All this stuff was made in high cost countries in the early 80s, manufacturing was still in the US Or Japan at this point and by the 80s Japan was not really a "cheap" country.
That had a lot to do with it. Consumers were not used to getting cheap electronics yet nor was collecting media normalized except LPs and Cassettes (mid-80s). Stuff was expensive and people just didn't buy as much of it.
We had a VCR really early cause my father worked at GE in the early 80s in a TV/VCR/Cable TV division. He got the VCR free I think at work. The only time we got new movies was when one of his co-workers would bring a VCR over and they would hook the two up and pirate movies. FWIW that early VCR lasted 20+ years.. it was built like a tank and I remember tearing it apart in the 2000s along with a broken Samsung from the early 2000s and comparing the two and it was pretty fascinating how things had changed.
I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies cause they were so expensive. We had the 3 SW movies and Superman 2 and I watched those over and over.
Computer equipment was the same way, just about out of reach for most. My dad moved into network equipment and internet stuff by the mid 80s and we had a PC or Mac almost all the way through the 80s but it was always a loading dock discard that my father would grab from work before the computer went into the trash when they upgraded. I don't think he ever paid a dime for a computer till about 1993. When I went to college in 1995 I bought a laptop and it was an obscene purchase for an 18 year old, I could have bought a pretty nice used car instead.
Most of us in the 80s taped Star Wars off network TV (including ads) - they used to show it once a year. And for some reason you could see the masks around the TIE fighters against the star background. When I was visiting my parents for Christmas last year we watched the Ewok Adventure that we had taped on VHS and the most interesting parts were the ads!
> 1985: The original Star Wars film was re-released on VHS, LaserDisc, and Capacitance Electronic Disc (CED) with an improved audio mix. The LaserDisc and CED sped the film up by 3% to fit onto a single disc.[10][b]
> 1993: The original trilogy was released on LaserDisc as "The Definitive Collection". With the exception of a new THX audio mix, scratch and dirt removal, and color balance changes, it matched the original theatrical releases.[10]
> 1995: The original trilogy was re-released on VHS with THX audio, advertised as the final release of the theatrical versions.[12][13][14]
I'm guessing the '93 LaserDisc (like the '95 VHS) lacked those obvious matting artifacts on some of the space shots, but the '85 release still had them.
a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies
Yup. For me it was Risky Business, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and probably a few others.
Freshman year of college my roommate had a VCR. We learned that if we hooked up the VCR's RF output not to the TV input, but to the antenna, we could broadcast movies to the couple of neighboring rooms in the dorm.
It was still relatively common at that time for VCRs and gaming consoles to have an RF pass through and would broadcast on channel 3 or 4. You just tuned the TV to that channel.
Yup. My grandfather worked for Zenith for 50 years, and he lived in Chicago, and was the head of quality control for factories that made TV’s that were literally in Chicago.
It seems inconceivable today but people in the US used to make consumer electronics. The fact that we don’t any more was a catastrophic policy decision not some kind of law of nature.
"September 30, 1990. HOW DID Japan destroy the American television industry? The secret history of that strategy reveals how Japanese manufacturers and the Japanese government first created an anti-competitive cartel ..."
https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:iVdEh3...
> The fact that we don’t any more was a catastrophic policy decision
One effect of this is that the US and China are economically interconnected. It makes war a lot harder. It's why the EU is dragging its feet on oil and gas from Russia because that's the one Russian export they need.
Yes and our supply chain is a house of cards that was bound to melt down one day because of a shock and finally did. And the industrial base of the country's interior has endured two generations of economic collapse leading to widespread misery and political upheaval.
The free trade and industrial policy decisions of the 90's and early 2000's will go down in history as era-defining mistakes in this county's political history.
I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies cause they were so expensive.
Or you had parents like mine. They used a lot of blank tapes, which held 6 hours worth of stuff. 3 movies each, that was. I think my parents saved up for it in the mid-80s.
Back then, the cable companies used to run weekends with free HBO, Showtime, Disney (which was a premium channel back then) and so on. Hours of movies. Hours of looney tunes cartoons. Hours of old TV from Nick at Night, Nickelodeon's nighttime programming for adults. (So much I love Lucy and Dick van Dyke shows). Some still had commercials, but we didn't care. It was really nice during times without cable. I thnk they finally got rid of a lot of them about 15 years ago when their final VCR broke.
> That had a lot to do with it. Consumers were not used to getting cheap electronics yet nor was collecting media normalized except LPs and Cassettes (mid-80s). Stuff was expensive and people just didn't buy as much of it.
Not quite - the movie studios hadn't figured out they could sell way more tapes to consumers than video rental stores, so they lowered the prices to $19.95-24.95 in the late 80's.
> I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies cause they were so expensive. We had the 3 SW movies and Superman 2 and I watched those over and over.
Yeah, 80s/90s kid here and I think by the end of the VHS era we owned about a dozen movies on VHS, including the Star Wars trilogy and maybe half a dozen animated kids' movies, plus three or four movies taped off TV. Anything else had to be a rental (and we almost never rented new movies because they were super expensive to rent, and nb that "new" might mean "was in theaters within the last 5 years")
I watched those ~15 total movies (commercial and recorded-off-TV combined) a lot of times.
Laptops were a thing well before 1995. Mine was a 486, I don't remember seeing any laptops before 386s but they existed and Apple had laptop/notebook machines in the pre-PPC era as well. But $3000-5000 was totally normal for laptops till the late 1990s.
Technically they were already "notebooks" in 1995. Everything today counts as a Notebook I think if you consider the original definitions. Something like the "Macintosh Portable" would have been a "laptop" but not a "notebook" by the old school definitions. Modern definitions basically say a laptop is a big huge notebook with fans and optical drive whereas a "notebook" is basically an Ultrabook.
