Nostalgia Time: VHS Tapes

[Parasondox]

Good evening all,

Time to take another trip down memory lane. VHS, yes they weren't the best but you know what, some of the best movies in my childhood up was seen on VHS. Sinbad, The Silence of the Lambs, The Mummy, Godzilla, The Ten Commandments, Star Trek... okay I can go on forever.

Remember the days when you had to rewind the tape back to the beginning once you finished watching the movie? Remember the little frame glitches you would get at times? The sound of the VCR machine when you fast forward, rewind, pause or even eject the tape? Good times.

Yes things have changed with DVD's, Blu-Rays and On demand but nothing was more fun than having an actually physical wall of movies that were release on VHS a year pr so after the movie came out in cinemas. You had to wait a whole year. Now you just wait a few months. And all filmed in glorious Standard Definition. Fun times.

So what are your memories of VHS and do you still own some? What collections do you have and share the nostalgic fun.

 

[Ratty]

I cleaned out one of my VCRs yesterday[footnote]Those "cleaning tapes" they used to sell are uncommon these days but cleaning without one is simple. Just take the top off your VCR, put some rubbing alcohol on a paper towel, apply that to the side of the round metallic disc/cog that reads the tape and gently turn said disc a few times to clean it off.[/footnote] and played my almost 20 year old copy of the original (1933) King Kong while I did some housework. Yeah I still watch VHS occasionally. Usually just because I'll see a tape that catches my eye for cheap in a used store, or it's a movie I never bothered to upgrade to DVD.

You're right though, the cover art was the best part. Especially for the crappy low budget horror films http://www.critcononline.com/video_companies_cover_art.htm

 

[PFCboom]

It was a perfect tactile feel, all textured and smooth in all the right places.
Just a little weight, but light enough for any kids to run around with their favorite movies.
Putting the VHS into that VCR sounded great. Those clicks, clunks and whirs were like a drum-roll before your main presentation.
Even I, at single-digit ages, knew how to record. I haven't had experience with DVRs but being able to simply throw in a tape and hit "record" is hard to beat.
VHS cabinets. DVD racks are nice and neat, sure, but having that chest with swinging doors, filled with tapes, it's one of those little things I enjoyed.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

I always hated VHS. The cases are physically durable, but I feel like the actual tape tended to have problems far quicker than the new formats do. I'm not fond of having to sit in front of my TV fiddling with the Tracking button for a half hour just to get rid of static, only to have the static return five minutes later. This was admittedly a bigger problem with rented movies than ones I actually owned since I take care of my stuff... but still, back then, I rented a lot of movies (a Blockbuster employee once told me that my member account had more movie rentals than the next three highest member accounts combined).

I've sold or donated the vast majority of my VHS tapes by this point. The only ones I still have left are...

Spoiler

The Terminator
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
Predator
Alien/Aliens/Alien III/Alien: Resurrection/Alien Saga (Alien Legacy box set)
Commando
True Lies
The Running Man
Red Heat
Eraser
Deep Rising
Stargate
The Mummy
The Mummy Returns
Starship Troopers
Men in Black
Independence Day
Star Wars IV: A New Hope
Star Wars V: The Empire Strikes Back
Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi

... and almost all of them I have either DVDs or Blu-Rays of.

EDIT:
One thing worth noting is that there are a lot of cases where VHS is the only format that you can actually get a movie on. If you look at the overall library of movies on VHS, only like half of them ever actually made the transition over to DVD.

And additionally, some movies are different on VHS than they are on other formats. There are a lot of movies with different soundtracks on VHS than any other format because of licensing issues. And there are things that just change between formats. The big example is George Lucas' butchering of the Star Wars movies, but it's not the only example. For something smaller, watch The Terminator on VHS and take note of the sound effect used whenever Arnie fires the AMT Hardballer .45 Longslide (the handgun with the oldschool laser sight). The sound it makes when it fires is significantly different than the sound it makes on the DVD and Blu-Ray releases.

