Of Movies and TV Lists

Today I am adding my Movies and TV Bucket Lists to the grand list of buckets. I feel like these lists require a bit of explanation in addition to just posting it as they are being handled differently. (The Reading category will have similar weirdness to it.)

As I mentioned in an early post on bucket lists. I wanted to make sure that each list item was challenging. That I would get to the end of each and feel like I have accomplished something real and concrete. I feel with video games, this was a fairly easy accomplishment. Many video games make you work for winning and have decent play times to make you feel like you've accomplished something when you finally finish it (not to mention there is definitely an increasing difficult in most video games as you progress). There are actually a couple of games in which I decided to group because some are shorter than others, this can be seen in Portal & Portal 2. Portal 1 was a fairly quick game comparatively and I think pairing them makes both stronger. Another aspect of this is that I would say a good majority of the games that I have chosen are RPG in genre, which also tends to be the more time consuming genre.

But when I sat down and thought about Movies, I realized there wasn't as much of an accomplishment in just a movie. Even long movies only run around 3 hours in length. You get a little better when you start looking to series... which if you are looking at, say, The Lord of the Rings Extended Edition series, that is about 10 hours. But even that seems rather mundane. I mean, unlike video games which tend to require skill, practice, and patience. Movies and TV just require time. I could do some weird things like "Watch 'Midnight in Paris' in Paris" or "Watch 'Lord of the Rings' in New Zealand," but that may be pretty circumstantial, and out of my power to complete.

So I instead went with hours to consume. This has created lists within lists. I decided to break down what movies and TV shows I should be watching for bucket list items by categories. Movie categories are range about 35 to 40 hours each, and TV categories are a mighty 150 to 200 hours each. Now I know what you are thinking, this is a pretty big disparity between the two. Why not have TV shows that are shorter and Movies be longer and meet in the middle somewhere around 75 hours?

This is a good dilemma. There are a few reasons that I can think of that I came up with the hours. For movies, I actually started at around 25 hours worth and slowly ticked it up, adding movies to each category. What I found was that around the 32 hour mark in almost every category that I had, there was a drop off in quality. I started making reaches for movies that should be included, which is fine to a degree. But I soon realized that adding 15 hours of movies would create a glut of mediocre entries, and I felt that overall would take away from the category.

On the TV side, well good TV tends to consume a ton of time. Consider Friends or Big Bang Theory, these are half hour programs (which in reality are around 24 minutes each), this seems small until you realize there are 200+ episodes. Even a show that only lasted for 12 episodes (Firefly for instance), lands around 10 hours. Because of this, I have considered breaking TV out of groups entirely, and indeed I have for a few key biggies. But then I have a disparity. some shows are ginormous (American Masters are around 300 hours), and some shows are small. I came to what is a happy medium of 200-ish hours give or take 50 as this seems to be about right. You get real content and most categories are only 2 or 3 TV shows large. I did something else to also aid in variety... I recognized that within a TV series, every season is not equal. So with longer series, you will see me picking out seasons a little bit. For instance, Stargate only has the first 7 seasons because it really became garbage after that.

The last thing I really wanted to talk about is watching these. I could actually instantly mark off a ton of these movies and shows. But then I decided that many, I haven't seen in over 20 years and I don't really remember much of them. So instead of picking and choosing what I recall well and what I don't, I've decided to just bite the bullet and re-watch all of it. Although, to be honest, I might just watch some in the background while doing other things. I mean I have seen The Matrix so much, I have it almost memorized, I don't really need another watching, but then I like it so much I will.

If you want to check out the latest updates to my lifelist, you can check it out here.