This will sound corny … but vintage films are such an important part of American heritage. Mr. works with a guy who never heard of Jimmy Cagney, and lots of people never heard of Laurel & Hardy. That's incredible to me.
As a kid, I remember poring over the TV Guide every week looking for L&H and other favorites. I loved the local UHF stations that ran lots of "oldies"---Abbott & Costello, the Marx Brothers, Blondie and Dagwood (remember "BLON-DEEEE!!" and Daisy and her puppies?), Our Gang, the East Side Kids, the Bowery Boys, even Joe E. Brown. By the time I was 12 I was reading books about them all. I still have those books. I remember reading about comedy teams that I thought I'd never see, like Wheeler & Woolsey, because our local stations didn't run their films. Now we own them on DVD! It's wonderful how digital video has made digital restoration of rarities possible, and merchants like Warner Archive make them available to us vintage film geeks. A couple decades ago we never dreamed of owning videos of rare old Vitaphone shorts, but today we can. I remember when, if you wanted videos of Buster Keaton, you had to settle for horrible-looking copies on VHS. Now I can watch the best available prints digitally restored on Blu-ray. It's like owning the candy store!!
(Sorry for the soliliquy! It's part of what makes me tick.)