In the 80s laptop and luggable were different things. The entire computer didn't fit into the screen + keyboard portions of a clamshell.
When I went to college (for CS) in 1995 it was rare to have a personal laptop, slightly less rare to have a desktop PC. By 1997 all the incoming freshman at the school had IBM Thinkpads.
Laptops that look like today's laptops were well established by 1995. I still have a Compaq I got in 96 that still runs Windows 2000. I bought my first laptop in Akihabra in 1989, before they were widely available outside Japan. It also looked like today's laptops (was roughly the size of a notebook, uniform thickness, much thicker than its width/height), which was I recall a new thing that year. But long before that there was a gradual progression towards that "genesis-laptop" stage. There were "luggable" PCs that used display technology that wasn't LCD (gas discharge?). I remember those used by field personnel back to around 1986.
Yes, Toshiba. It was marketed in Japan as the "Dynabook". I haven't been able to find the actual model number from archive information yet. Possibly a Japan-only model. It had a floppy drive and an 8088, monochrome LCD screen. I remember it could run Turbo Pascal.
My dad was a b2b salesman and his company gave him a compaq portable ~1990 [1]. They weren't super common yet, but businesses were starting to use them. I loved when he brought it home because it was way better for games than the pc we had.
If you relax laptop to mean functionally portable, then reasonable commercial variations existed since the early 80s. Not with a clam-shell form factor, but designed to travel with you. By late 80s you had things that looked a bit like current laptops, e.g. NEC ultralight.
I had an Apple PowerBook 520c in 1994. The "c" was for "color", they still had a greyscale version! One of the best laptops I've ever owned actually. It was the first laptop (from any manufacturer I think) with a trackpad.
Oh check out the HP 110 from 1984!. [1] I lusted heavily after them but could never afford one. There was an editor and spreadsheet included so it was fully functional. It was far lighter than later portable competition like Compaq and Kaypro luggables. Speaking from experience you didn't really need or want to park a Compaq on your lap, just the keyboard.
Then you don't know about the PowerBook 5300, arguably one of the worst computers ever made. We had one and though it never did set on fire, it was pretty crappy.
In me memory it was "Raiders of the Lost Ark" that was released for less than $30 that blew the VHS movie market wide open. Maybe it was "Top Gun" or "E.T." though.
It was pretty crazy though when movies were like $99 on VHS.
Of course, I'm also old enough to remember seeing a single Japanese import of "Wings Greatest Hits" on compact disc for like $300 in a high-end audio store.
And going further off topic, I remember that when the CD was released and cost around $20, the record companies assured us the price would drop to that of the vinyl record (which was often about $12 or so at that time).
There have always been some sort of price games in the entertainment industry. When you have the rights to an artist, finding the same thing cheaper somewhere else just isn't an option.
Well, except for piracy. I also remember a store in the college town I went to that rented records (and CD's?) and sold blank audio cassettes....
I'm 99% certain it was Top Gun, and also, IIRC, it was because it had a Pepsi ad bundled with it before the movie (a somewhat groundbreaking move at the time). That subsidized the 'cost' of the movie on tape, reportedly.
EDIT: looked a bit more. Diet Pepsi, not Pepsi, and it was 1986. Article I just found said it was only dropping the price from $29 to $26, so the bigger price drop was likely/possibly something else before that. My memory was that that Top Gun / Pepsi thing was the big deal that changed the VHS pricing, but it's been 30+ years so I'm likely misremembering...
Didn't Top Gun also break sound ground with Dolby Surround? Maybe I'm thinking of the Laser Disc or a re-release VHS? I recall it being some fantastic demo material for the time.
>It was pretty crazy though when movies were like $99 on VHS.
Yes! They touched on this in the Netflix documentary The Last Blockbuster[1], where an old exec claims that any video copy displaced a huge number of movie viewings, so they came up with a high price to charge for them.
It showed a picture of The Empire Strikes Back with a $99 price tag, which, if you assume it was 1982, would be like $290 today.[2]
According to the documentary, that only changed after someone bought the (expensive) videos and started renting them out, which led to a court case that affirmed the First Sale Doctrine and said you had the right to do that. Then eventually, the video rental stores got the studios to agree to "have all the copies you want, as long as we get a cut of the rental revenues".
[1] About the history of Blockbuster, framed around the last surviving location, a franchisee (in Bend, Oregon) that pays a fee to keep using the brand.
Priced to rent vs. priced to buy. There was a period when priced to rent was the default but certain movies would get released (sometimes later) at a lower priced to buy price, especially things like animation that kids would want to watch over and over.
He mentions that studios assumed people copied rented tapes, but I have to imagine that was relatively uncommon. Not many people had two VCRs, and by the time VCRs got cheap enough that people started to have multiples, most rental VHS tapes were protected by MacroVision[0] copy protection. Which was relatively easy to bypass if you knew what you were doing but wasn’t something the average home movie viewer was going to bother with.
My father in law has a room completely filled with VCR tape copies. My wife tells me that they weren’t allowed to mention them since they attended a church that an FBI agent also attended. The FBI agents job was looking for people making copies of Copyright material (I presume on a larger scale than my FIL). In the nearly 3 decades I’ve visited their home, I’ve never seen anyone watch a single one of those VCR tapes. LOL
If they tried they'd probably be unwatchable. VHS tapes degrade over time by just existing, you don't have to watch them for them to degrade. In the late 90's I was a part of a group on Usenet that digitized old VHS tapes. Though the tech at the time didn't allow for very good digitization.
