VHS, RIP
From today’s LA Times:
On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.
…
The last major Hollywood movie to be released on VHS was “A History of Violence” in 2006. By that point major retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart were already well on their way to evicting all the VHS tapes from their shelves so the valuable real estate could go to the sleeker and smaller DVDs and, in more recent seasons, the latest upstart, Blu-ray discs.
VHS was how I saw most movies growing up. Not just classic movies, but the R-rated ones I couldn’t see in the theater. I can trace my screenwriting career directly back to a rented copy of WAR OF THE ROSES, which I rewound and transcribed, amazed to realize that somebody wrote that.
Still, I have almost no nostalgia for the VHS format itself. With its springs and gears, each tape was built to fail. I can’t think of another technology that seemed so inelegant even when it was new.
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December 22nd, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Glad we had it growing up, but not sorry to see it go! Was Be Kind Rewind released on VHS? If not, it should have been.
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:26 am
WAR OF THE ROSES, hey? It’s been a long time since I’ve watched that – but it was impressively dark for a Hollywood comedy at the time.
I’ve actually never thought about whether anyone was producing VHS anymore. And I don’t miss it – it’s been so long gone from my life.
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:27 am
I like doovde. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KFlE9sEmf8
December 23rd, 2008 at 2:11 am
I miss them already *G Coincidentally, my sister and me did remember those good old tapes yesterday… when I was a very little kid, we went to a local video rental with our mum. My sis insisted to get ourselves the Encino Man, whereas I wanted to have Batman. She won in the end – which probably was the better choice, cause I love the film so much! What she said then was “Videos, pah!” *G I was lmao. She was right – but I still got loads of them on my shelves and I truly don’t understand people who look at you like you were stupid when you say “Hey, we do have a tape recorder at home!” It’s like when you say “Yes, I still listen to records sometimes – it’s nice.” Just because I’m 21 and I was born in a more or less up-to-date generation?! I don’t get it! As for A History Of Violence – I got it on DVD…. ;) – let’s just hope that DVD will remain with us. I don’t like to think about Blu-Ray – it gives me the creeps.
December 23rd, 2008 at 2:18 am
I persuaded my dad to move the growing collection of bought and recorded VHS-tapes from the living room some months ago. They are now stored under the stairs so they can be retrieved in case anyone would suddenly find it compelling to watch a VHS-movie, but who ever does?
Low quality picture, sound and the fact that you have to rewind or fast forward the tapes makes VHS pretty inconvenient these days. I’d rather download a movie I already own on VHS than actually put the tape in the VHS-player.
With that said, VHS movies were pretty awesome when I was younger!
December 23rd, 2008 at 2:51 am
Don’t miss it… but it’s still kinda sad. Things are moving forward.
December 23rd, 2008 at 6:49 am
I wonder if certain ‘producers’ in the San Fernando Valley observed a moment of silence to mourn the passing of medium that allowed them to flourish back in the seventies?
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:16 am
Having played “find the smudge, find the scratch” last night with a Blu Ray DVD rented from Blockbuster (after WANTED kept getting frozen at the same frame over and over again), I’m not going to miss the optical disc format either when it goes…
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:36 am
I remember having to pay a monthly fee to be a member of a video store, and bringing home our first Canon VCR, a 2-piece grey unit with colorful buttons. We watched ‘Stir Crazy’ first, followed by ‘The Toy.’
December 23rd, 2008 at 9:51 am
John, having never seen War of the Roses, I see multiple ways to interpret your story of it inspiring your career. Was this a “Somebody wrote that, and got paid for it. I could do a lot better.” or “Somebody wrote that, and I love it so much it makes me want to create as well”? The fact that you would rewind and transcribe suggests that it was closer to the latter, but then again I’ve seen some films so bad, I’d be tempted to go back and watch again just to prove that it really happened.
December 23rd, 2008 at 11:28 am
You say you don’t miss the format, but what about that Veags rush? What about that roll of the dice, with the whirring and the cranking, that meant every time you put your movie in, you might never get to see it again?
