At the beginning was an Eatons or Simpsons catalogue… 1976 edition. Inside its pages was an ad for a videotape recorder; and on top of the deck, as illustrated in the colour photo, was what appeared to be an alarm clock. I don’t remember the list price of this spiffy and intoxicating unit. Even though having a home video recorder was a dream come true (“I can tape The Six Million Dollar Man!”) I don’t think I realized what effect the technology would really have. Besides, it was more a case of being able to record ‘off air’. I don’t think the concept of movies-on-tape even occurred to me- or anyone, really.
In the autumn of 1981, Sam The Record Man in downtown Barrie started renting VHS tapes. As part of the store display were several ‘prerecord’ feature films. Each tape had a small, round colour sticker: They came in red, blue, green, etc. Videotapes marked with the red sticker, for example, were the priciest rentals at $8.00 per weekend, if I remember correctly. In descending order were $6, $4, and $2. Of course, the $2 rentals were of movies that were less appealing – older or more obscure titles – to most potential renters. If you didn’t have a VHS machine to play these little darlin’s on, then no problem; they were available for rent at $30.00 per weekend. (Remember, this was 1981! Just to give you an idea regarding inflation, I got a job in the summer of 1981, which paid $8.00 per hour. My dad laughed when I told him the rate of pay as that was good money back then, period; never mind that I had just graduated from high school!) Video Station opened up on Dunlop Street (Barrie’s main street) soon after and Video King opened its doors for business in the Wellington Plaza. These were Barrie’s first dedicated video rental stores. They had $25.00 membership fees and more generous rental rate schemes. I paid for a membership at Video King. Yes, twenty-five big ones for a “membership” (!) was a lot in those days, but, if you wanted access to the great movie repository, there was no choice.
I was first introduced to the concept of watching movies at home on videotape earlier in that same year. My friend Lorenzo’s family already had a VHS machine and some complementing prerecord movies to actually put in it. He would come over with the deck, we’d hook it up to the colour television downstairs, and we would watch movies. I remember that the first of these was Alien, a film which had only hit theatres around a year and a half earlier. Kinda freaky this is when you think about it. And I was already having fun. Things had got to the point where a home video version of a movie would hit tape very quickly after its initial theatrical run. I remember watching Conan the Barbarian, with my geeky friends, in the Autumn of 1982 – it had just hit theatres in June of that year.
This put a new spin on the movie viewing experience. One could not only watch a movie again – but in the comfort of the living room – but you could also fast forward to skip parts you didn’t want to have to sit through or immediately re-watch that very funny scene that you just finished laughing at. And this would allow my geeky friend, Tony, to say, after watching The Black Hole, “let’s re-watch the opening grid sequence”. Truly, a geek’s paradise, this was.
My family obtained our first VHS recorder in the summer of 1982. It was very exciting to have one in the house and at my (did I say, “my”) disposal, and being able to record Death Wish off the air – from CHCH in Hamilton – at 3 a.m. Next was Bananas. One controlled time itself… there was no more need to fight the closing eyelids: Just tape it! For instance, back in late 1977, the original King Kong movie was on at about 2 A.M. And I had every intention of staying up to watch it. (I never made it.)
In my parent’s rec-room I organized a regular movie night: This had gotten so popular, and it did quickly, that I remember having fifteen people crammed in for a double feature of Airplane and The Elephant Man. Come to think of it, that record might have been shattered when I programmed the classic feature film, Flesh Gordon.
VHS blank tapes were not cheap in the day. They easily ran $10 or more, and that was the cost of a T-60. I bought my own Agfa T-120 tape and paid a whopping $20 for it. But it was a “high quality” tape… said so on the box. I’m sure it was, is, as I still have it. (I recorded some archival stuff on it back in 1990 and decided to retire it as a new tape.) By the way, if you open up a tape from back then you will find the mechanism of a very high quality. Compare it to a tape manufactured years later and you will find the latter day versions to be more of the ‘friction’ type. (The newer VHS shells are missing the nice guide rollers and springs which the originals seemed to have. They were better made and more elaborate in their precision aspects… think ‘Rolls Royce’ versus ‘Lada’.) I guess we got what we paid for, over and above the inflated prices of any new technology… or toy.
Another big benefit of owning a videotape machine is being able to purchase your favourite movies. In fact, my first purchase was in the summer of 1988, when I laid down $19.95 for an episode of Star Trek (The Corbomite Manuever). To this day, I have accumulated around seventy VHS ‘prerecords’. But what I do have in my video library is pretty eclectic. For whatever reason, I never rushed out to buy prerecord VHS tapes. Maybe taping something is, or was when the technology was relatively new, much more exciting to me. And I would much rather rent a movie than buy it (since I have always been a cheap bastard).
To be perfectly honest, I never found the introduction of the DVD to be anywhere near as exciting as that of the VHS format. Exciting is not even the word in the DVD’s case, as the big problem was you could not record on it. Yes, DVD did have an improved picture and the capability to have multiple audio tracks, compared to VHS’s two (but of superb fidelity, if “hi-fi”) stereo tracks. But again, a playback only format just was not as exciting, plus times were different. I didn’t even get my first DVD player until the Autumn of 2003 which is odd considering I work in ‘imaging’ and have worked on and off again in video duplication!
It is said that “VHS is dead”. Well, I have a good memory, and ‘they’ have been saying that for years! But perhaps it is at the very end, at least for watching movies. I bought a new VHS recorder back in late 2002 and it is in excellent condition. I need it to play the video tapes that I am keeping (for now, at least, as many titles have not made it to DVD as of yet, and I have never been one to obsessively replace my linear tapes with the ‘shiny disc’) and to record shows off-air… which is the way most folk still record their favourite television programs and movies; for the time being, at least…
Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #19 (the ever-popular VHS RIP issue).
Simon St. Laurent
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Simon St. Laurent worked for years in the film/TV business in multiple roles, including: camera, design, optical effects, video post. He has also produced several of his own projects.