Internet Archive Part 4: Movies and Much More

Get ready to lose some big chunks of time. The e-texts, audiobooks and music at the Internet Archive were interesting; now how about some movies? From the home page www.archive.org click on the moving images tab.

You can spend hours watching old (and not so old) cartoons under the animation and cartoons link. Classics like Bugs Bunny in “Falling Hare” (the one with the gremlin). There are shorts featuring Woody Woodpecker, Betty Boop, Popeye…and many others. Then there is the subcategory “Brick Films” offering proof that some people have far too much time on their hands: Lego movies. This one is the first Star Wars movie…”acted” by Lego men, set to the original soundtrack.

Remember those non-fiction films they used to show in school (or the army) those are available under the Ephemeral Films link like 1947’s “Are You Popular?”: More are available under the Prelinger Archives link “Design for Dreaming” an extended General Motors car commercial is a personal favorite for the “Kitchen of Tomorrow” sequence. There are home movies, sports movies, and video game “speed runs,” where someone plays through a whole videogame as quickly as possible and records it as a digital video.

There are also nearly 3,000 full length movies available the likes of “Last Man on Earth” (1964) starring Vincent Price: based on the Richard Mathesson book “I Am Legend” or Cary Grant and Rosiland Russel in “His Girl Friday” (1940). And no such collection would be complete without “Reefer Madness.”

And again, there is a religion and spirituality section with 36,000 videos of sermons and religious services of all denominations including the adorable Buddhist children singing a favorite song in Taiping Malaysia

Happy Surfing!