Not to mention the mechanical noise that went with watching movies – something I always found far more disruptive than the picture or sound quality itself!
December 23rd, 2008 at 11:33 am
When it comes to Blue Ray, one advantage it definitely has over digital download is the image and sound degradation that comes with data replication. Each clone is less perfect than the previous iteration, even in digital, and having an image and sound that came as direct from the master render (or answer print) as possible is a big value for me. With online services, you just don’t know.
December 23rd, 2008 at 11:36 am
Ironic that the director of “Videodrome” gets to be the last person to have a movie released on VHS.
December 23rd, 2008 at 11:52 am
DVDs and VHS tapes have just about the same failure rate at the library I check them out from, and the DVDs are much newer.
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:22 pm
Aww… I’m curious what you think about Blu-Ray, btw?
December 23rd, 2008 at 2:04 pm
Am I mistaken or weren’t we promised a post-mortem on Shazam? What happened to that?
December 23rd, 2008 at 7:52 pm
I’d say that RCA’s proprietary CED laserdisc systems beat even VHS for inelegant obsolescence out of the box. Used a stylus instead of a laser to read the data (which inevitably skipped if there was dust or scratches on the disc), you had to physically flip the discs halfway through the movie, they were big and unwieldy in their plastic cassettes. And the picture/sound was only marginally better than tape anyway. Other than that, they were awesome!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CapacitanceElectronicDisc
December 24th, 2008 at 6:52 am
Hm. We might never find out, then, why it is that every home seems to have a Jurassic Park VHS, no matter if none of the inhabitants ever remember purchasing it.
December 24th, 2008 at 7:26 am
@Mani
Haha,… you got it! But I remember… got it on Christmas Eve (some many years ago) and my sister bought a part 1 + 2 VHS box in a local store – I never knew why she did it!
MERRY CHRISTMAS TO EVERYONE!!!
December 24th, 2008 at 9:52 am
I worked for quite a few years as manager of a video store and I can remember how much time I spent splicing those VHS tapes back together when they broke and sometimes having to transplant the tapes from one casing to another. Thousands of screws and levers, like a tiny factory. It was always a fragile format. Good riddance.
December 25th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I can. Eight-track cassette audio tapes.
December 26th, 2008 at 6:53 am
My household had a VHS and Betamax.
I worked at a video store when History of Violence came out, we were cutting back VHS tapes hard by that point, there was maybe a half-shelf in the store for ALL the tapes. We’d occasionally get old people in “Do you have this movie on VCR?”
ah, good times.
December 26th, 2008 at 7:48 am
@Kristan:
I think Blu-ray looks good, and the extra capacity is useful. But it’s not enough better than DVD to tempt me to replace anything in my collection, and the fact that I can’t (yet? ever?) play them in my MacBook makes me unlikely to commit for now.
@Ron Brassfield:
Yes. But I can’t think of a dominant technology that was so built to fail. 8-Track was comparatively short-lived.
December 28th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Being born in ‘79, ALL my early movie (of the classics and the R rated ones) watching was in VHS, except when I was lucky enough to make it to the theater, or sneak in.
I recall absolutely loving “Predator” as a 10yr old (the movie actually holds up really well when I catch it on cable), but wondering why the movie came as a double-VHS tape rental? 2 tapes for a 120min movie? Maybe it was just my video store
December 29th, 2008 at 8:20 am
I am bummed! Growing up in the ’80s was awesome due to the fact that I could record what I wanted from the TV. It was my own manual TiVo. It was those tapes that made me want to become a writer. I remember not only wearing out one but two different copies of The Goonies.
December 29th, 2008 at 10:15 am
“When it comes to Blue Ray, one advantage it definitely has over digital download is the image and sound degradation that comes with data replication. Each clone is less perfect than the previous iteration, even in digital, and having an image and sound that came as direct from the master render (or answer print) as possible is a big value for me. With online services, you just don’t know.”
This is completely wrong.
You have image and sound degradation from multiple iterations of CONVERSION. But with ANY digital format, you have the ability for every COPY to be bit for bit perfect.
