blows me away bc I loved it as a kid
When dude is swarmed by ravens and all that's left is his screw eye rolling in a circle. That was awesome.
80's kid here, so Bedknobs and Broomsticks was the one I watched probably the most.
Also watched The Incredible Mr. Limpet a number of times, and was disturbed on some level each time. Just a weird movie...
The Last Unicorn
The tree with boobs still creeps me out
What about the giant demon bird with three boobs
When the last eagle fliiiiies🎶
The Red Bull was terrifying to little me.
I mean it's still terrifying to me but it was terrifying to little me as well.
We have all heard of Little Nicky.
I didn’t think Secondhand Lions was all that obscure either, how young is OP?
Unleash the awesome. Popeyes Chicken is the shiznit! But for real, Little Nicky is a late-prime Adam Sandler B-grade campy gold nugget. It also has a huge mess of premium cameos (outside of his regulars) including Rodney Dangerfield, Harvey Keitel, Reese Witherspoon, Dan Marino….
I forgot to mention the actual prince of darkness, Ozzy.
Even Quentin Tarantino has a role in Little Nicky as the mad priest.
The Adventures of Ford Fairlane
The Pagemaster for sure
Rock A Doodle
Cool World
I'm sensing a theme here lol. That wasn't my intention when I started writing these out. I guess I was really into live action cartoon mixes
Also The Secret Garden. I think I've just have seen that movie a thousand times when I was little
Rock A Doodle! My girls loved that movie! Chanticleer🥲
Rock A Doodle had live action elements?? I don't remember that at all.
Yeah, the main character was a real live-action kid who was turned into a kitten by the owls
Scamper the Penguin
Rockadoodle
The Secret of NIMH
Quest for Camelot
Yesssss- Quest for Camelot. Literally made my parents name my little sister Kayley after the main character. I laid face down on the hospital floor throwing a tempter tantrum until they acquiesced- that’s how obsessed I was with that movie… 🤣🤭
The secret of nimh!!!! My dad had just died, my mom was always on a mission for us kids. There were three of us. It had something like tragedy +fear +vulnerability that mirrored my life and made it feel like I was escaping into magic.
Totally forgot about Scamper!!! Learned what an aqueduct pipe was from Rockadoodle...I always got secret of nimh and ferngully mixed up... but missed out on quest for Camelot somehow
Edit -- or maybe it was Once Upon a Forest...just remember being scared with a bunch of foresting equipment were chopping down trees and they had up escape
On here it’s definitely heard of but growing up, no one heard of it The Wraith (1986). Probably seen it over 500 times on VHS. I love the Dodge Turbo Interceptor
Legend (1985). It’s a fantasy movie with a super young Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, and Tim Curry as a big red demon. The original soundtrack by Tangerine Dream is an amazing synth heavy 80’s sound track that gives the whole film a really unique vibe. I watched it probably 50 times as a kid.
D.A.R.Y.L. dude I thought I was a robot. And nobody seems to remember this one.
UHF. Weird Al's movie was a masterpiece, but it had misfortune of being overshadowed upon release by Batman, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Star Trek V.
The black cauldron
The Monster Squad. Absolute 80's beast of a movie.
Wolfman's got nards!
PCU - with Jeremy piven
The Adventures of Milo and Otis
“Milo, don’t walk on the chickens!”
I loved that movie as a kid and was horrified to learn of the animal abuse that occurred during filming.
Time Bandits (1981)
Animated version of the Hobbit. Those were good Saturdays.
Felix the Cat: The Movie (1988) Fucking fever dream. The Duke of Zill frightened me as a 5 year old. The songs are still stuck in my head as a 39 year old. "Who is the boss? The Duke of Zill, of course!"
Secret of My Success. I just knew it was the road map to be a successful businessman.
Iron Eagle. Wore that VHS out
Eddie and the Cruisers
I don't know if this counts, but the animated Rankin/Bass "The Hobbit" from 1977 was one of the favorite movies in my household when I was a kid, watched on VHS dozens of times. I still love the music and overall haunting vibe of that film, so much so that I never cared to watch the Peter Jackson versions.
DOWN DOWN TO GOBLIN TOWN
Monster Squad
Solar Babies
Thunder Run
The Wraith
You gotta listen to the How Did This Get Made episode about solar babies
baby secret of the lost legend
The Last Dragon - OFFICIAL TRAILER
Runaway with Tim Selleck and Gene Simmons
Nightbreed. Clive Barker x David Cronenberg = chefs kiss
It’s probably too late for anyone to see these but
Flight of the navigator
&
A kid in king Arthur’s court/Aladdin’s palace
HBO in the 80s was awesome.
