Before we had IMDB, we had Cinemania. This cracking piece of Windows 95 software is full of film reviews, video clips and a great little movie recommendation engine to help you choose your next film. In the days before IMDb, Cinemania was probably the most authoritative and accurate guide to cinema in the 1990s.
Cinemania '96 combines 2,000 reviews from the 1996 Edition of Roger Ebert's Video Companion, 3,000 reviews from Pauline Kael's 5001 Nights at the Movies, 20,000 reviews from Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide 1996 and 9,000 cast and crew listings from CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide. Described as an "easy to use, personal guide to a world of great films", Cinemania was essentially the IMDb of the pre-internet world.
I think Cinemania '96 is such a great CD-ROM. Looking at it through the lens of a 1996 product, this would have been absolutely wicked. Reading up on films, creating watch lists, finding reccos for things to watch. 30 years later and cinema is still a relevant pastime. In the world before the internet, this would have been a great program for people who were into film. And all these years later, I think this is such a chill vibe. Despite its age, Cinemania '96 still fills me with glee to sit and use it. I’ve lost myself for several days making this video. Just flicking through film reviews for films I like, or checking out films I’ve still not seen, just to see what reviewers said back in the 1990s. And honestly, that little recommendation engine is straight up genius!
Cinemania may seem humble now, but this was something special in the late 1990s. I loved looking at Cinemania '96. It's a real piece of pre-broadband history and exactly the kind of CD-ROM I love looking at here on Stoked.
The Cinemania I’m playing in this video is my own personal big box CD-ROM copy. I have ripped an iso of this and uploaded it to archive.org as this absolutely deserves to be preserved and enjoyed as a time capsule of the late 1990s.
archive.org/details/cin-96
00:00 Cinemania 96 CD-ROM
01:24 Find your favourite movies
05:09 Watch movie clips
06:37 Create movie lists
07:35 Bibliography sources
08:07 Find new films
09:38 I love Cinemania
10:36 MSN Online
11:08 What happened to Cinemania?
#cinemania #abandonware #windows95
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