Rewinding The Rewind...

Original Launch Promo From 1999

We're just 80's Movies fans who thought that this fun & vibrant decade deserved a good home on the web

We're also a proudly non-commercial site. We're just doing this for the love of these classic movies. We hate it when you visit a site and your monitor fills up with pop-ups, pop-unders and flashing banners that you can't get rid of... So you won't find any of that here, we promise!

This site started out in 1999 as the vision of one guy but became what it is today thanks to the contributions of 80's movie fans from around the world. Visitors to this site became the authors of new pages, trivia etc ...And so it goes on. With your help, we can together make a site worthy of this great decade...

History of The Site (Quite Boring!)

Nick Alaway, the founder and webmaster of fast-rewind.com started his non-commercial 80's movies sites on 6th August 1999 with the multi award winning Karate Kid Website. He quickly followed up with two more sites; one devoted to Breakin' [aka:Breakdance The Movie] and another for The Secret Of My Success.

Nick realised that the whole '80s era needed a proper home on the web, a shameless celebration that would reflect people's fondness for the era, without the mocking and derisory comments that filled the pages of so many of the 'fashionable' movie sites -something different to the commercial sites with their scant info and banner filled pages. Of course, this was the late 90s. Since then, the 80s, although still often sneered at, has since gained a bit more 'cred'.

It was a big task, but by the early part of 2000, the lime-green colored '80's Movies Gateway' site was boasting about 40 movie pages and not only a healthy flow of visitors, but soon people were writing asking if they could help.

As the site grew, Nick realised that authoring the site by hand and receiving submissions for pages by email was quickly becoming unmanageable, so set about designing his own content management system that could run the site. If you're really bored, you can read more about that here.

Not forgetting his other sites, in June 2000, he added the Last Dragon WebSite.

By the middle of 2001 the site was called the 80s Movies Rewind and running in a version that would stay until August 2008. To be honest, by 2008 it had passed its 'use-by' date by about 4 years, but house renovations and real life had delayed its re-development.

The original content management system just wasn't going to provide the sort of things that Nick wanted, so in late 2005 work started on an all new version of the site and the software that runs it. A few scribbled notes soon became a massive wish list and what had originally been hoped for about a years work, ballooned into nearly 3 years of hard slog! What had originally been planned as one big changeover eventually got broken down into a number of steps leading to the final new site which finally premiered at the end of August 2008.

90% of the work was on providing the technology platform on which the site is built. Its all unique to the rewind and provides many new features and provides fantastic future potential for the site to 'grow into'.

A Note About 'Design' From The Webmaster

I hope you like the new version of the site. I know its not perfect by any means, but the design look of the new site has been tough. No doubt about it. As always, I wanted a design that looked like it might have existed in the 80s. Flat colors, jagged lines, those slighty 'off' colors from the era... You get the picture.

It also had to be efficient. Very efficient. It would have been very tempting to fill the pages with large, luminous graphics and funny wavy lines, but then bandwidth would have quickly been a problem.

-The reason? We've broken each movie title into 8 pages of info... And we fully intend to fill them with the very best info including the best locations engine ever seen which is on its way soon. This actual info will be bandwidth hungry, so we wanted as little overhead on the other stuff as possible. Many sites share this goal. The IMDb, for instance, is a very simple design... But they're not trying to replicate the 80s look!

You just wouldn't believe how frustrating the whole design process has been. I'm not a web designer. I'm just a guy who loves movies. I'm sure that the end result could have been better, but I went through many tens of basic designs and hundreds of versions. What you see is always going to be a 'work in progress' and the best that I could do whilst retaining at least a bit of my sanity!

Proudly Free Of Spam

As mentioned above, despite pressure from the costs of running the site, which I pay for out of my own pocket, I've always managed to keep it 'proudly spam-free'. I just feel that pop-ups, pop-unders, flashing banners and all that other stuff are a major pain and not worth ruining the site for. I've tried hard to make a site that I'd want to visit myself -- and I hope you agree...

My Big Thank You's...

My heartfelt thanks goes out to all of the site's supporters, members contributors and visitors -without you, none of this would have happened. There truly are a cast of thousands who deserve a big 'thank you', but I'd like to single out the following especially:

Kara Petty is my long suffering partner, who spent hundreds of painful days sitting at a PC non stop entering stuff into the new system, checking stuff and other dreadful repetetive tasks. Literally tens of thousands of entries... Not to mention her unflagging moral support. There aren't enough grateful words.

This goes for my whole family too. I'm sorry that I just haven't been around as much as I should.

Paul Shrimpton and Eric Wright both moderate the forums and its a thankless task that requires so much patience and dedication. Thanks guys.

Simon Barber is a founding contributor and good friend. Thanks man for your patience and gentle advice. I'm so sorry that I've been so self absorbed during this gig and probably made you feel unappreciated.

Piers Harbour hosts the server, manages it and patiently puts up with my requests for help while charging me the absolute minumum he can. Thanks Pi. Without you I'd truly have never got anywhere.

Stuart Fitzgerald is my cousin and founding contributor and all-round good bloke. You're the Guv! Thanks to you, your lovely wife Samantha and her family for my great visits to SF. Can't wait for more fun on one of our infamous locations scouting trips, Guv.

...I would also like to dedicate this site to the memory of Daisy Warner whose guiding influence and encouragement will always be with me.

-Nick Alaway, Webmaster.

From The Archive: Original Site Logo From The Very First Version Of This Site as launched in March, 2000