Superfuzz
Strange Brew
The Incredible Shrinking Woman
It Came From Hollywood
Jack and the Beanstalk (Animated, 1974)
Top Secret!
The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai: Across the 8th Dimension
Cannonball Run
And Emmett Otter's Jugband Christmas every year, multiple times. I still watch it every year.
Slappy and the Stinkers
Box office gross of $80k. Plot was Free Willy with a sea lion but with dollar tree Little Rascals doing the freeing.
Titan A.E.
1995 Powder. The albino boy who has telepathy and paranormal powers. Can control lightning and magnetism. He can also cure the sick.
Maybe very few people heard and watched this awesome movie.
I remember the tv trailers for this and Michael with John Travolta vividly, but I never actually saw either of them.
Wasn’t that directed by that Victor Salva pervert?
Princess and the Goblin.
The Brave Little Toaster
“Mac and Me”. It was very popular when I was a kid, but now it’s like it never existed.
Harvey, starring Jimmy Stewart who befriends an imaginary 6 foot tall talking rabbit only he can see
The Boy Who Could Fly, only because is was on TV every weekend, yet no one seems to remember it.
once upon a forest
The Elm Chanted Forest
The Thief and the Cobbler
Meatballs
The Electric Grandmother
Return To Oz
Pippi longstocking.
The Quest.
I dont even remember it myself, something about an underwater crane and a railroad. It had the kid from ET. It was probably awful but it was one of the first VHS tapes we owned in the late 80s.
The Guyver
One of my mine and my little brothers favourite movies.
Although I found out two decades later that it was actually the sequel that we were watching. Never even knew there were two movies.
Saturday the 14th
Starman. I can recite every line of that script.
Warriors of Virtue (1997). A live action fantasy-adventure with Kangaroo warriors who represent different elements.
For the longest time it was Clue, but nowadays I think everyone knows about it.
Secondhand Lions is a great movie!! Never saw Little Nicky, but definitely remember it.
Youngblood, hockey movie with a young Rob Lowe, Patrick Swayze, and Keanu Reeves.
Snow White Tale of Terror with Sigourney Weaver. Awesome 90s B movie.
Yellowbeard
I was shocked that every family didn’t regurlarly watched Bedknobs and Broomsticks
The flight of dragons
Thumbelina
Poison Ivy - Michael J Fox is a camp councillor for a bunch of crazy kids.. Very 1980s...
White Water Summer - Sean Astin and friends go on a white water rafting trip guided by Kevin Bacon to learn to grow and be self sufficient men...
Once Bitten - Jim Carrey in an extremely 80s movie about a woman vampire who bites her victims on the inside of their thigh but they have to be Virgins
Space Camp - a bunch of kids go to space camp and are accident sent to space
Manhattan Project - super smart high school kid steals some plutonium and builds a nuclear bomb for a science fair
DARYL - A robot built to look like a kid is stolen and ends up living with a family who took he's just kinda odd. Eventually is captured but steals an sr71 to go back home
Three Fugitives (1989)
I was 9 back then, and that movie made me laugh a lot.
None of my friends ever heard of it.
Meatballs
I really thought it would gain some popularity someday, but it hasn't seemed to. It's Bill Murray's first movie role and just a really fun summer camp movie, but it seems like no one has ever heard of it. There were 3 or 4 terrrrrrrible sequels, and I think maybe they've had some influence on people to think the first one is that bad, but the first one is pretty different than the rest.
I used to have the entire 3 seasons of that show “Millennium” that I used to watch all the time and no one knows what I’m talking about when I mention it
Night of the Comet
Clockstoppers (2002). I loved this movie as a kid. Anyone else remember this one?
Cat’s Don’t Dance. A 90s Warner Bros. feature cartoon that kinda got treated weird by the studio because it was animated. Still, the people behind it were all talented and passionate about movies and put out a good little picture. It’s an original musical about a song-and-dance cat who goes to California with a dream of being in the movies. As a kid I enjoyed the Hollywood backlot setting and style. There’s enough cinephile jokes to keep me entertained now as an adult, and it’s one of the last projects Gene Kelly worked on, a guy who certainly had style to spare.