I watched some 90's videotapes from the early days of movies being sold at affordable prices at my parents house last year. VHS quality has always been poor compared to DVD, but they didn't seem particularly degraded.
They have been sitting in a climate controlled room all that time.
You probably haven’t watched a VHS tape recently. I’ve not come across one that’s degraded by simply sitting on a shelf (or in a garage that got up to 120ºF each summer for the past nearly 20 years.
Hang on, “unwatchable” or “degraded”? Maybe you don’t remember what a brand new VHS tape should look like, but they definitely do degrade steadily over time even when properly stored. Not to say they’re guaranteed “unwatchable”, but definitely degraded.
Yeah, I probably worded that wrong. And that degradation is why we were digitizing them. We wanted the best quality we could get with what we had. The movies we were working on were out of print and would never be released again in any form.
Is that depredation measurable in any way? Not DVD or LaserDisc quality, but much better than I remembered. I’ve put on some tapes that I was actually surprised they looked as good as they did (on a much nicer Trinitron CRT than I ever had when the tapes were new).
Not that I know of. It's just an observation that our group of about 15 people agreed on. These were movies that were used a lot (pr0n) and were visibly getting worse (banding, tracking, wear, etc.), not just sitting on a shelf. We would also share them with each other through the mail and use the GoVideo dubbing decks that we all had to make copies. This was for alt.binaries.movies.erotica and associated newsgroups. Probably TMI :)
Agreed. I recently popped in Star Trek V for kicks and it worked flawlessly. However, I must say, while the physical tape may have aged well, the content surely did not - yeesh, what a stinker.
Anyway, it all depends on the storage - the best advice I ever heard was "store your things where you live" (in other words most of us don't live in the attic or the basement).
Oh, I know it. I came upon it rummaging and popped it in later that evening.
Honestly, I think in a single act I nearly destroyed my youngest son's interest in the series by having him watch the first one with me. I haven't seen those movies in years, but it really reminded me how big Star Trek was back then to be able make such bold assumptions of the audience on so many levels.
You know though, all this talk - I think I'm going to dig up another and watch it tonight. There's actually a couple I still haven't seen.
We had a family friend with something similar but a few years later - and every single tape was legit because he’d buy the remainders from the rental stores when they sold them off.
By the 90s the typical American household already had > 2 TVs. Two VCRs would not be that uncommon. It was common enough active measures were taken to prevent copying (as you linked). After all, VHS tapes are rewritable and quite durable. If you don't mind minor degredation you can reuse them dozens of times, or more. People would accumulate dozens (if not hundreds) of VHS tapes over the years with stuff they didn't want to keep anymore. So spare media wasn't usually an issue.
Now, I don't recall all that many copied rental movies, growing up. I do recall a lot of films off TV being recorded and passed around and even duplicated, though. Knowing someone with cable or satellite TV who was reliable in hitting pause/record during the commercials was Important.
I mean, just based off personal recollection, 2 VCRs was rarer than two TVs, since the second TV would be a small 15 inch in the kitchen permanently tuned to the Andy Griffith show or an old TV in the garage for football games.
But I’m sure there are some trade organizations stats about all this somewhere. And yes, I know people who had huge catalogs of movies recorded off TV (on beta lol).
> I mean, just based off personal recollection, 2 VCRs was rarer than two TVs, since the second TV would be a small 15 inch in the kitchen permanently tuned to the Andy Griffith show or an old TV in the garage for football games.
This is accurate, though by the early 90s some houses had three TVs. The third kind was the one from the late 70s or early 80s that'd recently been replaced by a new "main" TV, which older TV sat in a spare bedroom or basement "rec room" and you had to hit it sometimes to keep it working.
Did copy protection really help? In the early-mid 90s my dad was dead set against copying VHS tapes. A neighbor down the street had no problem copying anything from live TV to Blockbuster rentals. Their library was a massive mess of tapes from various sources.
I don’t recall them having any special setup except 2 VCRs. They also weren’t the type to be able to bypass copy right.
MacroVision worked by messing with the automatic gain control by fluctuating white bars in the horizontal blanking interval. Cheap, low end VCRs didn’t have automatic gain control and made much better copies.
That makes sense, all this talk of VHS copy protection in this thread, I never knew this existed. Apparently my parents had cheaper VCRs because I never had any issues copying a tape.
I was in high school mid 80s. I brought my VHS over to a friends to try and copy a tape. It didn't work. We couldn't figure out why and an internet search to discover work arounds wasn't yet available.
So I guess it kinda worked. Honestly though most movies we were watching were rented anyway, we weren't buying very many.
In the early ($99) days of VHS movies though, I don't believe MacroVision was a thing.
I recall frequenting the only video rental store in Homer, Alaska (ma-and-pa, of course, this was pre-Blockbuster and a small town in Alaska, of course) and I believe they would rent multiple copies of a popular title but dubbed onto blank VHS tapes.
I also had friends and relatives that had a few pirated films. The sci-fi nerds I knew all had "Star Wars" and "Empire" on VHS long before it was either possible or affordable to (probably picked up at a booth at a sci-fi convention).
The first time I saw Star Wars was at a drive-in. The second time I saw it was on laserdisc(!) at someone’s house years later. The third time was when it was broadcast on TV. The fourth time was on VCR tape. The fact that our family could watch a movie in our home just by going to the rental store was mind blowing.
I remember it being a big deal when Star Wars finally came to TV. I don’t understand why, but my kids laugh when I tell them for the big event we hauled my aunt’s large TV across the lawn (she lived next door) over to our house just so we could watch it in color instead of on the 15” BW that we had. We also made popcorn.
