New Options

The Mild Wife and I have always appreciated a little bit of time to watch something together via a streaming service. We sometimes partake in other activities while watching (and they're probably not ones you can guess), but there are quite a few posts on here about Netflix-related amusement. Heck, last week's post was inspired by something that we watched on Netflix.

Now, all that is fun, but this post isn't about Netflix. You see, we recently ventured into Amazon Prime Videos. We've actually had Amazon Prime for a little while, but we have never really bothered to check what movies or shows were available to us. For one, we already pay for a streaming service, so we didn't really have a huge desire to pay for even more content. Neither of us really minded choosing from Netflix's collection.

However, we happened to be browsing through Amazon recently when we realized that there were free-to-us options. These movies force you to watch some ads, but otherwise, there's no additional costs once you've paid for Amazon Prime. Well, we've paid for Amazon Prime. So, these options are effectively free to us, if we're willing to tolerate some ads in the middle of the movie.

We figured, "why not?" and decided to give it a go.

The interesting thing about this isn't so much that there's a new option for content, it's that we approached it like a novel new toy. I mean, this was a little bit like finding money in your pocket; we didn't expect to be able to watch these things. So, we were intentionally looking for movies that we wouldn't have watched otherwise. Suddenly, we found ourselves adding 90's rom-coms and always-on-cable fare to our list. Under normal circumstances, we probably wouldn't have looked twice at some of these options, but we were throwing our usual tastes to the wind for novelty's sake. I'm not going to lie, it felt sort of like a giant giggle-fest.

And that, my friends, is how we ended up watching "Hardball" one afternoon. It's sort of an inner-city version of "The Bad News Bears," with a bunch of ragtag kids learning to play some baseball. My favorite part, though, was that the movie has a sound track that reminded me of songs I heard from back then. It wasn't exactly an award-winning set of songs that has stood the test of time, but I did get a little nostalgic when hearing them.

Still, my favorite part was that the Mild Wife had never watched the movie or heard the songs before. She didn't have that same nostalgia for this, so when she heard the "Hardball" song, she reacted objectively. She's missing that "oh wow, haven't heard this in forever" thought, so she went immediately to, "uh, this is not the greatest song." Objectively, I know this, too. Emotionally, I sort of want to hear the song for old times' sake one more time. Let's just say that the Mild Wife disagreed with this notion.

To me, that was the cherry on top of an afternoon of whimsy. We were watching movies on a lark using a service we'd never tried before, and the Mild Wife was rightfully harumphing about so-so music. Maybe you just had to be there, but the whole thing culminated in even more giggling.

I suspect this is not the last time that we are going to giggle over something we watch on Amazon Prime.