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

Ah, yes, the satisfying "ka chunk" of inserting or ejecting a VHS tape, nothing quite like it. The box art was great as well, since at the time they just used the actual movie posters, which likewise tended to be excellent. For whatever reason DVD and Blu-Ray releases have this tendency to get an intern to slap something together in photoshop and use it for the cover, even if there's a gorgeous hand painted (or at least designed by an actual artist) poster ready and waiting to be put on the box. It boggles the mind.

Also, probably the best thing about watching a movie on VHS is the trailers for movies that were new at the time, but are now 20 years old. If you watch a lot of random VHS tapes, it's not a bad way of finding out about interesting movies that are mostly forgotten these days.

Not to mention it's one of the few readily available ways to get many movies that have never been released to DVD or Blu-Ray in their original form. Laserdisc is better for that on quality, but it's more expensive and harder to find. I found a copy of the theatrical cut of THX 1138 on VHS in a thrift shop not too long ago. I don't think I've ever found a laser disc in one, and I've only ever seen two players, one of which was totally busted. I have literally found more software for the Phillips CD-I than I have laserdiscs around here.

Things I don't miss:

sub (yes, sub!) standard def image

Having to rewind the tape

Linear access, instead of random. What really sucks about this is the standard actually had a crude form of chapter stops, but I have yet to find a commercial tape that makes use of them, even though pretty much any player could read and write them.

Pan and Scam for everything. Out of my entire collection, maybe three or four movies on VHS are letterboxed."

The audio being limited to stereo (and for surround sound, prologic) at best, with the stereo track being unreliable and likely to have a ton of dropouts.

Oh, also, as far as the whole cleaning tape things being hard to find, in my experience most places that carry blank CDs and DVDs still have them, along with a few dusty old boxes of recordable VHS and audio cassette tapes, and potentially audio cassette cleaner/demagnitizers or some floppy disks. Old standards die hard, I guess. Staples still had some Zip disks last I checked, for that matter. Anyone remember those?

 

[dyre]

I have a collection of VHS Disney movies that were some of the first films I watched as a kid, but despite those good memories, I have no nostalgia for VHS itself. The quality sucked. It had to be rewinded, and I was always afraid that the VHS rewinder would rip the tape. Also, the damn thing has no write-protection...once I taped a copy of Jurassic Park on a VHS tape, only to see my dad tape over it with the Macy's parade or some shit >:|

 

[Owyn_Merrilin]

I have a collection of VHS Disney movies that were some of the first films I watched as a kid, but despite those good memories, I have no nostalgia for VHS itself. The quality sucked. It had to be rewinded, and I was always afraid that the VHS rewinder would rip the tape. Also, the damn thing has no write-protection...once I taped a copy of Jurassic Park on a VHS tape, only to see my dad tape over it with the Macy's parade or some shit >:|

There was a write protect tab that you could break off (and that came broken off on pre-recorded tapes), but it's another one of those features that people didn't know much about. You could actually record over a pre-recorded tape if you put a piece of masking tape over the spot where the write protect tab should be. Floppy disks, audio cassettes, and probably most other forms of magnetic media had something similar.

 

[dyre]

I have a collection of VHS Disney movies that were some of the first films I watched as a kid, but despite those good memories, I have no nostalgia for VHS itself. The quality sucked. It had to be rewinded, and I was always afraid that the VHS rewinder would rip the tape. Also, the damn thing has no write-protection...once I taped a copy of Jurassic Park on a VHS tape, only to see my dad tape over it with the Macy's parade or some shit >:|

There was a write protect tab that you could break off (and that came broken off on pre-recorded tapes), but it's another one of those features that people didn't know much about. You could actually record over a pre-recorded tape if you put a piece of masking tape over the spot where the write protect tab should be. Floppy disks, audio cassettes, and probably most other forms of magnetic media had something similar.

Well, damn. If only I knew this fifteen years ago...

 

[Scarim Coral]

Well remember the bad thing about it. I can't remember how it happened (I think the tape player just because faulty), all I did was watching Street Fighter: The animated movie and when I was rewinding it back, the player made a weird sound so I eject it but part of the tape (the beginning of the film) was all folded like when you don't iron your cloth. Yeah I did end up getting yell by my bro since it was his tape and this is before I know you can fix it by applying tower inbetween and iron it (or so I had been told).