For years, "Star Wars" was one of the "big movies" that wasn't available on home video. The documentary "The Making of Star Wars," on the other hand, was released on VHS (and Betamax?) very early on, and I recall as being prominently displayed in seemingly every video rental store.
Ironically, "The Making of Star Wars" doesn't currently appear to be available for streaming on any of the services, at least according to JustWatch.com.
We recorded plenty of movies off TV in the 90s and had 2 VCRs. But the few times we tried making a copy of a rental VHS tape resulted in an unusable copy due to MacroVision. Point being I don’t think copying rental tapes by the end customer was a huge problem for the movie studios, unless I just got unlucky and MacroVision wasn’t as pervasive as I thought.
Someone else mentioned independent video stores copying tapes to rent and that I find more likely to have been a concern.
I worked at a large VHS duplication facility in the 90s. The largest branch of my company had a facility that had 5000 VCRs. The facility I worked only had around 1200 VCRs. All of the equipment involved to make it all work was crazy, but cool to someone in the engineering side. Lots of video distribution amps were involved, but there were other pieces of gear that most people would never even know about. We had gear that would inject other signals/data into the video on the tape. The most obvious was Macrovision encoders, but we also could insert a code in the blanking that would tell us what shift the dub was created and which bank of decks were used to make the recording. Most dubs were created from proper masters going back from 3/4", 1", BCSP, Digibeta, D1, D2, etc. From time to time, we would also get VHS/SVHS "masters".
The coolest thing to me was the high speed duplicators. VHS tape came to us on "pancakes" which were large spools of tape with thousands of feet of tape. The dub master was an 8-track type of system where you had the exact amount of VHS tape for your content that was spooled so that it wound back on itself with no rewinding. The company I worked for received a patent on this. At the beginning/end of the content were some cue tones. The high speed duplicator would run the blank stock from the pancake very very close to the tape from the 8-track wound "master" with both tapes passing through a magnetic field. This field would align the particles on the blank tape source. It was the closest to digital clone VHS could, and avoided generation loss in the dub. The high speed would run the entire pancake in a matter of minutes. IIRC, 45 minutes of content took 15 seconds in this system. The recorded pancake was then sent to a VHS tape loader. It would start at the end of the pancake and load the blank VHS cassette by rewinding directly from the pancake until it heard the cue tones where it would splice and move on to the next cassette. You could sometimes hear these cue tones at the beginning or end a tape depending on if the splice was pre/post cue tones.
The same pancake could be sent directly to the loader as blank stock and a preset length of tape was loaded so that we could have inventory in 5m, 7m, 10m, 12m, 15m, 20m, 25m, increasing by multiples of 5m up to 180m tapes. Using the dubbed pancake cut exactly to content duration was the most efficient use of tape, but some dub orders did not need a large enough quantity to justify the dubbers. That's where the large number of VCRs were used to make dupes the old fashioned way and we would choose the tape length closest to the content duration.
One thing the author doesn't do in this comparison is factor in the perceived technology value.
While you can adjust for inflation to get the price of a VHS tape in 2022 dollars ($23) and say that it's high, to someone in the 1980s just having the ability to record a TV show or movie and watch it forever at home was considered a huge leap in technology, and well worth the value. Today, however, we take that for granted, which means that the inflation-adjusted price of a VHS tape seems absurdly high.
I remember getting a Tivo as a gift for my wife. (2001 maybe?). I'd hooked it up to the TV the night before and when she came downstairs in the morning I said "let me show you something!"
I turned on some news channel and was trying to tell he about this. Something was 'newsworthy' on at that time, and she kept telling me "shh... hang on - I want to hear what he's saying!".
I pressed the 'pause' button on the tivo remote and the screen froze. Then she froze, and slowly turned to me... and... had that look in her eyes that "the world's just changed". :)
My dad ran several video stores from about 1988 to about 1994. He even bought out the earliest video store in our town - Hollywood Video - and switched the name of all stores to Hollywood Video. He got out of the business when the national chain wanted to come to town and offered him a ridiculously low price for all the stores. Sadly he took their first offer. They didn't care about the stores, they just realized they couldn't win any trademark infringement lawsuit against the owner of a store that at one time rented beta tapes and laserdiscs only after you paid a steep membership fee.
In the first years, the blockbuster movies would cost him about $65 each to buy and they did creep up over the years. While in theory you could rent them several times per week for about $3, in reality the newest releases (maybe less than a month old) only completely rented out on the weekends. It was hard to get most people to walk into the store to get a deeply discounted new release most weekdays. Once the movie had been released for a month or so, most almost-new-releases would have some copies that sat on the shelf on the weekends too.
The "sell through" movies - those that sold retail at $15 - $30 - were better. He would buy a large number of them and they would rent well for a few weeks. After the initial flurry of heavy rentals for a few weeks, he would start to sell them off. I think there was a small profit - better than the expensive movies which were almost always money losers.
Then there was this small little box in the corner (or under the counter in one location) where some other movies were kept. The movie cases for maybe 50 movies were all collapsed. Each of these movies rented for nearly the same cost as a new release, with little discounting for old titles. $30 was a very expensive one, most were about $15. They would rent well throughout the week, mostly to very loyal customers. There was only ever one copy of each title per store and the stock rotated between stores with occasional swaps with stores owned by others in neighboring towns until the movies wore out. Certain portions of scenes would wear out before others, presumably due to replaying action shots. Had it not been for this little box of porn occupying maybe 10 square feet of a 600(?) sq ft store, he would have been out of business long before Hollywood Video threw him a lifeline.
