“Let me tell you a tale. A tale of Columbia House Movie Club.
I was a member, and here’s how it worked:
Initially, you’d pay 1 penny, and you’d get…I think it was 12 movies.
Now, with this, you also had to buy 4 movies over the course of the year. That was the promise you made Columbia House.
I had my first real job, McDonald’s, baby, and I got my 12 movies the day we were meant to leave for Yellowstone.
I did not want to go to Yellowstone. I wanted to stay home and watch my 12 movies, a number of tapes that was deliciously decadent at the time.
I don’t remember all the tapes I got in that first round, but one was definitely Escape from LA.
I suggested to my mom that I stay home. From the natural wonders of Yellowstone. To watch Escape from LA, probably multiple times.
She didn’t go for it, and I should probably call her now and apologize.
Anyway, over the next year, I slowly fulfilled my obligation to The House.
One of the things they did was send you a monthly postcard advertising the Movie of the Month. If you checked a box and stuck the postcard back in the mail, Columbia House would NOT send you the movie of the month.
If you didn’t fill out the postcard, they’d send you the Movie of the Month.
Now, you could still just write Return to Sender on the cardboard box, and it’d wing on back to Columbia House.
But if you opened that shit, you were stuck.
Now, one month, the Movie of the Month was Batman & Robin. This was the first Batman movie since Returns I hadn’t seen in the theater (I guess I was too young for the first one, evidenced by the fact that I went to a birthday part with a bunch of other kids who had responsible parents, and they said we were going to watch Batman. I assumed it was the Tim Burton Batman, but it was Batman 66. Which I can appreciate now, but at the time, I was like, “What in the hell is this!?”).
I missed Batman & Robin, it didn’t look awesome, and my older brother saw it and confirmed, yes, it’s terrible.
So I get a tape in the mail from Columbia House. I was hopeful that it was a movie I’d ordered, Goldeneye, but I did have a creeping feeling that it seemed like the turnaround was quick. Ever the optimist, or at least, ever the optimist until this experience ruined it for me, I tore open the package and found Batman & Robin.
Shit.
There I was, stuck with a tape I never wanted, and boy, you paid for those 4 movies over the year. They were like $30 bucks or something. Which makes sense, they have to make their money back on all them penny tapes.
I popped it in the VCR, and I sat and watched with my finger on the Stop button. The movie opens with full frame codpiece shots. The opening sequence with Mr. Freeze shooting plastic, wobbly ice everywhere and making terrible puns, George Clooney sleepskating his way through, Chris O’Donnel being Robin, didn’t inspire a lot of confidence. It was somewhere after they surfed down from a space rocket on the doors of the thing, which was fine somehow, that I just couldn’t takes no more.
I did end up watching the whole thing in bouts. I could only do about one sequence at a time.
And that, my friends, is how and why I saw Batman & Robin.
On the plus, my 12 movies from Columbia House also came with a duffel bag, which I used for like a decade and a half. That thing was of much higher quality than it had any business being. “