Copying many generations of a digital file should have zero degradation. You only lose quality if you are converting the file to a different codec, format, or data rate (and while it’s possible that a download version of a movie is converted from DVD/bluray or other compressed format, if they’re doing it right, they’ll do a fresh encode from an original lossless source).
And that’s not even the reason that downloaded video often looks worse than on disk – generally it’s simply because the file sizes are smaller to keep download times shorter.
December 29th, 2008 at 10:48 am
It’s easier to be nostalgic about vinyl because you got to see the process in action and got to physically handle the medium. The only time you ever saw the tape itself was when something went seriously wrong.
We’re past thinking of the object as what is recorded on it. It’s just a logistical question now. That’s why I’m not even thinking about Blu-Ray….waiting for straight download to leapfrog it.
December 29th, 2008 at 10:52 am
VHS deserves more respect than you folks are giving it.
Try to remember a time before VCRs. No recording TVs/movies/sports. No Time-shifting TV (no need to be home on Thursday night for Cosby & Cheers). No renting movies / tv shows. No easy way to get P0rn (video). No fast forwarding through commercials.
Sure, I stopped using a VCR to record once TiVo came into my life and stopped using a VCR to watch movies once I got a DVD. Sure, NOW, VHS seems clunky and lame, but transport yourself back in time. Respect the VHS.
VHS had a great run and I, for one, am grateful for all it did for me.
I salute you VHS!!
December 29th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Remember the Jazz drive? :p
December 29th, 2008 at 11:01 am
You obviously aren’t old enough to remember pre-VHS tape formats. You think cassette tapes were inelegant? Every used a consumer-grade reel-to-reel videotape deck?
December 29th, 2008 at 11:08 am
I also despise DVD’s, but we buy them anyway. Our kids destroy DVD’s in days, sometimes hours. So about once a year we go to the neighborhood garage sales and buy a dozen kids movies for a $1 or less each on VHS. Keeps us both happy.
Recently we have burned our DVD’s to the media center attached to our HD TV, and locked the originals away. As blu ray is difficult to burn and consume in this safe manner, it will not find itself in our home anytime soon.
December 29th, 2008 at 11:21 am
I can.
The CD (and its cousins and descendants like the DVD and HD/Blu-ray) is infinitely worse. A scratch on the tape, and 99.99% of the tape is still good; a scratch on the CD, and all the data is gone. I have recorded tapes from 15 years ago which are still playable; I have recorded CDs that are unusable after 6 months. Tapes, with their plastic cases and self-closing flaps, seem designed to survive rough handling. CDs, with their exposed data surfaces and thin coating, seem designed to fail as soon as one sets a disc down on top of a table. I’ve rarely had to deal with rental tapes that are unwatchable, but many of my Netflix DVDs have to be returned for scratches and unplayability.
I do not think the VHS format was anything special, but the physical design of the tape case is better from a data integrity and usability point of view than CDs and DVDs. Perhaps if the CD and DVD adopted a mini-disc- or floppy-like self-protective case, many of the problems I mention would not be issues.
December 29th, 2008 at 11:52 am
do miss one thing about VHS. Unlike many DVDs where you have to sit there and watch what seems like an increasing number of previews before you get access to the main menu & corresponding “play movie” selection, at least the VHS allow you to fast-forward all that preview stuff and get right to the movie.
There have been many times where I fell asleep before getting through the preview & ads in a rental DVD.
December 29th, 2008 at 2:36 pm
@Brian I’m guessing you worked at a video store before DVDs. I was a video store guy during the transition. While you can fix VHSs after hundreds of views DVDs are scratched to hell at about 30-50 rents.
I never had to fix them like you describe, we were a big chain, and just threw them away, but they lasted forever. (multi hundred rents)
They are a pain, and inelegant, but they are rough and tumble, much more so than naked optical disks.
December 29th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
I personally find the helical scan drum and tape engagement mechanism to be quite beautiful. I used to clean the heads myself, and would run my vcr without the lid on so that I could watch it work. I think this is similar to the attraction that people feel for vinyl, there is a fantastic mechanical/tactile aspect to the system. Most optical discs just don’t have it ( mini-disc is an exception ) and I must say that I miss it.
