The One Still Good Thing About The Internet...

Some stuff you could never look up no matter how hard you searched.

Despite the blatantly fake news, glut of “I think” videos and blogs and enough deliberate misinformation to make the old libraries at Alexander overflow…you can still find most things if you know how to search. It may not be exactly how he envisioned it, but HG Welles “electronic library” did finally come to pass.

I had a fleeting memory from back when I was 10 years old and watching a film with my father. He had is practice in local mall and that featured a world class pizzeria and a theater that boasted $1 films, which usually amounted to war films from the 60s and 70s so we spent a lot of evenings grabbing a pizza and taking in a movie.

The memory in question was less than a minute of film, an unknown actor (to me) discovered old dynamite and ran his fingers over the sweating sticks, walked outside the storage shack and dripped the liquid onto rock and it exploded on contact. He then explained dynamite sweated nitro glycerine.

So that led to multiple searches trying to substitute key words until I arrived at something that sounded like the film in question. A 1977 film directed by Friedkin (which would have been interesting to my father as he also directed The Exorcist) about a group of men trying to transport unstable dynamite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorcerer_(film)

To be sure I rented it on Netflix and sure enough, same film. And I just popped over to EB and snagged a Blu Ray copy of the same.

If my father tried to find an obscure film from his childhood back in 1977 I don’t think it could have been done.

It is very odd to me you posting this…I too have just yesterday tried to look up a scene I saw once, as a kid in early seventies. The show itself was from then or late 60’s. Ive tried several times in the past- no luck. Why I want to find this I dont know, but I do.
The scene is a cattle stockyard, iirc. Lots old sots, hobos & railroad bums hanging around for some reason. This guy gets mad at his good lookin chick…and he gives her over to all them. I remember them all closing in on her…leering. Next scene I remember, she is sprawled out next to a plank fence in the stockyard…having been raped multiple times. She looks at the guy who found her and says “He told them they could have me…for a nickle”. Then opens her hand and a bunch of nickles fall out. I remember that bothering me & I was a wee lad at the time.
Back in the day, something aired and that was IT. Only info you could find would be in a TV Guide or something like that. I dont know how you coulda found out anything much then.
Glad you finally found yours…little mess like that gnaws at you sometimes.

Almost sounds like Boxcar Bertha.

The good and the bad on Reddit is amazing.

The hardest part is telling them apart…

Nm…

Absolutely. I look up trivial shit all the time. I have to say that as much as some of us bitch about the internet it can be handy.

I’ve found songs from my high school days that I could only remember a line or two of.

Michael Stanley Band “He Can’t Love You” is one I specifically recall.

Anyone else ever try to think back before we had the internet to look stuff up on? Shotgun News was the shiznit for gun-related stuff.

If you didn’t have a reference book with the info you needed, you were screwed. One reason I started buying books buy Ed Ezell as soon as a I realized they existed. In the days before Collector Grade Publications Ezell was pretty much the final word on anything small arms, unlike guys like Duncan Long who were publishing complete nonsense about every platform under the sun. HK Assault Rifle Systems is still the standard bar for more errors per page.

Thanks Steyr…so I watched that flick. VERY close to what I remember in terms of style and era…but that wasnt it.
But WOW…wasnt Barbara Hershey a doll!

Yep, speaking from experience in the mid 1990’s what you described was hours of trips to multiple rental places trying to find something obscure.

I’m just surprised to learn Netflix still has their DVD rental program and that people still use it.

I do. It’s my sole television source.

As for the original topic, I’m kinda shocked. I didn’t know the Internet could do so much. I thought it only did M4C and Porn. I guess I might have to try more … hmm, nah.

Doesn’t cost much and 70% of their titles are not available on streaming.

FOUND IT.
Cant believe I finally found this film after all these years. PRIME CUT…1972.
Lee Marvin, Gene Hackman & Sissy Spacek…was a MAJOR hotty then. Ive watched several clips now on YT…still looks like a great flick.
Actually found a clip with the line I remembered.

See, told you this crap actually works.

Yep! Kept thinking Lee Marvin, once I had him it was easy.

And with these “fragments” we can more accurately date our childhood memories.

Isn’t that the truth! After wading through all the sewage, you can still post up an obscure question about an obscure topic from many moons ago, and some internet autist will be on standby to give you the full history on it, often with a handy link to click (just don’t click it on your work computer!)

Remember Kurt Russell playing Charles Whitman in “The Deadly Tower”? It was a made-for-TV movie from like '74 or '75. I watched it with my grandfather.

Here’s one that bugged me for a while and I’ve been unsuccessful with:

Spy meets guy in bar, talks about knife, shows to another person who hands it back, later reviled to have put a tracker or audio bug into it. I think the protagonist had a MP5K at some point, tried to use IMFD to find off of this but couldn’t.
Al

THAT was Kurt Russell?! Havent seen that in decades, but I didnt remember it being him.