Vintage Film collections

I have been a collector of many things over my lifetime, one of them is vintage fishing films, from the 1930's through the early 1970's. This includes production films, silent and with sound, as well as silent home movies. Most of my original films are 16mm, with a few 8mm ones and even a handful of 35mm big screen theatre productions.  Some years back I purchased high end 8mm, super 8 and 16mm telecine conversion projectors, which convert the obsolete film formats to digital, meaning that the old footage can be viewed on DVD's, flash drives, SD cards etc, even downloaded to a computer. Mp4 format can also be viewed on any smart TV, with a USB port.  I did film transfer for people as a side business for a while.

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So, over the years I transferred​ my films to digital and am now making them available in approximately 2 hour collections.  These films are are to be viewed only for their historical interest and taken for what they are.  Political correctiveness was not the same back then as it is now.  They weren't blatantly dis-respective, they were just products of their times.  They were meant to be fun and exciting but ... 

There was no catch and release; often there are scenes of dozens of dead fish in piles on docks, proudly shown off.  Docile Manta Rays were portrayed as evil and were killed on sight; as were Sharks of any kind.  Whaling was considered also as sport fishing by some and were killed in the odd film.  Portrayals of women anglers and native peoples of places they visited were not always the most flattering.  You get the idea.

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These films are quite humorous at times to watch.  Most of them were extremely low budget, filmed with single handheld cameras and without wireless microphones and other technology available today.  Of course there's no special effects or fancy editing ... more than once I noticed anglers reeling in or aggressively shaking a landed fish in their hands, which was obviously long dead ... you can even make out a string towing an obviously dead Hammerhead Shark behind a skiff in one of them, the Shark apparently attacking the small vessel.  The music is almost always very dramatic, as is the narration, some of them by the likes of Bill Stern and even a young Ronald Reagan.

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I hope you enjoy them as much as I have over the years.

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