How much is she asking for?
I’d make sure the entire MST3K series was available to the public. Even the Godzilla movies.
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I don’t think anyone knows her asking price, except of course the companies who’ve tried to license from her, but the rumor it nobody can afford what she’s asking. For the Godzillas, would love that too - though I don’t think it’s a money issue, more of an image one (the rights holders don’t like us making fun).
For the Godzilla IP holders, that might require fan support. Fan letters, fan art, stories from the fans, etc. If only to let them know we love Godzilla and mean no disrespect.
As for Mrs. Hart, this may require some legal experts along with the cash. If we can sway her with fan love, it’s possible. If she’s asking for a ridiculous amount of money just for these movies, then we may have to negotiate.
As for the other hold-outs, that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
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Great movie.
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I’m going to not answer this question because honestly, I would be so overwhelmed by such an amount of money I’d have no idea what to do with it and probably just pee myself and faint. So I’m going to go on a tangent that’s kind of related to the premise of the thread, for fun.
You know how much a billion dollars was in 1962? Adjusting for inflation, Arch Hall Jr. would be spending $9,039,834,437.09 on flowers. I am very bad at math, so I am going to try my best here.
Okay. So let’s say that Arch Hall bought Valerie spent it entirely on roses, just to make my life easier. A bouquet of a dozen red roses (keep the change, hai doggy) costs around $30, excluding tax. Plus tax, let’s round that up to $32. Okay.
So dividing 9,039,834,437.09 by 32 gets us 282,494,826.1590625, so we’ll round that down to 282,494,826 bouquets of roses. Multiplying that by 12 and rounding up the last decimal, we can determine that Arch Hall Jr. would be buying Valerie 3,389,937,914 red roses. That’s nearly 3.4 billion roses. Now, I don’t know how to calculate how much space that would take up. But I did look up the Guinness World Record holder of the largest bouquet of roses, which was made up of a measly 156,940 roses and looked like this:
Dividing our number of roses by the number used in this bouquet, Arch Hall Jr. would be buying the equivalent of 21,600 of these arrangements for Valerie. This thing is bigger than am average bus. Maybe it’s like the size of a very fancy yacht. So imagine 21,600 yachts, all made out of roses, for Valerie. I don’t even know how much space that would take up but I’m sure somebody could work that out.
Feel free to correct my math here, since again, I suck at math. But, yeah.
I guess I would use some of my money to get a puppy, IDK. Maybe even two puppies.
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I know! I’m in my 60s and only on my 3rd car.
OK, this is kind of one of my “niche” interests—tracking inflation—and I think the mistake comes in trying to use inflation calculators to figure this out. I think you’re in the right ballpark but I always prefer to go back and look at what things actually cost.
This is trickier than it seems since for some reason, I cannot just pull up the Valley News and Green Sheet (which would’ve been Arch Hall Jr’s local newspaper) for 1962 and get the price for a dozen roses without putting in credit card info somewhere.
I know what I’d be doing with MY billion dollars.
Anyway, I was able to find trays of (8) petunias for .49 cents in the nearby-ish San Bernardino Sun.
A funeral spray cost $3…which is shockingly cheap if current prices ($100+) are any gauge. But we don’t know what the $3 spray looked like. Could’ve been…crepe on old wire.
A little further searching and I find roses and azaleas and fuschia galore for 4 bits up to a buck—but for the whole plant, not just the flowers. I do see BIG FLOWER is continuing it’s PR push in the papers.
I think Sav-On will save me, but no, it’s for the whole damn plant again. :-/ Meanwhile, times was different:
Aha, I’ll go to February 14th. Surely! SURELY! there will be ads for flowers then. Nope. Same biz. I think I’m going to find roses or other flowers and instead it’s the whole plant.
I think the issue is that flowers are so cheap, it does not pay to advertise them in the paper. I mean, you can get FAKE flowers for 9c each!
Now, consider this: $1B in 1962 is 1.25% of the Federal Budget! There may not have been $1B worth of flowers on any given day!
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Dang, you got me. I did use an inflation calculator.
lol, it wasn’t hard—I’ve used them a lot, too, it’s how I became suspicious of them. 
