Dave, my Dad loves watching classic movies and old TV shows on his laptop, but complains that all the streaming services are new content, not classic older shows. Are there any sites where he can find shows he likes? Bonus if he could download them to view offline.
With thousands of movies and TV show episodes released every month, it’s no surprise that modern streaming services seem to be skewed towards the most recent results. If you want to watch films from the last few years, that’s great, but if your tastes – or your parents’ tastes – run more toward content from a few decades ago, not so great. There are classic movie channels like Turner Classic Movies and, to a lesser extent, American Movie Classics, but the former’s only available as part of an expensive cable or streaming package, and the latter, well, AMC seems to be more and more focused on modern content nowadays.
Meanwhile, there’s an enormous amount of content that’s fallen out of copyright and can be legally streamed online, if you can only find it. One solution is to search YouTube for full-length movies and TV episodes, but there’s so much poorly organized content on YouTube that it’s literally that needle in a haystack you’ll seek. However, here are two really cool options, one of which you can access with your public library card: Kanopy. The other is even more amazing:Â The Internet Archive contains millions of web pages, PDF documents, ebooks, movies, TV shows, training videos, documentaries, propaganda films, advertisements, even social media video content. And it’s completely free.
Let’s poke around The Internet Archive, so you can see how much is available…
TOP LEVEL MOVIES AND VIDEO CONTENT
Instead of beginning with the home page of the site, which is completely overwhelming, I’m going to start in the Moving Image Archive, reachable at archive.org/details/movies. Here’s what I see as of this writing:
The numbers here are worth calling out: 15.244 million results, organized by media type, year, subject, and more. Archive.org also works with “collections” and a close look at the above will reveal that the “Television” collection has 637,626 entries, and “Movies” has 105,532 items. There’s overlap because anyone can create a collection, so a show might be in “Television Archives”, but not “Television”, or vice-versa. Same with “Feature Films” vs “The VHS Vault” vs. “Movies”.
I find it helpful to use the filters on the left side to narrow things down, though it’s worth pointing out that these are tagged and organized by untrained individuals, so there are just as many items misfiled and mistagged as there are properly tagged.
For example, you can see that there are 15,236,536 items categorized as “movies”, but that includes tv show episodes, trailers, and much more. 15 million items. A staggering wealth of content!
As you learn to navigate the unimaginably large archive, you can find useful sorts and filters, like sorting by “all-time views”, which surfaces entirely different videos:
Your Dad might remember some of these educational videos being shown in his school classroom back in the day, actually, including How to be Well Groomed and Care of the Skin. Notice here that there are also feature length films like the Abbott & Costello classic Africa Screams and Danny Kaye’s star-making film The Inspector General. The latter is worth looking at closely (on the lower right) because it lacks much of any information, excluding director (Henry Koster), release year (1949), and stars (Danny Kaye, Barbara Bates, Walter Slezak). It’s not even obvious that it’s the feature film!
That’s the fun of the Internet Archive; it’s best to view it as a digital content treasure hunt. Search for an actor, a director, a movie studio and you might find most of the matching content, but you’ll find other unrelated content too.
SEARCHING FOR CONTENT IN THE ARCHIVE
For example, your Dad might have fond memories of the great director Howard Hawks and his many splendid films.
Two different versions of His Girl Friday, and an unrelated film, Big Trouble in Little China, are included in the matches.
That’s why one smart navigational technique is to click on the category or collection for a matching film or TV show so you can find useful collections. Like Feature Films, which you can also find at archive.org/details/feature_films:
This collection has 27,564 items and is further broken down by category, including Comedy Films, Film Noir, Silent Films, Sci-Fi / Horror, and more. Move into the Comedy Films collection, and you can find hilarious films like Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL
So many quotable likes and memes have come from this nutty comedy, and you can enjoy the original film, free, no login, no app needed, by just clicking play:
What’s really cool about it is if you scroll down, you’ll find that most of the content is also freely downloadable:
MPEG4 is almost always your best bet for file format (this is a pretty darn big file – 1.2GB = 1,200MB). With a fast connection and a little patience, you or your Dad can download dozens, or even hundreds of great titles without paying for anything more than bandwidth and disk space.
BACK TO FILM NOIR
It’s dark, there’s a femme fatale in the waiting room, and that whiskey ain’t going to drink itself, so let’s go back to that Film Noir category for a closer look…
Honestly, there are hundreds of excellent movies here, including Spellbound, Sabrina, Laura, Breathless, and…
Honestly, Double Indemnity is one of the very best of the noir category and a fantastic, dark, crime thriller that holds up as a tight, exciting film even 82 years later. It’s worth a watch, and notice it’s in 720p, which is going to look great on a tablet or laptop.
A few more top films just sitting at archive.org, ready to watch or even download:
Free downloads of excellent content? It’s the stuff that dreams are made of!
FOREIGN FILMS AND TV SHOWS
If you’re worried that the collection is only American films from Hollywood, fear not; there are films and TV shows in all languages from around the world. For example, one of my favorite Akira Kurosawa thrillers from the 1960s, High and Low, is available:
In this instance, I’m demonstrating the pop-up information window you get if you move the cursor over an entry. Helpful for ensuring that something is what you seek or not.
Finally, don’t forget that you can also search for and find old TV shows, even relatively obscure content like the cheesy horror series Dark Shadows from the early 1960s:
If you’re questing for content for yourself or your Dad, it’s amazing just how much great content can be found in the Internet Archive. Just be prepared: Once you start searching, you’ll lose a few hours exploring all of the many options and might even succumb to an item or two in your quest. Finally, you’ll know the answer to the immortal question of what is the airspeed of an unladen swallow!
Pro tip: I’ve been writing about computer and Internet basics for many years, and have been watching old movies even longer than that! Please check out my computer and Internet basics help area for lots more useful tutorials!