An appealing trip to the West Coast of the USA in 1991

The super 8 film featured in this post on Vintage Home Movies is the most recent movie on the site being filmed in 1991 during a appealing trip to the West Coast of the USA.

About the film

As I said above, the film was shot in Super 8 and I purchased it recently as part of a three reel bundle on eBay. It is a 5 inch, 200 foot reel and was the smallest of the bundle because the other reels were both 7 inch, 400 foot reels.

It is quite unusual to find film shot in the 1990s because by that point most home movie makers had moved onto using video tape rather than film. This would probably have been in the form of a VHS-C Camcorder and although the image quality of these was considerably worse than a decent Super 8 movie camera, the convenience of not having to wait for processing and not needing specialist projection equipment meant that for the majority, film was dead.

All I can say is I’m really glad the photographer who took this film stuck with their Super 8 camera because the film they produced is really good quality, very interesting and is quite appealing.

I didn’t need to do any real detective work finding the locations shown because they are actually recorded on an index page inside the plastic box the film was supplied in. The date is also written on the box, ‘May 1991 USA Trip’. In fact, I wish I could find the photographer’s full catalogue of films because the three I have, dating from June 1982, June 1986 & May 1991 suggest they would be an interesting collection.

Some images from the film

Below is a gallery of images which I’ve taken from the film of the West Coast of the USA. It shows the variety of different locations the family went to, and some of the famous landmarks they saw.

The Film of the West Coast of USA Trip

The film of the trip to the West Coast of the USA is shown below.

The opening few minutes were recorded in the Ghost Town of Calico, in California which gives a flavour of what an old wild west town would have been like in the late 19th Century. There are images of an old steam engine of the sort I remember Casey Jones driving (that gives away my age), and typical dry, dusty scenery of the sort most old western films are full of.

The next scenes show the party entering a large city, which I assume is probably Los Angeles since the film features the Hollywood bowl and the Chinese Theatre, Los Angeles. There are a few views around the city and at the Bowl itself, before the film moves to Disneyland where the majority of the filming takes place.

All in all an interesting film of a family’s trip to the West Coast, and one I’m sure they looked back on with much enjoyment.