Casablanca – Today, watching a movie is almost entirely about choice. You open Netflix, scroll through rows of recommendations, read a few reviews, maybe watch a trailer, and finally settle on something.
You choose the movie, the time, and, if you are not feeling it, you can always stop and pick something else.
For those who grew up in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the experience was a little different. And somehow, having fewer choices made movie nights feel more exciting.
You would turn on the television and start flipping through channels, including MBC 2, MBC Action, MBC4, Rotana Cinema, Zee Alwan which were all competing for your attention.
Sometimes you had something specific in mind, but more often, you were simply looking for something worth staying for.
You didn’t choose the movie, the movie chose you
Inevitably, you’d stumble onto a movie that was already halfway through.
You had no idea who the characters were, what had happened before, or why everyone seemed to be running, crying, fighting, or falling in love. But instead of changing the channel, you stayed.
Maybe you would figure it out eventually. Maybe you never would. Either way, you were invested.
And once you found the one you liked, there was always the possibility of catching it again.
Movies would return to the channels, sometimes often enough that you could remember certain scenes before they even happened.
CDs and DVDs
Television was not the only medium to watch movies. CDs and DVDs were a whole part of the experience too.
You would pick one from the stack, put it into the player, wait for the screen to load, and settle in for a movie you had probably already watched more times than you could count.
There was no autoplay, no algorithm suggesting what to watch next, and definitely no skipping through ten trailers before deciding.
The same thing applied to cartoons and TV shows. Old CDs, DVDs, and even cartoon tapes became little collections of our favorites, carefully kept and replayed until we knew every scene and every line.
And if you still have an old closet or storage box somewhere, you might find a few of them hiding there.
A scratched CD, a forgotten DVD, or an old cartoon tape can suddenly bring back an entire period of your childhood.
Looking back, the magic was not necessarily in the technology itself. It was in the surprise of discovering something without searching for it.
We may have far more control over what we watch today, but some of the movies we never chose still ended up becoming the ones we remember most.
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