Tam has mentioned that Netflix has a new movie based on All Quiet on the Western Front. She also mentioned the 1979 TV movie of the novel.
I plan on watching the 1979 move, as I was kind of busy back then and never knew that it had been made, much less aired. But that's not what I want to talk about.
It's been said that, with all of the streaming/cable choices, that we're in the Golden Age of Television. I disagree. Sure, there are some really good shows out there. But finding them sometimes feels like looking through a ton of chicken manure to find a one-karat diamond.
The Big Three legacy networks seem to have mostly given up the fight to produce quality movies and miniseries. The 1970s were sucky in a lot of ways, but the networks produced some notable movies and mini-series. Now, they don't even bother, concentrating on dumb-ass "reality" shows and lots of copaganda.
To be fair, they had sort of a captive audience back then. There were three commercial networks, PBS, and, in big cities, a handful of independent VHF/UHF stations that mostly aired old shows in syndication and movies that were either in the public domain or for which they could get the rights cheaply.
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The 1979 TV movie was, as I recall, pretty decent. There was a program of distributing newsprint scripts to students across the U.S. and having them watch the movie, as I recall. I remember reading along while watching the movie, I guess that was about 9th Grade English I.
There was also an earlier version made in 1930 and it was shown on TV though I can't remember when but I still have a VHS tape I made of it. As far as I know Hitler banned the book because it was not a book to glorify war but to show how horrible war can be. A quick search showed a site where you can watch the 1930 version, it's actually quite good for a movie of the era.
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