I will say that I did had a good time recording my fav shows and film when they were on tv, something with the DVD lacked. granted these days it's no longer relevent to record them.

 

[Barbas]

Man, I used to have a big orange double-VHS box of Looney Tunes cartoons. There was one of Tom and Jerry cartoons as well. Both were great, but didn't really hold a candle to the epic Jason And The Argonauts. The stop-motion creatures in that film - my favourite being the skeletons, though Talos came close - were enchanting when I first saw them. The powerful score helped as well. What an experience.

 

[LaoJim]

Not experiencing a huge amount of nostalgia for VHS, the bad (rewarding, chewing up tapes) outweighs the good.

But in the spirit of the question...erm

Oh I know they were big, so when you bought something like a seasons box set you really felt like you were getting something substantial.

Other than that I've got nothing. Old Vinyl LPs though were great...

 

[Abe Mac]

Still remember cracking out the old VHS tapes of star wars every now and again. I don't know why, but I got the "special edition" or whatever the hell they are calling it on DVD and it just never feels the same as watching it on VHS, especially because of the fact that the VHS were on a fullscreen TV and I haven't seen one of those in at least 7 years.

 

[Sniper Team 4]

I have a lot of VHS tapes at my house. A lot of them are actually recorded shows from when I was in middle school. Toonami and whatnot. I have the Sailor Moon movies recorded on some. Good times.

However, there are two (technically four) VHS tapes that I treasure above all others. I have the original Star Wars trilogy on VHS, which means unedited 'real' version of the film. I think--assuming this DVD collection that I have is true--I also have the 'real' version on DVD, but I've never put the DVD in to check. It just says original theater version.

And the second is a VHS copy of The Hobbit. This one is important to me. I'm sure some of you have seen the cartoon movie. Well, how many of you have only seen the DVD version? Or watched it on youtube? That version is missing a great deal of content. The sound effects, and a few lines of dialogue, are not on the DVD version. They were cut out, or couldn't be copied, or whatever. It's very jarring, because the sound effects made the movie for me growing up. So I still hold the VHS tape and take good care of it.
Last year my friend, who had only ever seen the DVD version, watched the VHS tape with me and she was laughing so hard. She said she'd never be able to watch the DVD again because now she knew what she was missing.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Believe it or not I still use VHS players for work.

We're slowly pulling them out of teaching rooms but the larger lecture theaters will probably have them for years to come. Or until we run out of spares to install, either way it'll take some time to drop the format.

 

[Irridium]

I have a BUNCH of old VHS tapes with Three Stooges recorded on them. Made 'em with my dad, and when me and my brother were at his house and nothing was on TV, we popped 'em in and watched. So good.

My dad also has a collection of Star Trek VHS tapes in their own themed tin-case, and the original Star Wars trilogy on VHS.

As for movies, well Road to El Dorodo and Emperor's New Groove saw the most use, with Mulan and Pocahontas right behind 'em.

Also, dat sound when you put them in and eject them. Mmmmmm...

My dad also has a bunch of classic movies in quite a few containters. Of the ones I can remember there's Frankenstein, The Mummy, The Invisible Man, Wolfman, Frankenstein vs. The Mummy vs. Wolfman, Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Planet of the Apes, and TONS of Godzilla movies.

Now I want to watch some movies on VHS.

 

[NuclearKangaroo]

you watched movies on these things?

all this time i thought they were giant dominoes

 

[BaronVH]

One thing that was interesting, especially in light of people saying blu-rays are too expensive, is that some VHS tapes were as much as $125 the first several months of release. This was due to the video rental business. Also, once the price came down, were still the same or more than new releases on blu-ray today. There are some movies I have owned in more than four formats.

 

[Padwolf]

God I miss those days. I had a massive disney VHS collection. Many of my memories are about rewinding the tape to listen to a song over and over again. My family always had a huge film collection, it was so weird watching that slowly go from the tapes to the DVD's. I remember the night my parents threw out all the VHS tapes, it was so sad I did manage to scavenge my tape of The Little Mermaid. Aw and I remember when one of the saddest things ever was when a tape got chewed up, or stuck in the player. Never saw Pocahontus again until the DVD release.