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Get a look inside the "greatest year in cinema ever" in the totally tubular limited series GREATEST GEEK YEAR EVER: 1982 premiering on Saturday, July 8 (8:00-9:00pm ET/PT).


Here is the original release on what the documentary will cover. This was originally a crowd funded documentary that was suppose to come out in 2022. But, they sold it to The CW, who made it into a 4-part series. Scott Mantz, who is a movie critic and pundit, is one of the producers of the series.


Just giving you all a heads up so you can set your DVR. It's airing on 4 Saturdays, so it's easy to miss. Especially in the summer. No trailer has been released yet.

Don't you mean "program your VCRs"?

No idea even how to access CW these days. Also, what's a DVR?

There’s a free CW app.

In celebration of the era, I shall watch this live with my roof antenna.

The trailer dropped.



Unfortunately I might have to watch it on the CW app because DirecTV is in the middle of a carriage dispute with Nextstar, who owns our local CW affiliate.

They stretched out 1 year into 4 hours? VH1 couldn't even do that with the I Love The series !

40 minutes times 4 episodes. Approximately 160 minutes. 2 hours, 40 minutes. There are lots of extensive documentaries that long. Mantz said there was more footage before the cutdowns.

I gave the first episode a shot. If you need a heavy dose of 1982 movie nostalgia from a wide range of fringe Hollywood people I really don't recognize, it's a perfectly average doc which jumps around a lot. Watchable but not particularly compelling.

I thought the 1st segment was pretty good. They did get some pretty good interviews from a few stars and creators in that era and even the great Leonard Maltin. But, I can understand that if you're not into the "Geek" and Critics scene, you might not recognize some of the writers, pundits and critics that they talked to. I think Scott Mantz, who produced it, only appeared in 2 quick interviews. I mean hell, they even talked to Bill Hunt from the digital bits.

It's true 1982 was a pretty loaded year for content.

I liked that they even covered Siskel and Ebert and Atari, including the disastrous ET game. The creator of Pitfall said in the film that the creator of the ET game created a great game in the 2 months he had to make it.

I am almost done with the first ep and some of the info is new to me. I keep forgetting that with a bit of hindsight that there was indeed an abnormal amount of what would turn out to be top tier films introduced in 1982 (hard to believe I had only just turned 11 years old in 1982), but the thing that really gets me is when one of the folks being interviewed notes that there were back to back weekends where not one, not two, but three films were introduced to theaters on each weekend and all of these films would turn out to be beloved films so many years after they came out in theaters.

That is crazy, in hindsight so many good films were released right on top of each other and yet most (almost all of them) of them were able to thrive at the box office.

I compare this to the recent comments in the Box Office Thread, where it is noted that critics and folks in general are grumbling that by having so many potential tentpole films released so close to each other that many films are missing out on box office dollars that they might obtain if there was at least a 2-3 week gap between the tentpoles release weekends.

How times have changed.

Also, folks went for the easy laugh when they said this, but it still made me chuckle when some of the folks interviewed said that for all of the Science Fiction films released in 1982, if you were a kid living in 1982 you might look back and think you were living in a science fiction film because of how free you were as a kid to get up, go to school, and just do whatever with your friends, or by yourself after school, and as long as you were home for dinner your parents were not freaked out by your absence throughout the day. Even I would spend a bit of time putting quarters into some arcade machines at a liquor store that is still located where the school bus dropped me off, and then after say 30 minutes or an hour just walk a couple blocks home.

Being a kid in the 80s really was different than it is now.

I was only 9 in 1982 and I rarely went to the theater back then. Just a clueless kid. So it's funny looking back at the pop culture significance from seeing this 1st part 1982 really was. I don't think our family even owned a VCR yet, so I wasn't even able to see these big movies until a couple years later.

I was 13 that summer and spent most of it at the local mall watching these movies, playing at the arcade, and cruising the food court. Those were the days...

I caught a replay of the first episode last night and enjoyed it quite a lot. I was a senior in high school in 1982 (now I'm just a "senior"), so all that stuff was right up my alley. I was unaware that Spielberg co-directed Poltergeist in much the same way Howard Hawks co-directed "The Thing from Another World." I was happy to see the much-underappreciated Nicholas Meyer and enjoyed the stories about the making of ET. I was surprised they used the gun footage in the clips instead of the walkie-talkies. The video game stuff was fun too. Pitfall was probably my favorite Atari game.
I'm glad they broke it up into 4 parts, because 2 hours and 40 minutes would be a lot to take all at once.

Anytime "Poltergeist" comes up on a message board I know it's going to break out into the usual "Was it Hooper or Spielberg" argument, even all these years later. I thought the show gave the most reasonable answer to the question.

I wasn't born until 83, but I want to watch this. I set it up to record on my YouTube TV DVR. I hope to get around to watching it soon.

Never was a big fan of E.T. or Poltergeist. Saw them both in their original theatrical run and thought they were good/not great and that there were a number of better films in 1982. But I understand why they focused on these two for this episode.

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. It was worth it for JoBeth Williams & others talking about the making of Poltergeist & John Sayles on the genesis of E.T. Also fun to see an old clip of Ron Hendren & old video game commercials.

it was not bad but strange it is airing on the CW on Saturdays.

I thought it would be on Vice or AXS TV where all the shows about nostalgia exist.

There's a 5-hour documentary called "In Search of Tomorrow" that covers all the sci-fi films of the 1980s that is much more in-depth than this show, if anyone is interested. Of course, it covers a whole lot more films, but the format is very similar to what this CW show has.

I will be honest - I had never heard of Megaforce before they covered it in the second episode. And I've seen literally thousands and thousands of movies.

Megaforce is one that I remember seeing in the pages of Starlog, but was one of the ones I never managed to see. Hopefully, I can see it one day but I don't think there's a Blu-ray release and not sure where it can be found. Another one like that is Spacecamp which I finally ended up watching for the first time last night.

Megaforce 1982 1080p BluRay REMUX AVC TrueHD

The CW is still blacked out in Los Angeles on DirecTV, so can't DVR it. So still watching on the app.

I watched episode 2 late last night. A good chunk of it was devoted to Star Trek 2 and Blade Runner. I knew most of what was discussed about Star Trek 2. But, as far as Blade Runner goes, I didn't know that Harrison Ford and Ridley Scott didn't get along. And Ridley was having trouble fitting in with the US crews. I don't think the BD documentaries on the Blade Runner disc covered that.

The Megaforce stuff was awesome. I loved that Barry Bostwick acknowledged the movie was goofy and his acting sucked in it. I see you can rent it for like $3 on Amazon. Is the movie really that awful? Is it worth a rent?

I had never even heard of Megaforce before. The segment was a hoot and so was Bostwick talking about it. His crapping on it almost made me want to watch it. Almost.