DVD killed the video packrat

At work, I have a small stack of videotapes on my desk. There’s a sticky note on top of the stack: “Free to a good home.”
A couple of weeks ago, my boyfriend gently hinted that I might want to organize my big bookcase of videotapes and DVDs. I had so many videotapes that they were falling out of the bookcase (which is actually designed to hold videotapes) and stacked on top of my CD shelves, next to the VCR, and even on the floor. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
My first task was easy. I pulled out all the commercial videotapes that I now own on DVD, such as The Princess Bride and Ed Wood, and put them in a stack to give away. It was a substantial stack since some people gave me DVDs for Christmas.
The second task was harder: Figure out what was on each videotape that I had taped myself, and throw away the ones that were poor quality, or that I simply didn’t need and never watched. I have had some of those videotapes since high school, and throwing them away was a real wrench.

My parents bought the first family VCR in 1979. They were fairly early adopters, which is rare for them. Their reasoning was that first of all, a VCR was a good alternative to cable TV, which was becoming quite popular but didn’t appeal to them (they thought we kids would be exposed to all kinds of naughtiness), and second of all, they could tape and watch the Olympic games, which they were quite looking forward to seeing, especially the US team in the track-and-field events. (That turned out to be the year the US boycotted the Olympics. Oh well.)
They wisely chose VHS format over Betamax. The VCR cost them around $800, I believe. It was a top-loader—much later, I realized how similar it was to 3/4″ decks I saw being used at TV stations. It didn’t have a remote control, but it did have a little switch on a long cord that you could use to pause the videotape recording during commercials.
The VCR programming controls did not display on the TV screen, but displayed in tiny LCD abbreviations on the VCR itself. For years after I stopped using that VCR, I missed those controls and hated onscreen displays. I finally realized that the problem was that I hated specific VCRs, not the feature in general.
My dad built a special piece of furniture for the TV and VCR combo. Because it was a top-loading VCR, it fit in a compartment on top of the TV that you accessed from the top of the cabinet. (The cabinet was low enough for us all to reach the top easily once we were old enough to be trusted to use the VCR.) The only problem was that the hinged top had a nasty habit of not staying open and would slam shut at the most annoying times, often on your hand while you were trying to put a tape into the VCR or program the timer.
I don’t remember if anyone else knew exactly how to set the timer on the VCR besides myself. I think my mom eventually figured it out.
For the first few years after we bought the VCR, videotapes were terribly pricey. They cost from $20-25 depending on the tape length and so forth. I remember saving up enough money to buy one of my very own so I could tape my own things on it and not worry that someone else would tape over them. The family had maybe a half-dozen tapes at the most, and we would tape all kinds of things. Breaking Away, when it aired on TV. Episodes of MASH and The Muppet Show. The 1980 Winter Olympics. We reused the tapes a lot, and no one worried too much about picture quality.
Then there was the night we went to see Fantasia at Elmwood. It was a very big deal, since the movie was in limited re-release and I was dying to see it. I must have been 12 or 13 years old. I was too old to get in the theater with a child’s admission. Adult admission was a whopping (for that time) $4. My dad figured out that it would cost the family about $20 just to get in the door and decided it was too much money. We walked away. I didn’t see the movie until my last year at LSU.
But my dad had a better idea. He’d heard about these new videotape rental stores. You could join for a fee and then rent movies. Surely they would have some Disney films we could watch on our VCR at home and that would be just as good, wouldn’t it?
I remember going into this dark, quiet video store. Very small. The woman explained to my dad that you couldn’t rent movies unless you were a member, and it cost some outrageous amount of money to join: $100 a year, maybe. Plus a deposit. And then you had to pay to rent the movies, and the selection was quite slim. No Disney. No kids’ movies at all, really. (No, this wasn’t a porn rental place … well, I don’t think it was. Hmmm.) We went home empty-handed.
(Actually, if I remember correctly, the car broke down in the video store parking lot and we had to get a tow truck and it was a big fiasco and by the time we all got home, the news was on, which meant Bedtime. It was a very frustrating night.)
A year or so later, we got a free trial membership at another store and rented movies there for a few months, but even then, the selection was limited. (That’s where I rented Rock’n’Roll High School, though.)
As more friends’ families got VCRs, we were able to trade and borrow movies (they all had cable). We never bought commercial videotapes. At the time, videotapes were priced to rent, and if you wanted to buy one, it could cost you $60-100. (I remember pricing some Almodovar movies once, because I was desperate, and they were $75. And that was in 1990.) Eventually the video rental stores had free memberships, and more movies … and you all know the rest. My parents finally retired that VCR four or five years ago. It worked fine except for the rewind feature, which started eating tapes somewhere around 1988.
I can remember staying up very late at night watching movies I was taping, just so I could pause the tape during the commercials. In recent years, though, rewatching the old tapes, the best ones were the ones where I hadn’t cut the commercials. Late-night ads from the 1980s are a hoot.
As blank videotapes got cheaper, I bought more for myself, and I had a good 10 tapes or maybe more by the time I left high school. I taped everything in SLP (EP) mode so I could fit more on a tape. By setting the timer to catch late-night movies, I was able to watch The Graduate and Rebecca and other movies I might not have rented.
I used to number every videotape and I had a box full of index cards that listed every one of them and what was on them. I had numbered them up to 40 or so before I stopped. I also labeled the spines of the videotape cases. Everything was scrawly and messy and non-uniform but I could find whatever I wanted.
I had already removed the original 10 or 12 tapes from the shelves before I started the big cleanup this month. (Actually, they may be stored in a box, and I should check that and throw them away. But damn.) In cleaning out my video shelves, I had to throw away dozens of other tapes. Throwing away videotapes, some of which had been used to tape things only once or twice. Imagine that back in 1980. I threw away tapes that contained movies that are easy to find on DVD now, tapes where the movies were such poor quality that you have to crank up the TV volume all the way and it still sounds awful, not to mention the tracking problems.
I kept tapes that contained movies that are currently out of print, because even a rotten copy of Swimming to Cambodia is better than none at all, and tapes of Xena, Warrior Princess that I still have to review for quality (probably most of those will be thrown away, too) and a whole shelf full of Sesame Street episodes, that I’m not sure what I want to do with. I kept all my episodes of Brisco County, Jr. because it is highly unlikely that we’ll see that show on DVD anytime soon. I kept more tapes than I threw away, but I filled two brown-paper grocery bags with videotapes.
The shelves look much tidier now, and they’ll look even better once I go through the TV show stuff. I have plenty of room for all my new DVDs.
I sent an email to some friends at work yesterday about the commercial videotapes, which I brought to the office in a big shopping bag. Most of the tapes were snatched up immediately, despite the fact that so many people have DVD players now. Some were quite popular—I thought a fight would break out over The Princess Bride, a videotape I hunted down and bought when it was out of print, and used to be very proud of owning because it was so hard to find.
I still have four left, and it’s sad to see them on the desk, as though they were homeless creatures: Some Like It Hot, Kiss Me, Stupid (the last commercial videotape I bought, because I was sure it would never be on DVD), and two copies of Army of Darkness. How could no one want these tapes? But then if you like these movies at all you probably have your own copies already.
My friends keep telling me to take the remaining four to Goodwill and be done with it. My boyfriend suggested Craig’s List. I can’t do that yet. I’m too lazy to mail them out, too. (So please don’t ask.) I’ll probably email my product group at work, which is so large that I am sure someone will take Bruce Campbell home. I can think of a couple of friends who might like the Wilder movies. I know they’re just bits of plastic, but I’m weirdly attached to them. And I want them to all have good homes, at least for a little longer, before they become entirely obsolete.