How could I forget!

I was over at a new favorite movie site of mine, twitchfilm.net, and I saw a t-shirt that they were advertising. It's the pic you see above, black shirt with a VHS tape on it saying "Never Forget". I suppose this marks the officiality of the death of VHS and the true reigning of DVD/Blu-ray as the rulers of home media. VHS was on it's deathbed, wheezing through a respirator for some years though, so it's hardly a surprisse to anyone. However, this made me think back some years when we were all using tapes, and I got in touch with my feelings about them.

Tapes, not only VHS but Beta too!, had a kind of allure. The tape itself degraded with time, so when you got your hands on an old tape you knew how much it had been played/loved/obesessed over. I saw a few big movies on old copied beta tapes in my youth and I still recall those watchings with a fondness for the lack of contrast, darkness that crept over it's boundaries encompassing the rest of the frame, tracking issues that you could minimize but never completely dispel. Movies I first saw on poor-quality tape: Animal House, Jokes My Folks Never Told Me, The Empire Strikes Back.



As a family we recorded many TV specials off of TV and I still watch A Charlie Brown Christmas (and It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown!) with a sense that a commercial is on the horizon and I'll see that old McDonald's ad where Ronald and the kids are skating on the pond, but the youngest of the group can't keep up. I miss the '80's CBS Special logo and the old NBC peacock that was actually a peacock with a head and neck and legs. Those logos and tags were indicators that what I was watching was not run-of-the-mill.



The copy of Empire Strikes Back that I watched had a Degobah so green and dark that I never clearly knew what was going on. There were so many things I caught hints of in the background and that added a mystery to the Star Wars movie that I will never get back, since now I can see everything...even the new things that have been added to "improve" upon the original release. Oh, and it was formatted wrong: the widescreen image had been compressed to fit a TV screen and I saw a Chewbacca that was taller and thinner than even a wookie could ever be. My copy of Animal House had no contrast, so the nudity really had an underground feel to it. I had discovered an adult movie and was watching it at too young an age. The texture of the tape only amplified that sense of wrong-doing. It made watching exciting.

The same can be said for Jokes My Folks Never Told Me, a film I'm sure none of you have ever heard of, although it is Anthony Keidis' third acting role, well before he formed Red Hot Chili Peppers. Jokes... is a collection of dirty jokes played out by actors with all the sex and nudity you could want. And it's real '70's nudity. No silicon. But maybe that rant is for another post. Unfortunately the copy of Jokes... that was available to me was not complete and I've never seen the ending. It doesn't exist on DVD so I may never know what the rest of the jokes are. I wouldn't mind except throughout the movie there was one joke they told in parts, and I'll never know that punchline.

I was too young and afraid to get into the horror VHS boom of the 1980's. I wish I had, but I was too young for all that stuff. Home video really let horror loose on the world and the horror junkies ate it up with reckless abandon, causing some countries to ban many films with a fervor you wouldn't believe. Britain banned 37 horror films and took severe legal action against stores selling them. These films were called the Video Nasties and I'll probably do a post on just them another time.

So VHS has had a colored history, but it's one I wouldn't trade for anything. It's too bad that kids these days will never have the fun of watching a movie with all the imperfections that tapes had to offer. Scrubbing the negative clean for Star Wars was ultimately a great thing, as a movie like that needs to look good. Cleaning up The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? I'd rather watch it on the 15-year old tape we rented where the grime of the Hewitt house was magnified by the grime on the cassette. Besides, the phrase "stash of porno DVDs" just doesn't have the same ring to it.