VHS nostalgia, memories?

[Scott123]

Not sure this is the right category, but couldn't find one that really fits it?

Does anyone kind of miss VHS? I sort of do, but I suppose it doesn't make that big a difference, cause I like DVDs too. Maybe I miss it because of memories I have of going to the video store and renting movies with a former girlfriend and spending the weekend watching movies. That, and I actually liked the sub par quality of the picture, or seeing old commercials from tapes I recorded years ago.

So what are your opinions, memories etc. Please share. 

[Rev. Powell]

The big advantage of VCRs was that it made it easy to tape things off TV. I had a HUGE collection of movies copied off of Showtime, Cinemax, etc.

[Archivist]

I don't miss VHS tapes per se, but I do have many great memories of the VHS days.

Picture being a kid in the 80's, and you're in one of the first families you know to have a VHS machine.  Suddenly, the morning cartoons you miss because you have to go to school can be recorded for you to watch later!  The shows you love, like David Attenborough's Life On Earth and Leonard Nimoy's In Search Of can be preserved.

At first, you go with your Dad to the local 7-Eleven, and together you leaf through the white plastic sheets containing VHS covers.  There's Drama, Romance, but for a young teenage kid, the best sections are Action and Science Fiction.  There are sometimes glimpses of the covers of Adult movies, but they are far and few between.  You sometimes wish you also had a Betamax machine at home, because a number of the REALLY cool movies only seem to be on Beta.

As the popularity of VHS increases, rental stores begin to appear.  And now there are walls and walls of bookshelves, with thick plastic boxes arranged like a shop.  80's movie posters burn themselves into your brain, with their garish and often gruesome cover art and taglines.  Your Dad becomes friends with the local VHS rental shop owner, and your bedroom becomes plastered with original posters from movies like Dune, The Terminator, The Ninja Mission, and many more.

You can't watch the R-rated movies because you're too young, but the box art and descriptions make you create movies of your own inside your mind.  You shudder at cover art of movies like Xtro and Bloodsucking Freaks, or the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, not knowing that in years to come, you'll see those movies and chuckle at how bad they really were.

And one of the best parts about the VHS experience is not just the movie itself, but the trailers.  You rented a B-grade action movie like Missing In Action?  You'll see trailer after trailer of more hard punching, head kicking action.  What about Metalstorm?  Prepare for even more craptacular sci-fi goodness.

Fast-forward a few decades.  You now have a computer with terabytes of movies and TV shows at your fingertips.  A collection of DVD's and blu ray discs threatens to burst out of a large cabinet.  Your VHS collection, including dozens of tapes recorded from the TV, is just waiting for you to buy a conversion kit so you can digitally archive everything.  Your entire CD collection of hundreds of albums can fit on a few pieces of plastic, smaller than postage stamps.

And now you're typing on a forum, reminiscing about the days of going to the video store, and enjoying the online company of likeminded souls.

Don't get me started on cassette tapes.   

[Trevor]

I still have quite a few VHS tapes - and a good player - but I'm focused on DVD (and BluRay in the future) now.

This was the first VHS I rented in 1987: I screened it in class to illustrate a review I wrote of Alistair MacLean and his work I wrote.

[Skull]

I was in a vhs movie club (they would mail new releases to your house - or send a card to say "nope") I got stuck paying 90 dollars for Aliens (1986) - Sure Aliens was a awesome move but it wasn't worth 90 dollars!!!!

[tracy]

I kinda miss VHS though I can remember when one blank tape cost $20 and movies were between $59 and $89 . I remember just before Star Wars came out on VHS we bought a bootleg tape from a local video store owner for $100 cash. The quality wasn't excellent but we all sat in the livingroom sipping sparkling grape juice....we were all under 18...and watching our movie before anyone else. It probably wasn't the only copy he'd sold but that never occurred to us. We paid way too much to supposedly watch it first.

[JaseSF]

I miss VHS tapes but most of all VHS rental stores (or those that were even offered in local Mom and Pop stores). The experience of going out and searching for a movie and then watching it with family and/or friends made it seem like an event in your life every time. Have a lot of good memories of those times, of looking at the garish cover art that made the bad movies seem so much better than they actually were, seeing all kinds of 80s comedies with nudity bits as those were the films Dad liked best. I miss when movies weren't so easily available as it is now for most people. I recall waiting for upcoming rentals as they would be listed ahead of time with those listed what would be available soon. Using blank VHS tapes I recorded a ton of stuff off TV and I actually still have a lot of it now. Now I love DVDs and BluRays nowadays but yet there was something about the sturdy VHS tapes and many have lasted me for more than 30+ years as long as the tape didn't get caught in the machine (not to say there haven't been a few to get VHS rot).

[Archivist]

I kinda miss VHS though I can remember when one blank tape cost $20 and movies were between $59 and $89 . I remember just before Star Wars came out on VHS we bought a bootleg tape from a local video store owner for $100 cash. The quality wasn't excellent but we all sat in the livingroom sipping sparkling grape juice....we were all under 18...and watching our movie before anyone else. It probably wasn't the only copy he'd sold but that never occurred to us. We paid way too much to supposedly watch it first.

There was a period of time when I would buy boxes of ten 3-hour TDK tapes, and chew through them in a couple of months recording the TV.  Now it's so much easier with harddrive recorders and blu-ray burners, but there was a charm to having stacks of tapes.

Being in Australia, we have been using the PAL system for decades, whereas all the 'good stuff' from America was a) in NTSC, b) required a multi-system player and c) ludicrously expensive if you bought an American import.  In the early 90's anime boom, a single American VHS containing two episodes of a show cost about $60-80 in Australia.  It was mad.  But it was the only way to get what you wanted if the show wasn't distributed by an Australian company.

