Memories on VHS

True story… I own dozens of VHS tapes and dozens more DVDs, and I do not own a device that will play any of them. We had one of those snazzy VCR/DVD combo machines that we bought around when George W. Bush was in office, and about five years ago, the VCR side stopped working and when we moved across town two years ago, as I was packing, my wife asked me when the last time was that I watched a DVD. When I responded, “Uhh…” she threw it in the trash pile.

But I’m not throwing any of my “collection” away. For one thing, our wedding, about a dozen Christmas mornings from when the kids were little, and the only video footage of my daughter who passed away when she was 15 months old are all on VHS tapes. For another thing, I never throw anything away. One of the perks of the new (to us) house is the big upstairs attic for me to hide all my precious heirlooms, like baseball cards, comic books, Star Wars toys, and yes a few boxes of VHS tapes and CDs. I mean, I’m never going to actually wear my authentic 1991 World Tour Guns N’ Roses t-shirt again (mostly because it no longer fits), but you can’t just throw something like that out with yesterday’s leftovers and the litter box contents.

I bring this all up because a friend and I were talking about 80s movies after binge-watching the “Karate Kid” revival TV show “Cobra Kai” (which I highly recommend for the 40-and-over crowd), and we started talking about movies from that era. He brought up “The Goonies,” which I loved as a kid but have not seen in at least 25

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years.

It did remind me, though, that when I was in my early teens we did not have HBO (my Dad was not going to pay an extra $10 a month for one channel when we already had like 40 channels and didn’t watch 2/3 of them). But every so often, HBO would give you a free one-week trial period. Well, we did have a VCR (somehow spending $20 a weekend on renting movies was OK but a $10 monthly subscription to many of the same movies was not), and what we’d do is go and buy a box of those 8-hour SLP blank VHS tapes. We’d stick a tape in when a movie was starting, press record, and record three or four (often 3 1/2) movies in one whack, wait for another movie to start and repeat the process several times for the week and by the time our free trial was over, we’d have 30 or so movies recorded. We’d watch them over and over, so often that more than three decades later, I still remember that one of those tapes had The Blues Brothers, Cujo, Rambo: First Blood, and Friday the 13th Part II on it (as well as the first few minutes of some nudie show).

Nowadays, you have the entirety of the world’s cinema in your hand with all the different services available now, and that’s awesome, there’s still something cool about sliding that boxy VHS tape into the machine and hearing those gears start to whirl and spin.

But one good thing: My Dad no longer has to yell “Tracking!” when the tape gets a millimeter out of whack.