As I was driving into work today I heard a song being sung by someone who I swear sang for the Garfield Halloween special. Most people may not even remember that cartoon and I'm not sure if they even still play it, but at that moment I wanted to watch it again, even if it wasn't as good as I remembered. That got me thinking about how a long time ago I used to have it on videotape. In some strange way I miss VHS tapes. Now I like DVDs as much as the next person and I haven't totally embraced the whole BluRay format yet, simply because I'm not entirely convinced that it's necessary. It was only about ten years ago that DVDs became the standard and all those VHS tapes became yesterday's technology. Now while I suppose the DVD is better than the VHS, I don't know that it's had the same impact that tapes had. At least not for me.
A long time ago in a frontier far, far away we only had a couple television channels and weirdly enough, HBO. So the only way to watch a movie back then was if it happened to come onto one of the three channels we had. Then one day we heard about this magical invention called the VCR. My parents bought one and were immediately presented with the fact that we owned no movies to actually watch. Our next door neighbor came over and dumped out a box of movies on the couch. It was like movie Christmas. Apparently all those movies that were broadcast at random intervals on the various stations had been captured on video cassette and could be watched whenever you wanted. Also seemingly overnight there were things called video stores just up the road. I remember going with my dad out on a trek to find something to watch. Back then the selection was still somewhat small and guarded. Eventually we found something to watch and headed home to view it. It was an amazing thing. Not only could you watch the movie whenever you wanted, you weren't bound to your seat for the entire thing. You could rewind, fast forward, or even pause the action at any point. For me it was as an huge moment in movies, rivaling what it must have been like when The Beatles arrived in America for music lovers.
The appeal of watching movies whenever you wanted never really wore off, but the video tape uses started to change from simply having a set movie on it. There were blank tapes out there that let you record your own movies. Now camcorders had been around for awhile in different forms. It was never really a technology that my family embraced. We were more of a standard camera crowd and as such I'm fairly certain that there are no home movies of my childhood sitting in a box somewhere. There are a ton of pictures though. Both my mom and I realized fairly quickly that while it was great to watch the latest movie on VHS, there were things still on television that we wanted to watch a second time. Things that weren't always available on tape. Today you can find nearly any television series on DVD. Even those shows that were cancelled usually have enough fans that the studio puts out the entire thing in a nice package so you can enjoy it one more time. So in addition to owning our favorite movies we started buying blank tapes so that we could record whatever we wanted.
I come from a cold, dark place and a majority of the year it's not very fun to be outside. So it was necessary to make your own fun and if you couldn't make fun, then you needed to be entertained. We had a large selection of movies to choose from and an even bigger selection of randomly recorded shows. Looking back I have fond memories of opening up the bottom drawer under the television and scrounging around looking for a tape that had a show I remember recording. Sure they were labeled, but after awhile things got recorded over and mixed up. My mom had nearly every episode of the PBS Sherlock Holmes series and to this day watching it is like comfort food. With time the VCR got to be more complex and allowed you to set timers and pause for commercials, but I still remember watching a television show with my hand on the remote control, just waiting for the commercial to come so I could press pause. Watching those tapes later you could see when someone wasn't quite ready for the show's return and the action came back with a hard cut. Those video tapes were a lot like vinyl records, each one had its own pops and scratches that just added to the music. Today's DVDs are so crisp and detailed that it's great for preserving the actual movie, but often doesn't have the same amount of personality that a recorded VHS tape would have.
As I got older I went to work for the local video store. My first job there was to clean the shelves and rearrange the movies. Most people would think this was tedious work, but it was great for me. I literally touched every single movie in the store. I saw every piece of cover art. Read the back description of even the lowest budget B movie out there. I was in charge of all the movies on the shelf, even if I wasn't the manager. VHS movies were a big deal in my town. As I mentioned, it was cold a lot of the time so people didn't have a whole lot of options when it came to their entertainment. When new movies would come out there would be people waiting at the door so they would be the first to rent them. Come Friday afternoon it was something of a mob scene as people tried to get the new releases before anyone else. On the weekend my primary job was to restock the movies on the shelves. People would return the movies, we'd check them in, and they'd get stacked up behind the counter. It was my job to take that stack of movies and put them back out for people to rent. Imagine carrying about fifteen movies with both hands and having people surround you trying to not only read the titles you're carrying, but also pull from the stack. Many times there would be a waiting list for the most popular movies and those wouldn't even make it back to the shelf until after the weekend.
I love my DVD player. I love my Netflix instant queue even more. As I said before, most everything that's ever been broadcast is on disc somewhere, but there are a few things out there that can't be found, no matter how much you dig. Thankfully the internet can be a wonderful thing and there are people out there who not only recorded things, but managed to keep them all these years. With the help of YouTube those long lost videos are now watchable again. Now I know that there are DVR units that let you record your favorite shows and movies. Most of the time though these are rented or leased from the cable company and when you move you have to return them. So you never really get to keep what you recorded the same way you did with those old VHS tapes. It's only now that they're starting to release hard drives that not only let you record from your DVR, but let's you save it in a way that means it's yours. It's funny that it took them over twenty years to replicate what could be done on VHS from the start.
