The Olds?
Where the hell did that come from?
I’m reading an article in the Washington Post about how movie studios are adjusting their business model, planning in some cases to release movies on streaming services and in theaters at the same time. Of course, that’s for the post-COVID world, when people actually want to go to the movies instead of just watching at home.
One of the reporters says that while certain movies won’t come across well on a 13-inch TV, modern 70-inch UHD screens can pretty well handle anything. The last time I had a 13-inch TV was in 1990, so I’m sure I wouldn’t know. My best television now is a 55-inch UHD screen and my worst is a 42-inch HD. In fact, the only two TVs my wife and I actually watch are both UHD.
And we’re Olds, whatever the hell that means.
Oh, I know what it means, but in case you don’t:
I suppose calling someone an “Old” is the modern version of calling them a geezer … or an old coot.
In the article, one of the reporters says Blu-Rays and DVDs will still be around “because the Olds like buying movies with their faces on them from Walmart.”
Yep, I’m an Old (71 next Friday) and I have a mixed bag of a collection. I have more movies in the cloud or on my Kindle Fire than I do DVDs, and the primary reason I occasionally still buy DVDs is if they’re not available on streaming.
I also have six VHS tapes of movies I like from the ’70s and ’80s that never made it to DVD or streaming.
Once was the time back in the ’80s when I had a collection of movies I taped off HBO and other channels. I think I had about 600, two to a tape on Beta. I got rid of all of them and gave away my Sony Super Betamax to a friend who would use it.
He’s an Old too.
In fact, except for children and grandchildren, nearly everyone I know is an Old. Actually, a lot of the indignities that go along with becoming an Old begin long before you really are old.
When I was 37 and living in Colorado, I started receiving invitations to join AARP.
Not only wasn’t I 50, the age required to join AARP, I didn’t even have any gray hair.
It was some years later that I learned advertisers considered me an Old at a younger age than I had thought. I remember reading about the way program directors and advertisers aimed the products at certain age groups. The biggest one was age 18-54, so when I hit 55 I knew those particular groups no longer cared what I thought.
If there was a paradox to that, it was that those 55 and older — many of them early Baby Boomers — were the ones with the most disposable income. I learned that it wasn’t the income that disqualified us, it was that we were considered invulnerable to their arguments to switch away from products we had been using all our lives.
Ironically, some of those products weren’t even ones I chose. I’ve used Crest toothpaste for most of my life, mostly because it was the one my parents bought when they went shopping. I may be an Old, but the two of them are Formerly Olds.
Still, there are products I love that have come along when I was past 55. I have an iPad and a Kindle Fire, and I’ve owned every numbered iPhone starting with 5 (there was no 9), and I currently have an iPhone 12 pro max.
My first home computer in 1989 was a primitive PC and I had PCs for about 25 years until I got tired of how vulnerable to viruses. Then I did something you don’t see that often. I junked my PC and switched to iMac.
Don’t call me an Old.
In fact, don’t call me at all, and stay off my damn lawn.