The VHS Revival Culture

Well, reading some posts here and there, I am getting that the cream of the crop with VHS and Laserdisc was analog video, whereas DVD did not and produced lots of MPEG-2 artifacts. I never thought DVD looked or sounded bad, but it's undeniable that Blu-ray is still the best home-video format from a quality standpoint.

 

IMO, DVD blows away VHS and Laser no matter how hard one tries to believe it doesn't...yes, BR is better than DVD in most cases...

 

As much as I love all-things-vintage, VHS is one thing I'm glad went out the window.

You just cannot argue the superiority of DVD/Blu Ray over VHS. Sound quality, picture quality, convenience, portability, ease of use, etc

Still fun with mess around with VHS though

 

I bought a lot of VHS tapes back in the day. A few hundred is my guess.

But fortunately I was not an extreme early adopter when tapes were $75 and more.

Most tapes I bought were later releases in hi fi stereo and under $15. I most likely watched each one at least 2 to 3 times so they pretty much paid for themselves over paying for beat up rentals.

I did do a fair amount of renting though too. The small place in my town was run by a guy what had very eclectic taste, so some of the off beat stuff that was hard to get or too expensive I'd rent from him. And he was always fun to chat with, the guy knew his movies. I really miss that.

I got him to buy me my first WC Fields VHS tape, It's a Gift, it was not even available to public yet then, but he ordered me one from his supplier catalog for $45 on Kartes label, big clamshell case. It was many years before a public Universal release was available.








Once I got into DVD I just donated the VHS tapes as I replaced them with DVD's.

I've done the same thing with DVD's now being replaced with blu rays.

 

Vinyl has had a small popularity upswing lately. Why not VHS? Both are noisy and inconsistent and wear after each play.

 

but at least with vinyl you get direct access to a track.

i do not miss "fast-forward" or that sound of the ribbon getting mangled.

 

I honestly only buy VHS because they're so cheap. If I see a music related vhs I'm buying it. It's practically free.

 

http://flavorwire.com/512442/awesome-80s-style-vhs-covers-for-current-movies-and-tv
(sorry if these have been posted previously)

 

After selling off 99% of my tapes 15 years ago I've noticed that my collection is growing again, mostly in music related titles. I'll frequently browse thrift stores and pick up any interesting looking music videos. If I like it enough, I may even seek out the DVD if one is available.

 

The one thing, the ONE thing I miss about VHS - videotapes in general: You put the tape in, you hit record, you can play it back in any machine of the same format (VHS in VHS, Beta in Beta, etc). None of this "finalizing" or "may not be compatible" rubbish. All players played whatever a recorder recorded.

 

Unless you bought a tape overseas. Then you had to deal with PAL or NTSC or SECAM

 

....OR if some cheap bonehead recorded with the SLP setting on VHS which may or may not play back on YOUR VHS deck. Plus, Betamax decks aren't immune from this either. I have a box of Beta tapes that were recorded in BetaIII and they're SO unstable I may never be able to transfer them.

 

Indeed....I absolutely love it!!

 

I'm glad that VHS is gone now, and I much prefer DVD and Blu-ray a thousand times over ... but how can anyone say that "VHS always sucked"? Back in the very early days of home video, say 1979-1983, VHS was really pretty amazing in that we could actually have movies to own and collect... plus we could record TV broadcasts. Of course by now in 2015 those old clunky tapes are very primitive... but they were good when that's all we knew.

 

Its sad seeing you say your glad its gone... NOTHING IS PURE LIKE ANALOGUE IS MY FRIEND!! (Nothing is a nicer experience -- Its watch we used to ALL WATCH in the 90s and earlier)

Dont you care about the purity our world once had?? How beautiful it was??

I am grateful to have all the beautiful analogue movies,etc I have in this world!! (I do not like what its become @ all)

Very sad

 

Yes, I'm definitely glad VHS is gone... I think it looks horrible today. DVD and Blu-ray are many miles superior quality-wise ... but I do respect VHS for being good for its time.

 

You would notice issues such as tracking lines and other artifacts, but most people had nothing else to compare it with - so that was just part of the home movie experience. Laserdiscs never took off in Australia - they weren't even pushed on the public until the early 1990's (which - at that time, a lot of Aussies thought they were a new technology)!

When you'd rent a movie, you would just hope it wasn't too worn. Most tapes would be fine, but a lot of tapes that from the early 80's were usually a "renter beware" deal, as a lot of them were pretty gnarly after a decade of being run through dirty VCR heads.

That said - I found it a lot more hassle dealing with skipping rental DVD and BluRays.

 

That's interesting. Whenever we had a rental tape that had a worn or crinkled section we'd sit back and wait for it to clear up, which it almost inevitably did. A skipping DVD would go right back to the store because it would be pretty much unplayable.

I used to work in a rental store and one of my jobs was to take apart bad VHS tapes and fix them by either splicing the tape or replacing the parts with pieces from another tape.

 

The trouble with rentals were they were filthy. You'd either have to clean your tape heads or play the tape until it righted itself. You could see the oxide falling off the tape if you opened the little door. Once I rented a tape that played black and white all the way through (Overboard with Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell).

 

Yep, same. The only time I'd ever take a tape back was if it didn't play at all.

I worked briefly in a video store too. It was in my hometown and the lady who ran it knew every tapes catalouge number off by heart.

Natural Born Killer? "Let's see, that's 6007". It was amazing. We wrote down all the rentals on a notepad. I asked her why she didn't get a computer. And she said she couldn't be bothered learning how to use one when she knew the numbers anyway.

Now that's a new one on me. I've seen a VHS tape that bad!!!

 

There was a video library in my suburb that was notorious for copying tapes and renting them out as originals but the guy never did it properly. Once we had a Thomas the Tank Engine tape and after the credits went up some soft core porn film came on.

 

Back in the late 80s I was just getting into cult films and VHS was a godsend. I lived in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere and we could finally see all of these John Waters and Alejandro Jodorowsky films that I'd only heard of. One of the films on my list was Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer, which has a graphic murder scene.

I proceeded to watch the tape a got to the section where the murder was when suddenly the tape jumped ahead by a few minutes, missing the crucial scene entierely. I took the tape back and we discovered that someone had crudely spliced the tape - the store rented plenty of other cult titles and said that it hadn't been edited by them. More than once we'd watch a title and when it came to a controversial scene or nude scene, you could clearly tell that people had repeatedly stopped the tape and replayed the scenes over and over again.

It's been almost 30 years, and I just realized that I've never seen the complete Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer.

 

There was a scene in Basic Instinct that was always preceded by what looked like a snow storm on VHS.

 

This is meant to be a parody, right? It can't be serious - can it?

 

Believe it or not, there were perverts that did that on purpose.