Back in the 60s (why yes, I am old, thankyouverymuch), my weekly allowance was 25 cents, with which I could buy TWO comic books and either a Coke or a candy bar.
So yes, things were much cheaper then (but people also made a lot less money).
It’s interesting to note where the prices haven’t changed, mostly technology related.
Well, a lot of the technology we have now didn’t exist then. What did you have in mind?
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Living room ovens?
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Well, mostly the obvious things. Tough to buy a Motorola TV these days but if you could, you might be able to pay as much $329 for a 23" screen. You probably wouldn’t consider it a bargain, tho’.
Or a $125 for a calculator that does basic math and could be used as a murder weapon in “Columbo”:
Back in the early 80’s we had to pay $1.35 for the newest single which is hilariously close to Amazon’s price today…. But… without the B-Side!
I love this old Radio Shack ad where everything is basically your phone today
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Two things come to mind: TVs and data storage. I was doing some deep research recently before a big TV purchase, and learned how profoundly the cost/size ratio of TVs has changed over the decades. They keep getting bigger and cheaper. (However, most of them today are built to barely last a couple years, whereas TVs from the 60s were built like tanks and are probably still functional today.)
And data storage, oh boy. We’re at pennies per gigabyte today, will probably be pennies per terabyte before long, vs. rolls of punch paper tape in the 60s that held maybe a couple kilobytes?
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Operational, yes, functional, no — unless you shell out a few sawbucks for an over-the-air HDTV converter or have an old VCR or DVD player lying around, too. And even then, you’ll be stuck with 540x480 video, or letterboxed pictures in even lower resolution. And once the phosphors in the CRT fade or burn out, it’s pretty much junk. I don’t even want to think what it would cost to replace an old Trinitron™ CRT these days, considering that they’ve been out of production for well over a decade now.
Everyone pretty much points at Moore’s Law for why TVs have gotten cheaper, i.e., ICs get denser, smaller, and with better yields (i.e., cheaper) approximately once every 18-24 months. But with LCD / OLED (/ microLED in the not-too-distant future) displays, Moore’s Law applies to the picture element, now, too! After all, a liquid crystal display is basically a humongous, transparent integrated circuit that includes conductive, semiconductive, and insulating layers, along with polarizing, filtering, and reflecting films, to say nothing of the all-important liquid crystal layer.
The other thing is, a flat panel LCD is just that — a flat, multilayered glass panel. The only weight it needs to support is basically itself against the pull of gravity. A CRT, on the other hand, is a pressure vessel. It has to be in order to maintain the vacuum inside of it required to function — yet at least one side of it must be made of glass. A 40” diagonal flat display pane like that of the Sony KV-40XBR800, the biggest consumer CRT TV that ever reached the market? That pane of glass was standing up to over 10,500 pounds (~46.6 kN) of atmospheric pressure — and that was just the part of the CRT you could see! It was basically a 300 lb. bathysphere sitting in your living room. The engineering that went into figuring out how to mass-produce and deliver such a device at any cost — safely — was astonishing. Scaling it up much further, on the other hand, was pretty much never going to happen.
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I still have a 17-year-old CRT TV and it’s fine (the government handed out coupons to purchase a digital converter when that happened) and my BluRay player works on it just fine (as does my Roku)
I will soon be upgrading to a projector system, not because the TV is junk, but because I want to be able to watch movies on a large screen because I may never go back to the movie theater again if this COVID crap keeps up.
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Get a 4K projector and pair it with a 4K streaming box or UHD Blu Ray player, and you’ll basically be able to watch new and UHD-remastered movies in the same resolution most digital cinemas use these days.
Now, if COVID would just give us a break so that Cameron could finish Avatar 2-5 and get back to the wet-transfer 4K remaster of The Abyss…
I’m using a friggin’ computer monitor to function as a TV and you have to pull the entertainment center forward to the middle of the living room if you want to use it to play video games on it because it’s very small.
It’s difficult for me to play Smash on that thing. We need a bigger TV. Probably one of the fancy ones… but I do love the look of a CRT. A boxy little CRT TV is still like the default image of what a TV looks like in my mind, to this day.
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