In my last blog I commented about the many ways I have watched Superman: The Movie over the years – theatrically, television, VHS, laserdisc, DVD, Blu-ray, streaming – but there’s one I’d like to talk about that goes way back to my youth in those pre-VCR days.

If you’re of a certain age like me, you probably grew up with an old reel-to-reel projector in your parents’ house. They would take their 8-millimeter camera and film different things and make little home movies, and if you wanted to watch them, they’d haul out the big movie projector from the attic or the closet. My parents would hang a big white sheet over the side door leading to the den of our house, plug up the movie projector, and we’d watch our little home movies. It was a huge effort for just a few minutes.

For Christmas in 1977 my parents got me an 8-millimeter home movie of Star Wars. It ran eight minutes and consisted of two sequences: Ben Kenobi telling Luke Skywalker of his days as a Jedi Knight while trying to convince him to join him in rescuing Princess Leia, and Ben’s death and the TIE fighter attack on the Millennium Falcon. It was silent and had subtitles, but I didn’t care. I watched it numerous times in my youth to the point where I could have charged admission to my friends. Ken Films made several versions of the Star Wars home movies, including silent and sound versions, and one that was a whopping 20 minutes long. There would even be one for The Empire Strikes Back.

They also did one of Superman: The Movie a couple of years later in silent and sound versions and an even larger one similar to Star Wars. There was even one released in Japan that I just found out about.

It would be a good twenty years or so before I came across the 8-millimeter reel in an eBay auction, and even though I had VHS and laserdisc players at the time and had not yet moved to DVD format, those were the days when I owned a WebTV dialup box that I plugged into the phone lines and could go online without having to use a computer. Gotta love DIY technology! I got into a bidding competition with one other fellow over that Superman 8-millimeter reel, and in the end I won. He would email me shortly afterwards and congratulate me on my victory, and we talked about it in a lighthearted and respectful manner. That led to many conversations by email, message boards, phone, texting, DMs, and Facebook that have turned into a wonderful friendship over the years.

Who was that competitor, you ask? None other than my friend Jim Bowers.

Many years afterwards, in 2010, I had to clean out my parents’ house in Clinton, Mississippi, to put up for sale to pay for my mom’s nursing home and prescription bills. One thing I did was take my 8-millimeter reels to Deville Camera in north Jackson to inquire about transferring them to DVD. The ones my parents shot were no problem. Star Wars and Superman, however, they couldn’t do because of copyright issues. I was left with no choice at the time but to throw them out.

Since then I have sought out anyone who has transferred those 8-millimeter reels to disc or uploaded them to a video file, but with no success. Even those reels would have made great little extra features on DVD, Blu-ray, or even 4K discs. But someone out there managed to get their reels filmed and uploaded to YouTube. The quality is not good, but at least they’re better than nothing.

Memories of the good old days. Gotta love them. Even in 8-millimeter.