I think everybody remembers a while back I was making plans to get some movies to donate to the local library since their video selection is rather poorly. Well last July I had a box full of them, all tested to make sure they ran, all checked to make sure they weren't ex-rentals, etc., and I took them down to see if they wanted them. The librarian who sorted through them had doubts about all the ones she hadn't seen, she wasn't sure if they ought to take the Rambo movies because she wasn't familiar with them. She wasn't sure about My Girl because she didn't know about it, or Return to Oz, didn't want the original Halloween, and she rejected the original Garfield cartoons since she wasn't sure about them, as well as the silent horror/mystery classics Phantom of the Opera and The Cat and the Canary, though she did take the Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin DVDs.

Maybe I'm wrong, maybe nobody would've wanted the ones that she didn't approve of and sent back with me, but I think they should've kept them to try, and if nobody did, they could pull them for the next sale later on.

In the end though they DID take:

21 Jump Street, Season 1
First Blood
First Blood II
Scarface (1982)
The Best of Buster Keaton
Buster Keaton: The General and Steamboat Bill Jr.
Charlie Chaplin: The Kid and Tillie's Punctured Romance
My Girl
When a Stranger Calls (1978)
The Pagemaster
The Neverending Story
The Neverending Story II
Thelma & Louise
Matilda
Return to Oz
Dennis the Menace (1993)
Highlander
East of Eden
Alice in Wonderland (1933)
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
Fahrenheit 451
Metropolis (1927)
Dog Day Afternoon
The Poseidon Adventure
Boom! A documentary of Hollywood's Greatest Disaster Movies
Harold and Maude

And they rejected:

Phantom of the Opera
The Cat and the Canary
The Towering Inferno
Earthquake
Mad Max
Garfield as Himself
Garfield's Feline Fantasies
Garfield's Holiday Celebration
Garfield Travel Adventures
Labyrinth
Halloween
Freaks (1932)

Now in the last couple of weeks I have noticed that of the ones they kept, and put out, Rambo 1 and 2, Scarface, 21 Jump Street, both Buster Keaton DVDs, Charlie Chaplin, The Pagemaster, Dennis the Menace, Return to Oz, and BOOM! have all been checked out, some more than once. Those are just the ones that I know are off the shelf currently. I'm glad that people are getting some use out of the ones they kept but I wish they'd been more open minded about the rest. I do think that's a weird policy though that if you're not familiar with a movie, you won't take it. That's just my opinion though, what's everyone else think about it?

Well, around here, they would have taken them all, but put them all directly for sale. Very few donations to our library go into circulation. They are just saved for the semi-annual sales.

since yours takes DVDs for circulation, I am surprised they didn't take the Garfields.

I'm surprised too because who doesn't love Garfield? And these are the ORIGINAL cartoons, before the crappy computer animated one on CN now, before he was a Saturday morning cartoon, not everybody is going to have these.

And yeah, these probably would've wound up on a sale except I found out when the closest sale was, kept them for a week after, then took them down and specifically explained they were for the movie inventory, NOT the book sale. Though I still have the ones they rejected and the horror movies and the Garfield holiday one I'm going to take down again and see if they want them closer to Halloween. Maybe by then they'll have changed their minds.

So she took the Rambo movies Highlander and Scarface but not Mad Max? Movies have an MPAA rating, so it should be easy enuf to know appropriateness for age. IDK why libraries don't do an age appropriate loan like they do in the movies. That way they should even have NC-17.

Still her decision seems rather arbitrary.

Even our cat Fancy loved the Garfield movie, she sat and watched the entire movie. How old was the librarian? The head librarian here is still fairly young and I suspect she would have taken the lot.

Suzi wrote:

Even our cat Fancy loved the Garfield movie, she sat and watched the entire movie. How old was the librarian? The head librarian here is still fairly young and I suspect she would have taken the lot.

She is I guess in her 60s, so yeah that might have something to do with it, but the part that I REALLY cannot believe is that she didn't know anything about Rambo. That makes no sense because even if you've never seen the movies, you have a general idea what they're about and know they're a big hit and very popular.

Shale wrote:

So she took the Rambo movies Highlander and Scarface but not Mad Max? Movies have an MPAA rating, so it should be easy enuf to know appropriateness for age. IDK why libraries don't do an age appropriate loan like they do in the movies. That way they should even have NC-17.

Still her decision seems rather arbitrary.

Our library has no age restrictions like a video store does, so a child can get anything on their card, even the R-rated movies, which thrilled me because even after we got our video card limits changed, it would still go back to if it wasn't rated or if it was R rated we had to have our dad come down and clear it out. And I really don't think anybody has a problem with the library allowing this because around here you never hear about anybody complaining that their child got something 'inappropriate'.

How could you have gotten rid of Matilda??????????????????????????????

Tony Marino wrote:

How could you have gotten rid of Matilda??????????????????????????????

Because I have my own copy.

Supernova wrote:

Because I have my own copy.

Ah ok I love that Movie!

Tony Marino wrote:

Ah ok I love that Movie!

Me too! Though I do wish they would've done the scene from the book where early into her lessons in punishing the family, Matilda makes them all believe the house is haunted by borrowing a classmate's parrot and stuffing him up the fireplace and letting him squawk and talk all night long.