Crazy price for old, in-print VHS tape...

Sometimes you'll see cult movies that aren't on DVD going for 50 or 100 bucks on VHS, but this...!

Somebody just paid over 30 THOUSAND dollars for a VHS tape of Terminator.

And it's in one of those sealed plastic cases verifying the grade and that it's the first issue.

This strikes me as beyond insane, but maybe I'M the crazy one????

 

I knew I should have grabbed a bunch of them when they were retailing for a mere $80 back in the day.

 

Right?

I checked eBay, and it looks like nice sealed copies go for a few hundred dollars.

Which is insane, but with inflation, not too far from what a new copy would cost now if we all still VCRed & did the rental thing which kept buying most new movies prohibitively expensive.

But 30k+?

Nuts to the extreme!

 

Probably some rich collector. I mean, if you have billions of dollars, what is $30K? It's all relative. You have to assume the buyer is just living in a different world than the rest of us.

I don't know why anyone would ever want to subject themselves to watching a VHS tape. Rewinding and fast forwarding, the machine eating the tape or wearing it out, etc. All that got real old. Glad we progressed to DVD and BR. But I doubt this person bought it to actually watch the tape on his old JVC.

 

Pretty cheap. A similar Star Wars VHS is expected to go for $60K.

'Star Wars' Vintage VHS Tape Goes Up for Auction, Worth $60K

 

VHS...I knew the OOP's were worth money, but this is ridiculous. Wait'll CD's start going up when the majors knock out individual albums and do only download and box sets of the artists' work.

 

Some one has more money than common sense.

 

Common cent$

 

My WTF radar definitely is up on this one. Perhaps there's someone who understands the VHS marketplace who can explain the deal here.

 

I read an article a while back about how eBay users would bid insane prices (and win) on their own auctions for "rare" Disney VHS tapes via other accounts to create a false sense of value. I wonder if something similar is going on here?

 

I vaguely remember hearing something about how the old terminator vhs and maybe one of the early dvds has the original mono soundtrack to it, since whatever company it was that was funding the fund thought it wouldn’t be a success and punished James Cameron by not giving him a budget for Dolby stereo and made him record it in mono. This was redone later on in the later releases and apparently it caused some glitches in what you see compared to what you hear. But, 30k is stupid amounts for that.