In the mid-90's, I was friends with a guy who knew a guy, and he was able to get new American releases before they made it to Australia.  I never sipped sparkling grape juice while watching these things, but that image does bring a smile to my face.

[Trevor]

Being in Australia, we have been using the PAL system for decades

Here too. Now it's Region 2 and Region B 

[Archivist]

Being in Australia, we have been using the PAL system for decades

Here too. Now it's Region 2 and Region B 

Heck, I've never sat down and looked at region codes properly.  All I know is that that it is difficult to get a region free blu ray player in Australia, although you can often get the DVD region settings changed to universal.  At least with a DVD/blu ray player it can be switched, but you were out of luck if you wanted to play an NTSC tape on a PAL machine, or vice versa.  There were some machines that could take a NTSC tape and export in PAL, but they were super expensive.

After some years, we bought multi-region VHS players from overseas, as nothing of that type existed in Australia at that time.  Tapes were played!

[RCMerchant]

I still have way more VHS tapes than DVD's-I usta buy them from mail order companies-long gone.
I bought a bootleg copy of  ABBY (1974)-the blaxsploitation take on the EXORCIST -from some defunct Canadian company called Video Vortex.
I found ads in Fangoria and Psychotronic Video for all these obscure tape companies-and still have lotsa old catalogs from them-and I still have lotsa them old big box clamshell wonders.
My favorite was Sinister Cinema-they had lots of trashy public domain titles-I ordered lotsa stuff from them-stuff I couldn't find in the rental stores-like the SADIST (1963),TNT JACKSON (1974) the BRAIN THAT WOULDNT DIE (1959),the BRIDE OF THE MONSTER (1955),the ASTOUNDING SHE MONSTER (1957)WHITE ZOMBIE (1932) and KILL BABY KILL (1966).

[claws]

I spend most of my teen years and beyond browsing aisles at video rental stores. Loved it. Renting movies was always a big deal and an exciting event. Some nostalgic memories:

- buying my first VHS movie, Purple Rain (1984) on day of release. I believe it was priced something like $24.95 instead of the usual $70+ which was standard for tapes back then.
- renting Re-Animator (1985) and Batman (1989) the weekend before official street date (which usually was a Tuesday) because these two rental places broke street date, intentional or not. Made me jump with joy on both occasions.
- grabbing a meatball sandwich, a bag of chips and a can of cherry coke on our way home from checking out movies.
- winning a couple of movies at a rental store raffle: Demoniac (1975), The Best of Sex and Violence (1981) and Terminal Island (1977). They were obviously trying to get rid off old stock that happened to be Wizard Video movies, but I didn't mind at all.
- a Vestron Video booklet listing all their releases (up until 1985) with synopsis, poster art and format availability became my personal bible. Wish I still had that booklet. I have searched the internet and e-bay for many years but it seems like it never existed :(
- miss those video promotion standees, counter top displays and what not. One rental place had a rather cool hanging display promoting the VHS release of The Amityville Curse (1989). It was the Amityville house made of cardboard with blinking red lights inside. The movie was crap but that blinking thingie was awesome.
- video store employees putting candy in our bag of rentals during the week of Halloween.
- getting free coffee and being seated next to the heater when checking in to rent movies on a cold winter's day.
- video store employees actually calling us on the phone to inform us that our reserved movies were in.
- some rental places didn't have reservation, and it was ok to wait at the store for returns. One time we waited four hours for The Terminator (1984), Mutant (1984) and Razorback (1984).
- movies we never rented but would always mock or comment on at the rental store because they looked like crap: House of Psychotic Women and Invasion of the Blood Farmers.
- first really bad movie rental that made us angry was Fiend (1980).
- my first annoying encounter with MacroVision was trying to make a VHS copy of Weird Science (1985). It wouldn't let me. I finally could by making a copy to betamax. The Manhattan Project (1986) had the most aggressive MacroVision encoding. The image would flicker and colors fade even if you didn't try to make a copy.
- my VHS player ripping the tape of Delirious (1991) after rewinding. I've fixed the torn tape with scotch tape after cutting open the security stickers with a razor. The video store never noticed.
- buying a still sealed copy of Scream (1981) for $3 when one of our rental places was going out of business.


I could go on and on but that's it for the moment :)

[Scott123]

Thanks for all the cool replies ... guess I'm not alone. As I said, I do like DVDs as well, but have some very fond memories the VHS days. Glad I didn't throw what I have out. In fact, I even plan on adding to the collection ... there are a lot of flea market type places that are just trying to get rid of their VHS movies .... usually for no more than a buck. 

[voltron]

VHS rules. Don't get me wrong, dvd's and BD's are excellent but there's so much wonderful crap on VHS that will probably never make it to dvd. I have a lot of great memories renting tapes at my local video store but there's just too many to mention. One thing I do remember is  (and I've mentioned this a few times before) renting a pre hype and pre dvd copy of Black Christmas which was mindblowing because I'd heard nothing about the film before. It was more obscure back then I guess.

[RCMerchant]

VHS rules. Don't get me wrong, dvd's and BD's are excellent but there's so much wonderful crap on VHS that will probably never make it to dvd. I have a lot of great memories renting tapes at my local video store but there's just too many to mention. One thing I do remember is  (and I've mentioned this a few times before) renting a pre hype and pre dvd copy of Black Christmas which was mindblowing because I'd heard nothing about the film before. It was more obscure back then I guess.

It was VERY obscure-it came on vhs in the early 80's-and folks thought it was SILENT NIGHT.DEADLY NIGHT-the Santa with an axe.It nothing realyl like the other"holiday" horror films-it starred Margot Kidder! Of SISTERS!!! It may have been the first of the "holiday killers" movies.
It's not a real good movie-but it is a landmark in the history of slasher films...I think.

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