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One of my brain-resting pastimes is watching ‘reactors’ on YouTube. These are generally millennials viewing classic films, which depressingly are often from the 80s & 70s, for the first time. As a boomer born in the early 60s these are movies I have seen many that are close to my heart and among my favorites. It is surprising just how successful some of these channels have become. One Canadian lady now in the US, who until she started this project described herself as a rom-com and comedy gal, had her channel, Popcorn in Bed, become so large that Tom Cruise’s production company invited her to the premiere of a Mission Impossible film.

One of the fascinating aspects of watching these channels is seeing how some things that were once common knowledge slip away into obscurity. It makes me feel like Galadriel’s narration at the start of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring: “…some things were lost because none now live who remember it.”

I have written before about how these younger people have no context for the little white nitroglycerin tablets Father Merrin takes for his heart disease in The Exorcist but another larger thing on my mind this morning: overtures.

Taken from ballet and opera, an overture in film is a piece of music played before the start of a movie used to set a mood. They were never common, but overtures were once employed much more often, usually of grand elaborate productions such as Gone with the Wind (1939) or Ben-Hur (1959). I can’t recall when I learned about overtures in feature films, but it was long ago, so much so that it is just part of what I know about movies. I think the first overture I experienced before a film was for the original release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

So many of these millennials, coming to adulthood in a world so unlike mine own, have never encountered an overture nor have they learned what they were from some text or book. When these people, who are not dumb or stupid, encounter an overture it is a period of confusion as they sit through several minutes of sometimes a black screen, neither Star Trek: The Motion Picture nor 2001: A Space Odyssey employed a title card with their overtures, with only a score playing. Aside from people who manage to see live Broadway-style productions, and the rare film that still employs them, the overture seems to be slipping out of all knowledge.