Remembering the Eighties Blockbuster

Via a recent Slate Culturefest episode, I learned about L Magazine’s five-part series of video essays on the evolution of the modern blockbuster. They’re a terrific middle-brow exploration of the blockbuster movies and related pop-culture of two years: 1984 and 1989. Here’s the first in the series:

http://blip.tv/play/AYGavRAC

I was ten years old in 1984, and I’m surprised how many of the movies I recognize from that year. I saw some of them in the cinema, certainly, but I must have watched a lot more on video. I wonder, did we have our Betamax VCR by then, or were we still, hilariously, renting one from the video store?

Having clumsily experimented with it myself recently, I’m quite fond of this essay-as-narrated-video treatment. When writing about the medium of moving pictures, it feels like the right format.