In A #ThrowbackThursday…

I should seriously consider hiring one of those “Voiceover Guys” from movie trailers to dramatically read my blog posts out loud.

There are movie trailers with over-the-top, dramatic declarations of alternative worlds, where obscure 1990s action movies are the norm, there are romantic comedies that aren’t the ones we all know and love, and the “Rated R” disclaimer didn’t beat around the bush and tell you why it was “Rated R,” but rather, it told you that you needed an adult.

And it was red.

So very red. Red like the blood of all the casualties of a ’90s action movie body count.

I loved the mid 1990s home video market. With just the right amount of money, anyone could be a direct-to-video action star, if your movie wasn’t enough substance for the big screen. And if it was, you were lucky.

And if you were an action star circa 1995, your movie was likely being released by this company:

It takes a soulless person to not get pumped over the opening chords of Mortal Kombat.

Don’t be that person.

Like this video (and quite a few of the others I own), videocassettes have many trailers. Many, many, many trailers. Movies coming soon to theaters, movies coming soon to videocassette, movies already on videocassette – the trailer portion of the tape was always the “get a snack and hurry back” or “use the bathroom, or else you’re sitting for two hours.” And really, you could escape during the movie. But will your family pause it, or leave you to flounder and not know what you missed?

Of course, if we didn’t want to watch the trailers, we had an option – hit Fast Forward until we got to the logos before the movie. Kids today have it so easy, all they have to do is hit the “Skip Ahead” button, jumping through all the trailers on a DVD or Blu-Ray. They don’t even have to buy a physical copy of a movie to enjoy it, they have digital downloads. And Amazon. It’s what put the video store industry (if you can call it that) out of business.

Enough of that, let’s actually get to the meat of the article!

I recently was watching my VHS copy of National Lampoon’s Senior Trip. It was your typical mid-1990s teenage comedy, it starred quite a few unknowns (including a young Jeremy Renner), and Tommy Chong was a pothead bus driver. And “Max Headroom” was the principal of a high school. It was a somewhat terrible film, but by my (obviously non-existent) teenage tastes, it was a funny movie when I saw it in 1996. Apparently, it had its redeeming values, because I bought a VHS copy from Suncoast Video a few years later.

Today’s Throwback Thursday digs deep into the vaults of 1996 and pulls out my VHS copy of National Lampoon’s Senior Trip, which yes, I own. I’ve owned it for years. I also haven’t seen it in years. And yes, it was pretty silly, but I laughed. I laughed harder at the trailers before the movie, because when you watch a VHS, you know you’re getting something nostalgic, and to fast forward through the trailers would just be crazy.

There are memories to be had…or not.

In this collection of trailers…