December 29th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Sad. And sadder yet that the nightmare that is DVD player (un)usability is now the standard. My late Dad, with most of his pleasures curtailed by ill health, spent much of his last year enjoying his favourite films again. Plagued by failing eyesight which meant he couldn’t even read most of the tiny menu options text forced on DVD viewers by confusing navigation and abysmal selection designs, he watched his films using an old VHS machine.
Yes, DVD offers much that is better than VHS,, and yes video tape is an inherently fragile medium, but VHS offered (and still offers) something that DVD so far has not – ’stick it in and press play’ simplicity. Simplicity that even an old, ill and dying man used to brighten his days.
December 29th, 2008 at 11:18 pm
I’ll never miss VHS for one simple line: “This film has been modified from its original version. It has been formatted to fit your screen.” Gone are the extra pan & scans some unknown person added which ruined the directors original vision for a fixed 1 frame shot.
…and re-winding. I don’t have time for that! lol.
December 29th, 2008 at 11:54 pm
OK, these comments need nitpicking all over the place:
@ Sarah:
What’s with the “*G” interspersed with your comments? Is that supposed to mean something?
@ Tennyson:
This has been addressed by others – digital copies do not degrade, they are exact copies.
@ Devin:
Isn’t it fitting, rather than ironic, that the director of Videodrome should get the last VHS release?
@ KL and others claiming that optical media is less durable than tape:
The CD/DVD disc is not “naked”. It’s protected by a thick layer of polycarbonate. The data is not stored on the plastic, it’s stored on the aluminum layer underneath the plastic. Even very heavy scratches can simply be polished out. It’s not difficult at all to restore highly scratched discs – some good polishing, and you have a perfectly smooth, unscratched surface back.
In contrast, videotape is much more difficult to repair, and you’ll never completely restore it like you can with optical media. And once you have done the restoring, you can make as many perfect backup copies as you like.
December 30th, 2008 at 6:22 am
The one thing I’ve found only recently mediated is the need for digital format readers to replicate what the laws of physics provide for analog format readers. If I stop a VHS recording, I can eject the tape, power the player down, wait three weeks, power the player up, insert the tape, and continue right from where I left off. This is the flip-side of the must-rewind coin, and I always felt happy with the balance VHS provided. So much so, in fact, that I found a $6 VCR in very good condition for viewing my old tapes, rather than repurchase everything in DVD.
As to Blu-Ray, where Finding Nemo highlighted the increased picture quality and detail of DVD over VHS (watched it in each format), Wall-E might be the only movie I’ve seen so far to provide a motivation to upgrade to Blu-Ray. That won’t happen anytime soon.
It shouldn’t be overlooked that with the advent of extended storage space has come a lot of extraneous garbage in the form of copious “extras.” At least VHS tended to focus solely on the primary content; and if I wanted to fast-forward through previews I never received a “That operation is not permitted” message.
Formats provide a content infrastructure, and as formats change, so too may the content.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
Audio cassettes. Always getting mangled. having to rewind and fastforward randomly to find the song you want.
The confusion over which side is playing, in which direction. The big spaces of silence when you listen to an album spanning both sides.
December 30th, 2008 at 10:36 pm
Three years ago I listed why I think DVDs (and their successors) suck. Not that VHS tapes were inherently better in all respects, but I think tapes were less insulting to customers:
http://www.penmachine.com/2006/03/why-dvds-suck.html
January 2nd, 2009 at 11:01 am
@Dave
G/g means “grin(s)” …same as you’d use *lol, rofl etc.
January 4th, 2009 at 11:38 am
@ Sarah:
You mean as you would use LOL, ROFL. I wouldn’t.
Now that we’ve established what it means, why do you use it? Is there any reason that you need to keep us apprised of your emotional state and whether or not you are smiling? It’s simply not relevant to what you are trying to say.
If you really must inform us about your emotional state, then why not do it through expressive writing, rather than ridiculous symbols/abbreviations/emoticons?