One of the stores he would do swaps with had a somewhat private area like that. I think my dad did not build such a thing because of fear that people would, umm, linger. I don't know if that was a real problem at the other store or not. Also, if the area offers some privacy from the staff it is harder to take a quick glance to make a guess as to whether anyone was shopping this area and whether they looked old enough.
I think that there would often be standees advertising movies that shielded the area from visibility from the street and casual non-staff observers. You had to be "this tall" to see into the box, the front was covered with 18+ signs, and it was either next to the counter or placed on the counter at the store where it was stored behind/under the counter. There really wasn't a problem with youngsters taking peeks.
I worked briefly at a video store part time around 2000. There wasn't that brisk of a business from the little private room, at least not during the times when I worked (which included week days). But by this time home internet was broadly available, perhaps only dial up for many people in my area but it was still available. I wonder if the new competition for this subsidy business wasn't a bigger part of the fall of video stores than it seemed to be.
Although, most of the other staff were quite "judgey" so its possible that I just worked at a store that wasn't popular with those customers.
Ah, memories. I took job in 1985 at Skyline Video near the World Trade Center at Trinity Place. We sold videos, blanks, and rented movies and big, big VCRs that people would rent for the weekend ($80 or $100 IIRC) or a night($60). Andy was the owner, and Jim and Howie were his partner and manager. If any of you recall anything about that store, or the workers, I'd love to hear about it. Good times watching videos after work, bringing home a VCR, if available, to my family with three videos! We were at the poverty line for many years, so this was a very special treat. Living large in the 80s!
I like the tone of the article describing vhs has some mystical artifact of antiquity (I’m old).
trailers and reviews on demand weren’t a thing when vhs rentals were common. All you had to go on was the cover of the box and the description on the back. It was a roll of the dice renting a movie you hadn’t seen before.
> The cost of VHS tape in the 80s is one reason I think VHS tapes are an underrated collectible. But Gen Xers are more nostalgic for their video games than for movies, at least for now.
They're an overrated collectible. There's no great quality-of-media benefit to VHS tapes, versus say the audio record market (where there is an argument in terms of the audio experience).
People are in fact quite nostalgic for movies, not VHS tapes. The author is confused on the difference.
Nobody is buying Ikari Warriors 1/2/3 (old NES games) for $50 on the PS5 today; but people have been buying Top Gun on DVD, then Blu-ray, then 4K, and paying retail prices to do it. They do it because there has generally been a quality increase. The rare exception is a few hyper popular games from the past that eg end up on Steam (Final Fantasy 1/2/3/etc games, or Age of Empires) or on a Nintendo repackaging hardware device.
Most NES video games for example were not endlessly repackaged with each generation of video game machines. The companies make new games, the old games largely stay in the past (in part due to the vast improvement in the quality of the games, the graphics, the size of the games, etc). The same is not true of movies. I can buy a superior copy of the movies The Color of Money or Heat on disc today vs the same movies on VHS, and that's why nobody cares about collecting VHS tapes, the same exact movies are reproduced at often dramatically better quality vs the past. They're not merely reproduced, it's typically a superior offering (certainly moving from shoddy VHS tapes to modern discs, when they're done well by the studio, is a vastly superior consumer experience).
My son once grabbed a huge crate of ditched VHS on the sidewalk, filled with 80s action movies (complete Stallone, VanDamme, Schwartzenegger etc). He made a lot of 80s-movies-watching with his friends from these VHS. They loved the experience of watching 80s movies on 80s technology apparently :)
I've recently fixed a VCR from the 90s, connected it to a TV from the 80s (I collect retro stuff..), put some old VHS tape and I must say that the experience is really enjoyable - the whole mechanical operation and even the poor quality. VHS tapes have a distinct look and sound that can affect the perception of a movie, especially horrors seem more scary because the picture isn't as clean and sharp which helps hide any imperfections that would otherwise ruin the illusion of "realism". It's similar to vinyls - you wouldn't want to use it daily, but from time to time it's fun to do something "the analog way" :-)
There's actually a growing subgenre of horror videogames that utilize this aesthetic to great effect. It's mostly an "indie" thing right now, but heck, the most recent prominent example I can think of is Puppet Combo's 'Murder House' game, which looked and played like a '90s PS1 horror title, tank controls and all, and yet it was still scarier and spookier and than Resident Evil's latest triple A title.
Here's the Steam page if anyone is interested in what it looks like:
Huh. I really don't see the appeal of that aesthetic. To me it just looks poorly done, not vintage. If it's actually trying to be vintage, it misses the mark.
My first official job as a teen was working in a video rental store. Indeed, new movies cost $40 to $80. Blank tapes came in different supposed quality levels (similar audio cassettes), and cost $5-$10 apiece. Writable CDs were also quite expensive at first. But floppy disks were also expensive at first.
Video rentals, before Blockbuster, cost $1-$4 depending on whether it was a new release and other specials (like rent 3 for a discount, etc.)
As VCRs got more powerful, and rewinders came into existence, periodically a tape would get ripped off one end of its spool. Then it was a task to open the tape and do some minor surgery to fix it. And of course, some tapes were designed to be difficult to open, having permanent rivets. Those were solved with a dremel and some careful work. When the tape costs $80, it's worth an hour of teenager time to fix.
We have it so much better now with streaming, although our appetites and consumption levels have grown so much that we often lament "having nothing to watch".
I remember when the first CD-R drives came out, a blank CD was around $100. In the early days, CD distribution of software was in some ways an intrinsic copy protection because computer hard drives typically had less capacity than a CD and it was not uncommon to run the software directly from the CD (not to mention that if you wanted to duplicate the CD it would cost $100 for a blank CD-R).
Speaking of CD being poor mans copy protection, sometimes quantity of disks was enough.
