“You’re going to have the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood.”

—-Fay Wray, quoting Merian C. Cooper on King Kong.

There was the promise of cable-cutting…

First there was cable TV. I remember in ~1983 stringing cable into a bedroom for a second TV (a rare luxury back then) thinking, “I wish that television could come right out of the air, instead of through a wire, then I wouldn’t have to… wait a minute! It does!”

But over the years, cable became more and more expensive… and then cable-cutting! For a few heady years, that was the cat’s pajamas – until the streaming world became more and more bifurcated and expensive, until you have to have so many paid subscriptions that you forget what you’ve got and the one thing that you want is always on a stream you don’t have and you scroll for hours and can’t find anything to watch anyway.

But I have found a streaming service that has a carefully curated selection of wonderful content, no ads, available on all smart TVs, phones, tablets, and computers, and (with some limitations) is completely free. And a lot of people haven’t heard of it.

It’s called Kanopy.

It has fantastic content. I subscribe to The Criterion Channel – which is great – but certain odd, classic, or foreign films kept showing up on this “Kanopy” thing – so I had to check it out.

One catch is that it is only available through your library, if your library offers it. My local library did not, so I was shit out of luck. Until I discovered the next city out in the string of suburbs did offer it – and they had a deal with my town so I could get a card. It was only a few miles drive and I was signed up. So now I had my Kanopy subscription (and a whole new set of libraries to visit).

The second catch is that you are limited to the number of films per month you can watch. But in this new year, I discovered that my city now offers it too – so I can sign up twice and get twice the monthly limit. And I’ll sign up with my wife’s card (and maybe send her to the neighboring city) and get even more.

This is truly the best of all possible worlds.