It's still around, and somebody's actually thinking

I remember at the beginning of 2012 writing about the change from the Fox Movie Channel to the format where half the day was "FXM" and the other half still had the old movies without commercials. I wrote something about giving that six months before it disappeared. Well, here it is closing in on five years, and amazingly, the corporate folks haven't done much of anything, other than change the format name from the Fox Movie Channel to FXM Retro. Sure they have a ridiculous number of repeats, but that was always the case even when it was the Fox Movie Channel 24 hours a day.

And sometimes I wonder whether there's actually somebody thinking when the movies are programmed. Take today's schedule. Starting at 6:00 AM we get A Letter to Three Wives, which is certainly a classic and a good movie for them to be running.

That's followed at 7:45 AM by 23 Paces to Baker Street, with Van Johnson playing a blind playwright overhearing a kidnapping plot and trying to prove it's actually going to happen. I've got that one on my DVR and should have watched it over the weekend so I could do a full-length post here. (I've read, however, by somebody else who watched a recent FXM Retro showing that the print is panned-and-scanned. Not a surprise.)

Then at 9:30 AM there's These Thousand Hills; The Story on Page One comes up at 11:15, and finally we have Five Weeks in a Balloon at 1:15 PM.

I assume you see the commonality. Somebody must have taken a look at the movies available to FXM Retro currently and decided, "Hey! All of these have numbers in the title! Let's run them together!" They did the same thing not so long ago with movies with colors in the title.

So perhaps FXM Retro will still be around a while longer. And perhaps I'll get around to watching 23 Paces to Baker Street before the next showing.