We’ve done polls about ages and locations but I want to know how old you were when you saw a silent movie for the first time.
As always, I will share the results in about a week. If you don’t remember the exact answer, just offer up your best guess. We’re performing an online poll, so we’re not exactly setting the world on fire with scientific method here. As always, thanks so much for participating!
This will be fun!
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Movies Silently 
Before I was in elementary school, there used to be local morning and afternoon kid shows on TV that showed Sennett shorts – Keystone Cops, Ben Turpin, Fritz Pollard. I watched those a lot.
I was sixteen, although I was certainly no stranger to classic film in general 🙂
Am I cheating by including all the Max Fleischer cartoons, especiallly Koko the Clown, I watched on TV as a child? And others.
I… don’t see a poll on this page. Help? (For the record, my answer would be no older than five, thanks to my dad’s taste for Laurel & Hardy.)
Problem solved; it was a browser configuration issue. Carry on.
I was pretty young. My dad had (still has) an 8mm projector, along with several Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy and a few others. We loved them
I was probably about ten, watching slapstick comedies shown at the wrong speed. My first proper experience would be Phantom of the Opera at about fifteen.
West of zanibar with lon chaney
I remembers seeing The Phantom of the Opera on tv as a child and being young enough that I couldn’t read… It must have been sometime before the age of 6 or first grade.
Only when I got own children I realized that I had seen silent animation as a kid. Clearly silent storytelling had been so fluent that I had not paid any attention to the lack of speech.
Perhaps pantomime is like swimming – natural if one is small enough.
Probably 6 or 7, because Laurel and Hardy shorts aired on local television.
I was about 4 or 5 when Chaplin shorts were shown on local tv/boston area,..was mezmerized ever since.
Some of my earliest childhood memories are of flickers shown at home… Probably 16mm prints. I’m turning 70 this month so I’m figuring that was at least 67 years ago. I was fortunate to have a great grand father who was an early pioneer in the business, A.E. Smith one of the founders of Vitagraph.
I didn’t see any silent movies until my early 20s when the local PBS station showed several Harold Lloyd movies. Since then I have seen many silent movies of various genre.