Teenagers aren’t always the most discerning consumers of media, but we were… weren’t we? We’ll let you decide as we bear our souls and share which movies we watched the most as teens:

Sitting Duck: In 1989, our TV broke down and it wasn’t repaired until early 1992, in time for the Winter Olympics. During this period, the only chance my siblings and I got to watch anything was during the Sunday afternoon visits to the home of our paternal grandparents.

Among the somewhat limited selection of videotapes available was a recording of Masters of the Universe that would frequently alternate between viewing episodes of Kids Incorporated. What I’m saying is that we ended up watching it a lot.

And back then we actually liked it. Perhaps it’s because our memories of the cartoon were getting pretty faint. But we weren’t bothered by things that enraged so many true fans, like He-Man’s mullet or Teela’s 80s hair or the bulk of the action taking place on Earth or the absence of characters with names like Ram Man, Buzz-Off, and Fisto. The only thing that really irked us at the time was how the costume for the Sorceress was kind of underwhelming (certainly not as awesome as what she wore in the cartoon).

Of course, older and more jaded me now recognizes the flaws young and oblivious me didn’t pick up on. But I can still make allowances for it being made on a Cannon budget at a time when they were on the brink of financial ruin. And it’ll probably still be better than the live action movie scheduled to come out next year.

Drake: So, first off I want to make the formal complaint that this question is ageist*. Not all of us Mutant Reviewers are young enough to have grown up with VCRs, which allowed easy access to multiple viewings of movies or television shows. For some of us**, we had to do with catching a movie at the theater, or maybe later on a Movie of the Week showing on TV, and that was it. There was no tape of it to watch multiple times, and DVDs and streaming would have been the stuff of science fiction back then.

So honestly, my answers here are limited. I’ve made mention before of seeing Star Wars several times when I was a kid, since it played for pretty much the whole couple of years I lived in Southern California. So there’s that. And I did see Flash Gordon in the theater a few times as it was playing during the holiday season and I saw it with different family members, and then it was re-released (playing on a double bill with The Empire Strikes Back) a year or so later when I was dating.

The other one would probably be The Road Warrior, which was one of the first things I taped off of HBO once we did have a VCR in the early ‘80s, and I watched the heck out of that. That’s about it for multiple viewings in my teen years, though. It was a different era, to be sure.

*I’ll be taking this up with MRMR (Mutant Reviewers Mutant Resources) as soon as my calendar is free of Ozspoitation flicks, 1950s B-movies and ‘70s Trash Cinema. So, somewhere around June of 2032.

**Meaning me.

Thomas: I had a DVD of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) that I would replay relentlessly for a certain patch of my teens. Sometimes daily, if possible. I never tired of it, though my family certainly did.

I remember visiting my older brother, and we were deciding what to watch that night, and I suggested, well, you know. And he said, didn’t you just watch that recently? And I said, so? I got my way and we watched it. It was his first time seeing it, along with a friend of his, and they both appreciated it much more than they’d expected to.

And you know, to this day I stand by the opinion that it’s pretty great. I know that the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka absolutists out there turn their noses up at it, but really, this is a magical Tim Burton joint. It has a perfect blend of uplifting charm and comedic child abuse. It exists firmly within that era when Johnny Depp’s bizarre characters were actually delightfully quirky. The score is one of Danny Elfman’s best Tim Burton collaborations. And finally it has some wicked practical effects — the trained squirrels are genuinely amazing.

The great thing about having watched it so many times when I was younger is that I never actually need to watch it again, as the whole thing is saved in my head for any occasion.

Justin: When we bought a VCR in the mid-80s, there was no going back. My parents recorded pretty much any movie that came on TV, and once we were given the go-ahead to see a specific title, we’d rewatch them (fast-forwarding through commercials) so many times. Even the bad ones.

In my teen years, I became a little more discerning (cough), leaning to spoofs, scifi, and energetic teen comedies. On top of wearing out our Star Wars and Star Trek tapes, I loved me some Airplane! and Return of the Killer Tomatoes, not to mention indulging in Encino Man more than is healthy. Batman ’89 was a staple, but so was Superman II.

I did sneak a copy of Aliens and Terminator 2 to get my R-rated James Cameron fix, and when The Stand came on TV, I made sure I recorded and memorized that in the ensuing months (that was my Stephen King phase).