(CNN) — If the future of in-flight entertainment is virtual reality headsets, and the present is movies, music and Wi-Fi, the past was a more wholesome affair involving cards, conversation and cocktails.

Today airlines are tripping over themselves to offer the latest digital thrills to avoid stop passengers voting with device-obsessed fingers and deserting to more tech-savvy rivals.

But back in the day, flying as a "thing" was enough of a novelty. As the images above of yesteryear flying fun supplied by our friends at AirlineRatings.com reveal, if you needed any extra entertainment, you mostly provided it yourself, or got stuck into the free booze.

Full story here.

Were airplanes more fun before movies?

 Here’s a quick answer for you: absolutely not. Are you fucking kidding me with this question? Is this what journalism has come to? Of course airplanes weren’t more fun before movies! Airplanes still aren’t fun. You get into a steel death trap that makes your ears pop and you get self conscious that someone’s going to walk in on you pooping at 25,000 feet. You spend 2 to 24 hours without enough space, feeling like your feet are falling off, dreading death, fighting with every inch of passive aggressive rage you have to carve out an extra inch of elbow space.

Airplanes are just less boring than they used to be. Thank god we have movies to distract us from whatever “worst-case scenario” is playing out in front of our eyes. Dude throwing up? Put in those headphones and dig into Arrival. Baby shit its pants? Get ready to rewatch Ocean’s 11 for the twelfth fucking time. Is there an exception to the rule? Sure there is! Of course one out of a hundred times you end up sitting next to a total babe, and you spend the next twenty minutes wishing you had the social wherewithal to start a conversation that doesn’t make you look like a weirdo, before finally falling asleep and drooling all over yourself. But 99 times out of a hundred you just end up sitting next to the same hairy, snoring, dude with sharp elbows like you always do.

The second you set foot on an airplane you should be thinking about nothing other than getting off of the airplane. That’s just the way it is. I don’t care what it takes to get through that flight: movie, booze, Benadryl or all of the above- but give it to me.