In Europe around 1996 Russian pressed pirate CDs showed up en masse. Often not direct 1:1 copies, but scene releases with modded homebrew translations, sometimes even including custom voice acting! It was especially hilarious in case of pirate localizations by Russians to other Slavic languages (mostly done by students barely speaking target language).
"Localization of foreign computer games in Russia was carried out by computer pirates in small studios from 1995 to 2005 who worked on a illegal basis. The most famous similar studio was "Fargus Multimedia". Localization made by such studios, most often had poor quality. Not only the text in the game could be translated, but also the name of the game itself."
Now the interesting thing about those pirate CDs was the business model. Smuggling and sales were mafia controlled, with fixed price set at ~$15 per disk. This made multi CD releases like Under a Killing Moon (4xcd), Phantasmagoria (7xcd), Ripper (6xcd), Wing Commander 3 (4xcd) etc much cheaper from legal sources. Break even was somewhere between 2 and 3 CD releases.
> The cost of VHS tape in the 80s is one reason I think VHS tapes are an underrated collectible. But Gen Xers are more nostalgic for their video games than for movies, at least for now.
Ugh. Good riddance to VHS. I still have "fond" memories of sitting down to watch a movie only to have it interrupted half-way through for one of these reasons:
1. Tape's banjaxed and it's full of noise and other garbled junk due to bad recording, poor playback, or deterioration of the tape itself.
Or, my personal favourite:
2. Someone's half-recorded an episode of Matlock because they grabbed the first VHS tape in reach so they could watch it later. Or it's half of your Uncle Fester's 48th birthday cake reveal, shakily recorded with a home camcorder.
DVDs were the best thing to ever happen to the home movie entertainment in the late 90s.
Same thing for audio tapes. Inconvenient, sound like crap. At least, vinyl has something for it, it is also inconvenient and sounds like crap, but at least you don't have to rewind them, and all the noise and distortion it introduces can be considered pleasant and "warm".
Really, there is a good reason all these things are gone except for nostalgic purposes.
Video game cartridges are actually practical, they are essentially read-only SSDs! Some even include specialized co-processors so they are more than just storage. While they were made with the electronics of their time, they are in essence, much more modern than disks or tape.
I think vinyl sounding terrible is bandwidth limiter or something missing in amplifier. Above 10 grands they sound not much different against high-res digital audio.
Yeah they should be using prefabulated ammulite casing...jokes aside vinyl shouldn't sound worse than CD et al at all. They just cost a halfway fortune to get working.
> vinyl shouldn't sound worse than CD et al at all
CDs are slightly beyond the limits of human hearing, meaning that with proper mastering and output filters, you can't do better, though professionals may prefer higher resolution as it is easier to work with. It also means that below CD quality could be noticeable with trained ears.
CD is 44.1 kHz, 16 bit stereo, or 1411 kbps. That's a lot to ask to a physical stylus riding a plastic groove. It may be possible with a laser turntable (these things exist) in a clean room, with a special precision-cut record, but why bother when a cheap digital system can do just as well. In fact, that's probably why laser turntables didn't catch on, they picked every speck of dust, and were already obsoleted by CDs.
Now, if you enjoy vinyl for reasons other than high fidelity, that's fine. Like I said, some kind of distortion can be pleasant, but then, you are listening to your system, not the record. A bit like a guitarist whose amp is treated more like a part of his instrument rather than a device that reproduces exactly what it is being fed, but louder. And mechanical/analog systems have a certain charm that may not do the sound any good, but certainly contribute to the enjoyment.
Everytime I rented a video on DVD, they were scratched. Renting DVDs was always an uncertain experience of not knowing whether I would see the whole movie or not. Often times entire scenes would just drop. Great technology, horrible implementation.
VHS was big, clunky, complicated and reliable. I never doubted it. Sure the quality was not as good, but if you were watching the movie for the first time, you didn’t care. It was consistent crap quality and I much preferred it over DVD.
I feel like this is a rose-colored memory. I had VCRs eat and destroy multiple VHS tapes to a point where they became unwatchable.
DVDs could get scratched, but usually you didn't have to worry about the player killing the movie, and generally even when the movie got scratched it would still work for me.
By like 2002, DVDs became so cheap to order ($2-$8 per) that most movie rental places would replace them if a user reported one as scratched. It often paid for itself in a single rental.
I recall it depended a lot on what DVD player you got. Some would play through scratched DVDs merely skipping over the bad parts, others would stutter through the bad parts while some would just stop. Interestingly enough it was often the cheaper Chinese brands that would handle the bad DVDs better than the more expensive brands (but not always!). Luckily the players I had were always pretty good so I could play pretty much any DVD movie without any trouble.
> Someone's half-recorded an episode of Matlock because they grabbed the first VHS tape in reach so they could watch it later.
Did that really happen though? VHS tapes had a plastic tab that could be removed to prevent recording. Any commercial VHS tape would not allow that. So that would only be happening if you recorded some movie and someone else used the same tape to record their show. Not really a VHS problem.
Yeah, I remember this distinctly. VHS tapes used to be really, really expensive. So even though they were $25 in inflation adjusted dollars by the 90s, people had already been used to reusing the same tape until it died, because the one they are currently using was like $80 (inflation adjusted) new.
It was like buying a new slow cooker every time you need one. It's not that expensive, but it seems wasteful non-the-less.
TV shows were scheduled for your local stations and there may be an alternate channel that would have an echo or rebroadcast schedule.
If you wanted to watch "your show" you had to either have someone record it, or record it yourself. There were even VCRs that could be programmed to start recording at a certain point for a specific duration.
In all of humanity's many combinations of people, situations, and outcomes, yes, this has happened hundreds of thousands of times.
It's literally a meme that "oh! no, don't watch that one--that has our sex tape in the middle".
> There were even VCRs that could be programmed to start recording at a certain point for a specific duration.
Although programming VCRs correctly required skill, because the user interfaces were so abysmal.
It was a meme that parents couldn't do it.
For younger readers: there was a single small display on the early programmable VCRs that could show a few digits, which needed to sequentially program the slot, channel, start time, and end time. Years later there were LCD screens on the remote, although they were still cryptic, and they didn't always synchronise correctly to the VCR, so results were unpredictable. Even later there were on-screen user interfaces (which were still extremely quirky). Reading a manual was definitely required at first.
Does anybody else remember McDonalds selling inexpensive VHS copies of popular movies like "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels" with an additional food purchase, back when movies still cost a fortune?
>McDonald's Corp. will... sell Dances With Wolves for a bargain price.
As part of a special holiday promotion, McDonald's will sell the Oscar-winning movie for $7.99 with the purchase of a sandwich - at a time when video stores are selling it for its original list price, $99.98.
Article I believe is saying commercial pre-recorded VHS movies are collectible. Re: point 2, such tapes should not have a copy protection tab, so a properly functioning VCR should prevent this scenario. Just mentioning lest people get the impression VHS simply didn’t address this case. Cf. https://psap.library.illinois.edu/collection-id-guide/record...
This right here, my cousin worked at a video store which usually threw out cassettes not deemed working order and we took those and overwrote them with other newer movies. Was pretty awesome having 2 vhs on top of each other then pressing play and record and watch the movie and save it at the same time, the future was limitless at that point!
Sort of reminds me of the IT guy at my high school who was shipped a crate of AOL floppies (I guess to distribute to the kids) who just moved the tabs and slapped a new label on them when he needed one.
i cant remember the setup exactly but play the video on one vhs and record it with the other, i remember not all tv's supporting it sorry its quite some years ago :)
Which elevates the transgression from plausible simple mistake to premeditated destruction. There’s not an issue with the technology here, great grandparent commenter has an issue with bad human behavior (notwithstanding faulty cassette manufacturing and defective VCRs, of course).
Around 2000, I paid about $100 for a movie on VHS, in order to give it as a gift.
It was the timing that was key: pre-recorded tapes were priced to be sold to rental stores upon initial VHS release, then sold at a fraction of release price a month later.
I am from India and VCRs came into my life in the mid to late 80s. Initially, VCRs were so damn expensive (because they were all imported) and you would rent them for a weekend and a few films. The whole family, friends and neighbors would gather for a 'weekend binge watch' before binge watching even became a thing. It wasn't uncommon to rent 8 to 10 films and watch them back to back.
When I got to high school, we had domestic electronics companies manufacturing VCRs in India and we bought one at our home. A video rental store in our neighborhood had an excellent collection of English language films and a rental would cost Rs. 10 ($1 US ~ Rs. 13 to Rs. 16 those years). I would spend hours going through their collection and reading the synopsis on the jacket/sleeve before picking a couple of films to watch.
DVD/Blu-ray/Streaming today is better but the VCR/VHS nostalgia is a lot more than just the tech due to the lived experience of that era.
The thing you have to remember is that the movie industry HATED consumer VCRs and videotape. Industry insiders considered VCRs and tapes tools for copyright infringement and nothing more -- even after the Supreme Court ruled VCRs legal in Sony v. Universal in 1984. Jack Valenti went to his grave believing that the Supreme Court made the wrong decision. And my girlfriend's parents, who worked as an attorney and paralegal for the entertainment industry, banned VCRs from their home even into the late 80s.
To the movie industry, a movie was something you went to the theater and watched ONCE. If you wanted to see the movie again, you had to pay again. For consumers to buy a copy of a movie they could see again and again was, to studio heads, felony contempt of business model. But once market pressures forced their hands, the studio heads relented only somewhat. They would price the VHS tapes out of typical consumer reach, but allow them to be purchased by rental shops to be rented out to consumers, thus preserving the "pay for limited viewing" business model. Of course, once the first studio buckled to market pressures to release home copies for around $30 a pop, as described in the article, all bets were off.
Also note that VCRs were only ruled legal based on a very narrow exception: the Court felt that if there was a TV show that aired once, never to be aired again (Star Wars Holiday Special?), and you absolutely positively could not be in front of the TV to see it, you should be able to record it and then view the recording at a later time exactly once. This is the "time shifting" exception. Otherwise, VCRs are still mainly tools of copyright infringement in the eyes of the law. We seem to have this idea that if we copy something for personal use only, we're in the clear legally; Justice Blackmun, in his dissent in Sony, pointed out that this is not the case, and personal recordings of movies, music, etc. still infringe copyright and are violations of the law.
In the 1990s in the UK we got Star Trek episodes years behind America. Encounter at Farpoint for example came out in the US on 28 September 1987. In the UK it finally was broadcast on 26 September 1990.
It was available on VHS tape slightly earlier than that -- April 1990, but I was only 8 then.
By the time DS9 season 6 came out though, I was 15 and had a TV and VHS machine in my bedroom. I was also on the internet and was unwilling to wait until
A Time To Stand - first episode of Season 6 - came out in September 1997 in the US. In the UK it came out on VHS in Febuary 1998. From memory these were about £12-14 for a 2 episode tape. They were finally broadcast (with adverts) in October 1998 on premium subscription service Sky One.
I bought the first few in the season to complete the mini arc.
Come season 7 I bought the lot, once ever 2 weeks, 13 tapes, about £170, or about £320 in today's money - $420 for a season, $16 per episode, 35 cents per minute.
Random comment but one of my first memories of understanding price as a kid was going to a appliance store and seeing the newly released Ghostbusters VHS for 80 bucks. I thought about all the candy and video games I could buy for that.
>I think VHS tapes are an underrated collectible. But Gen Xers are more nostalgic for their video games than for movies, at least for now.
GenX'er here. I'm very nostalgic for 80s movies. There is no reason to buy a VHS version of it though, just like there's no reason to buy a cassette for 80s music. Vinyl only came back because of the unique sound properties, something that VHS or cassette doesn't have.
The first movie I owned on VHS was one of the Indiana Jones movies. It was either free or super cheap with the purchase of a meal at McDonald's in the 90s. Most of my VHS movie collection though was taped off the air or from cable broadcasts. When I cleared out my VHS stuff in the 00s, there was absolutely no market for it and I ended up dropping off a box of tapes at a dumpster at CalState Long Beach.
In Norway, there was a tax levied on blank media, as everybody supposed a significant portion of them would be used to make, ah, evaluation copies of copyrighted material. The tax income was put in a fund, from which copyright holders were compensated by market share (methinks).
It so happens I have excellent memory for numbers; my preferred blank media in the late eighties/early nineties and their associated prices:
Blank Fuji VHS tape, 240 minutes: NOK 89/ea (In today's money: $20)
Maxell XLII-s 2x45 min cassette: NOK 65/ea ($14 today)
5.25" floppy, 3M: NOK 179 for pack of 10 ($40 today)
3.5" 1.44MB floppy, Esselte: NOK349 for pack of 10 ($80 today)
CD-R (1996): NOK39/ea ($7.50 today)
I'll hand Maxell that, though - the tapes I used to record live music on back in the nineties still sound excellent today, so for longevity, they're hard to beat!
I spent some money on a vhs recorder in the early nineties when I was a teenager. I mainly used it to record movies and then watch them later. I only owned a few tapes that I just reused endlessly. I kind of skipped dvds as a thing. I never bothered buying a separate player and I rarely used the one in my computer, when that was still a thing. I've not had a dvd or cd player for about five years now. My last computer that still had a slot for that died five years ago. Obsolete technology as far as I'm concerned long before that. It rarely got used.
Each purchase of a movie should have came with a license to exchange it for the same movie on new media as it became available. Like pirating a copy of a movie you already own shouldn't be illegal.
I distinctly recall seeing a VHS tape of 'The Goonies' retailing for £64 in a video shop in the north of England sometime around '86, which blew my tiny little mind, as that may as well have been a million pounds.
If memory serves, a video came out on video for hire 3 years after cinema release, then 2-3 years for video sale, then same again for network transmission. Or, perhaps those last two were the other way around? So long ago, goddamn.
I did a lot of taping of movies that were broadcast locally. Lots of documentaries on PBS were many hours long and broadcast over the span of several days, or once a week over the span of several weeks. The only way to see them, for me, was to schedule recording for the entire series.
I had quite a collection of Woody Allen films on VHS only to watch then deteriorate before my eyes. It was sad to see them go.
All the paranoia about consumers copying movies is hilarious. It was not a thing. We owned two video stores and didn't even copy movies, with plenty of extra VCRs available. Most people didn't have extra VCRs to copy with and wouldn't even know how to do it if they did. Their paranoia propped up the video rental industry for over a decade until they figured out sell-though.
I don't really "collect" vhs tapes. I have a few that are weird or have never been released on any more modern format but I wouldn't pay more a few dollars for any tape.
At least once a week the vhs collector group I am in on facebook has posts from people asking how much a vhs movie is worth or offering to sell some common Disney "black diamond" movie for thousands of dollars.
I remember when my dad got our first video store membership. He was an engineer so it was early on. We had to join a membership club at the video store and the initial deposit to join was a a few hundred dollars to cover the costs if you absconded with tapes.
> They assumed every time someone rented a movie, they copied it.
That’s because they did! In my experience at least. I also remember when duplicating a tape at home with two VCRs stopped working, because they scrambled the signal somehow.
We tried copying them too back when I was young. It didn't work. a friend got a "super vhs" and we figured, we'd try that. no dice. Not having the internet at the time, we couldn't figure it out.
I am not interested in collecting VHS tapes because I wouldn’t count an a tape from the 1980s playing successfully (not being destroyed.). I had a lot of trouble with tapes getting pulled in the 1990s…
That had a lot to do with it. Consumers were not used to getting cheap electronics yet nor was collecting media normalized except LPs and Cassettes (mid-80s). Stuff was expensive and people just didn't buy as much of it.
We had a VCR really early cause my father worked at GE in the early 80s in a TV/VCR/Cable TV division. He got the VCR free I think at work. The only time we got new movies was when one of his co-workers would bring a VCR over and they would hook the two up and pirate movies. FWIW that early VCR lasted 20+ years.. it was built like a tank and I remember tearing it apart in the 2000s along with a broken Samsung from the early 2000s and comparing the two and it was pretty fascinating how things had changed.
I think a lot of us who were 80s kids who can practically recite Star Wars got that way cause we had a very small collection of movies cause they were so expensive. We had the 3 SW movies and Superman 2 and I watched those over and over.
Computer equipment was the same way, just about out of reach for most. My dad moved into network equipment and internet stuff by the mid 80s and we had a PC or Mac almost all the way through the 80s but it was always a loading dock discard that my father would grab from work before the computer went into the trash when they upgraded. I don't think he ever paid a dime for a computer till about 1993. When I went to college in 1995 I bought a laptop and it was an obscene purchase for an 18 year old, I could have bought a pretty nice used car instead.