It’s not a classic era for classic movies

It happens to most of us: You search your streaming services or an aggregator site for a movie you remember fondly, or somehow never saw when it was new, only to come up empty. The withering of back catalogs has hit all of the big services, as they cut costs and execute mergers in the face of stiff competition. But for classic film fans, movies often go missing in bulk, taking forgotten-but-important titles along.

Really old movies—which I define as being released between the dawn of the sound era and roughly the end of the decade I was born—are what make me happy. They’re my comfort food, my geeky hobby, my excuse to host a podcast. I’ve loved this stuff since high school. And while media mega mergers mean libraries of old films get valued as assets when the deals are made, that doesn’t mean they’ll pop up on a streamer anytime soon.…