What Was The First Movie You Watched As A Family?

Monday is Movies. And sometimes TV. Today it's nostalgia. Remember that?

My parents didn’t force movies on me. But we were always allowed to watch them – I have no idea how it started.

But I’m all about the memories of movies as much as I am the actual movies. You’ll know that from reading any of these Monday morning newsletters, but most recently this one.

So I was thinking recently about the first movie we watched as a family. And I settled in on it being Beverly Hills Cop.

Well, it was the first movie we rented. There were many movie outings to the theatre and I’ll never know what our first one was, I’m told the very first film I sat through was a screening of The Sound of Music. I was just a few months old. I don’t think this counts…

It was a while before we had a VHS player.

My aunty was the early-adopter in our family. We took a Saturday afternoon drive to see the microwave she’d won in a competition. We clapped as the eggs were scrambled by invisible zapping rays. She was also the first in the extended family to have a VHS player – and the legendary Green Frog Video Store in Napier even had a separate room for Beta tapes.

Scrambled eggs and scrambled memories of many movies watched in Napier during school holidays, weekends and overnight stays – we’d sneak in what we could of the films the adults were watching, and we’d delight in watching weird and wonderful things. Some we were meant to see (The Dark Crystal) some were probably weren’t (King Frat). 

So flash forward a year or two (or three) and finally we have our own VHS player. It even has a cordless remote! 

And though I can’t remember the name of the video store that popped up in Hastings – the first of many – I can picture us all tearing through the front door early on a Saturday morning to rent a film. You had to go early or the best ones would be gone – and we watched things like Back To The Future and Trading Places and Romancing The Stone.

If we were unlucky, we’d have to sit through an Out of Africa but sometimes we got to see something a little bit naughty.

The very first film we rented was Beverly Hills Cop. I’m thinking we’d seen Trading Places over at my aunty’s place already. Anyway, mum asked the video store clerk if it was appropriate. And he told her that there was a lot of use of the f-word in the first ten minutes.

So the decision was made that we could rent it and that I’d sit outside the room while they demo-ed the first 10 minutes. Then they rewound it and watched that 10-minute opening scene again with me. Spoiler alert to this subplot: I sat down the hallway and heard every glorious swear anyway, then pretended I’d been down in my room writing a story...

I loved the film. Instantly. Eddie Murphy was hilarious. 

The soundtrack was cool – and I had the album on vinyl (still have it). Years later I’d realise there’s really nothing particularly great about the soundtrack – beyond its iconic theme. But songs like Neutron Dance and particularly The Heat Is On were big deals back then.

I’m not sure I watched the movie again until the days of DVD – by then I’d collected its sequels and I watched them all again. And the first one holds up, I reckon. But maybe it wouldn’t mean anything if you hadn’t first seen it back in the day. There’s a slowness to the formula of those 80s films that would probably just seem so cheesy and grating to a lot of first-timers. 

We’ve been watching some classic 80s films with Oscar. A few of them work. A few of them don’t. We had to turn off Police Academy. We were all bored and a tiny bit embarrassed. It was so brutally unfunny. It was basically a bad Carry On movie. And yet, they were staples of my childhood.

I’ll miss the video store. Eventually. I don’t source all my movies from there. I still get sent DVDs to review – I told someone that this week and they laughed. I stream. I’m a Netflix-er and I have Neon and then others. I have YouTube Premium too. I find things if I can’t find them elsewhere. And one of the best places to find things – when you cannot find them elsewhere – is the movie store. If you’re lucky enough to have one.

The video store was such a thing of my childhood. Me and my folks and my brother ploughing through comedies on Saturday nights in the 1980s. The  big event. After sport. Mum would make popcorn, sometimes even some hard-setting fudge. A cup of milo. Dressing gowns and slippers. The promise of staying up late. Maybe a spaghetti and cheese toastie even. 

Sometimes it was the double-header of a family movie. Then bed. Then a post-midnight wake-up to watch a test-match of rugby in the middle of the night. I’d stay awake as long as I could. And sometimes it wasn’t very long at all. 

Thinking about Beverly Hills Cop send me down the wormhole to reading about the Stallone rewrite of the original script, the years in development and that Mickey Rourke was the original guy touted for the role. After him it was Stallone, and James Caan (R.I.P.), Richard Pryor too. Even Al Pacino.

But Murphy – a star of SNL and of a couple of break-out movies and his own big stand-up comedy career – was the one to get it in the end. It sent his career through the roof. 

We had to work hard for that information back when I first watched Beverly Hills Cop. Now I won’t remember what I just wrote in the paragraph above by tomorrow. 

I’m wasting words now. I have no idea what the point of this was – beyond the fact that Beverly Hills Cop is, on some level, one of the big movies in my life; one of the most important movies of my life.

Oh yeah, can you remember the first film you sat and watched as a family? Was movie-watching a together-thing in your house? Or was it something you did on your own? What were the wholesome or not-so-wholesome favourites you shared with siblings and parents?