Their heyday has largely passed, but for decades, novelizations played an important part in movie marketing. These quasi-novels, based on the screenplays for major motion pictures, were rushed out in cheap paperback form to bookstores everywhere. Before VHS, DVD, and streaming video took over, these flimsy books were just about the only way to relive movies once they had left theaters. Today, vintage novelizations are weird curios from a time gone by, prized by some collectors but largely forgotten. What becomes of these obsolete, utterly ephemeral volumes? For one thing, a site called Audiobooks For The Damned has been dutifully turning them into audio recordings and sharing them with the public for free. The site’s YouTube channel, still updated regularly, is a gloriously ridiculous exercise in nostalgia. Each video lasts in the neighborhood of four to seven hours. That’s how long it takes to read, for instance, the novelizations for Back To The Future Part II or Squirm word for word. It’s difficult to say which is the oddest inclusion here. The surprisingly ornate novel of cult favorite Clue, maybe?
Or maybe this spoken word rendering of Saturday Night Fever, minus all the music and dancing: