VHS

[The Sandmen]

I miss VHS tapes. We talked in another thread about Rewind This. Good documentary.

[The Rocketmen]

I'm gunna try and get it this weekend, but let's tell some VHS stories, shall we?

I had never seen Goodfellas until I was fourteen. At the time, Goodfellas was released as a dual-vhs. My buddy put the wrong tape in the wrong box and I thought Scorcese just tried a new idea where the movie just instantly starts, turns out I watched all of the second half and ruined the whole fucking film on myself.

[The Sandmen]

BRUTAL!!!

Man, sooo many times I started a movie, got half way through, then the tape just died, cause someone ate it, then put it in the machine to be eaten again.


Remember the worn out patches of a movie, usually where some chick took her top off? I miss that yuckiness of having a clearly abused tape.

[The Rocketmen]

Yes, usually caused by constant rewinding. I also hated when you had to grab the remote or physically go to the vcr and play with the channel buttons to adjust the tracking. Fucking nightmare.

[The Sandmen]

TRACKING. I so don't miss that. Especially when it was just like...the audio only playing in one speaker or something.

Oh, another VHS memory, I remmeber always thinking 2-tapers were cool, but nothing was never my favourite enough to buy a 2 tape VHS movie. I told myself i really liked Braveheart when it first came out cause i wanted to own a 2 tape VHS. Got it, loved it, it was my first 2-tape VHS.

[The Rocketmen]

Mine was a three-taper but it was the Indiana Jones trilogy. I wore those the fuck out. I also hated how easily the paper sleeves could tear or break, or you'd accidentally step on them and crush them or fuck up the folded top, just annoying, but man I loved them. Columbia House helped my VHS collection haha

[The Sandmen]

My parents made me read the living shit out of the fine print of Columbia House. I wanted to do those so bad, but once I read it I was like, FUCK THAT, and got VHS all the time at the movie store. We had 3 awesome rental houses.

My first was "The Couch Potato". It was right around the corner, and it's where I discovered classics like Robot Ninja, Puppet Master, and The Toxic Avenger.

When that closed, I had to move my business uptown to "Movies 4 You". There I rented most of the classics I came to love. Like...every classic. Stuff like The Great Escape, Godfather...everything. They were 99 cents each. They offered tape insurance. I declined.

When they closed, I had to go to "Movie Warehouse". That's where I used to get old UFC tapes. UFC 1, 2, 3, that type of thing. They also had shows.

The good owners sold the place, some new owners took over, and one night, when they were behind on rent, they literally fucked off in the middle of the night. Never seen or heard from again. I would have loved to buy out their collection.

[The Rocketmen]

The place I went all the time was just down the street from me called Bouchard's, then I moved to the other side of town and went to a place named James Video. They had a huge collection of classics, and was when I first started seeing 70s comedies and whatnot, also rented a lot of SNES games, my favorites being No Fear Racing, Fatal Fury, and the greatest wrestling game ever made - Saturday Night SlamMasters.

They had a fire and lost everything, and I have been sad ever since lol.

[xx - Former Phoenix Fight Club]

I still have VHS tapes and a VCR. lol BetaMax was still 10 times better than VHS though... Too bad Sony fucked that one up. :-/

[The Rocketmen]

I don't think I ever saw a BetaMax. But I also have some VHS tapes too, a lot of it is my own little home-made films I tried shooting when I was 8 to 12, a lot of it was horror/action or skateboarding.

[xx - Former Phoenix Fight Club]

BetaMax was actually better picture quality than VHS but Sony wouldn't give up the rights to the license so other companies could mass produce the product like JVC did with VHS and VHS ended up taking over the market cuz everyone could make a VHS VCR but only Sony could make BetaMax machines.

[The Rocketmen]

That's an odd choice, I get it though, it's like the Sega Dreamcast.

[The Sandmen]

The problem wasn't Sony, it was a consumer issue. Consumers wanted a product that could record longer. The Beta could only hold up to an hour of recording, whereas VHS could hold 2. When this came down to things like recording television shows and such, an extra hour is a HUGE difference, and people chose quantity over quality. They could record a movie off TV with 1 VHX tape and a timer, but they could not do that with Beta.

Beta was a superior product though, and not even that long ago a lot of TV stations were using various forms of BetaMax in broadcasting.

[The Rocketmen]

This is neat, I never knew any of this.

[The Sandmen]

I used to have Beta (top loading one) first, and i remember going to rental stores and you had to choose if you wanted to rent the movie in Beta or VHS. The one place used little tags. A red tag was VHS, a black tag was Beta.