Personal, tearful - and possibly highly indulgent - Time Out article mourning the passing of all things VHS…
Published in Time Out London issue 1975.
Planet of the Tapes
Michel Gondry’s ‘Be Kind Rewind’ (released on DVD this week) is a cooing love letter to the retro delights of VHS and all things lo-fi might evoke in some a certain nostalgia for an altogether simpler home viewing experience. For others, however, it represents a thinly fictionalised account of an ongoing obsession that the arrival of DVD served only to inflame.
Just as there were many holdouts in the bitter changeover from LP to CD, there will always be a few souls unmoved by the promise of such frivolities as better picture quality, format flexibility and illuminating extras. In the film, the refusal of video store-jockeys Mos Def and Jack Black’s to bow down to the digital juggernaut of progress, mirrors the feelings of many.
Their London equivalents might have spent their Saturday afternoons trawling through the racks of Music and Video Exchange in Notting Hill or Up The Video Junction in the heart of Camden Lock market, but even these stalwarts have now been forced to all but abandon VHS sales. In the case of the latter, the owner, Nick, showed me a storeroom stuffed with boxfuls of unsellable VHS tapes which, to these eyes at least, was like peeking into that warehouse at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’.
Naturally, there’s the odd minor drawback to buying second-hand videos. I recently came across an ex-rental big box copy of Clint Eastwood’s hysterical ‘82 Cold War potboiler ‘Firefox’ only to find a pristine transfer that was interrupted after twenty minutes by a Central TV ad break, circa 1986. Somebody had none-too-craftily taped over Warner Brothers version of the film with one screened on the telly one night after Midweek Sports Special. Who would do such a thing, and why? Whatever the answers, it says more about the human condition than a few heads bobbing up and down at the bottom of a pirated DVD of ‘Beowulf’…
It seems like only yesterday that the arrival of the video cassette recorder opened the hallowed vaults of cinema to our front rooms. Costing hundreds of pounds, and more complicated than manned space flight, they signaled the dawn of a much-heralded utopian futurama and were often the most expensive thing in the house.
I kicked off my own love affair with VHS with the help of a trusty top-loading Ferguson Videostar – spraypainted red with white ‘Starsky & Hutch’ lightning bolts down the side. Noisy, cantankerous and with a mind of its own, it was less a piece of the furniture than it was a beloved member of the family. The plasticky DVD players being knocked out for 15 quid alongside the disposable barbecues in your Sainsbury’s Local can hardly inspire the same brand of affection.
The films initially chosen for release on this nascent format were either
serio-comic Oscar plodders such as ‘Kramer vs Kramer’ or antiquated Disney children’s fare like ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’. This would all change as dominion over the remote control ceded from Dad to the kids and the video floodgates truly opened. With a captive audience virtually assured, production values went out the window and cheap horrors, lame comedies and exploitative ‘Video Nasties’ were churned out to insatiable playground demand.
When you can have any film imaginable delivered overnight by ordering on the internet, it’s hard to recall anything as pedestrian as idly browsing the racks of a video store or corner shop. But it was here that the true devotee was inducted into the VHS brotherhood: the fact that many videos featured stickers claiming that the replacement value for lost or damaged tapes was a ludicrous three-figure sum might go some way to understanding the precious allure these tapes would eventually instill on the connoisseur. That DVD of ‘A Bridge Too Far’ that came free with the Daily Mail is unlikely to go on to enjoy pride of place in your film collection.
The original rental releases of these films invariably came in cases that were the size of cereal boxes and made of the same material as flight recorders. We’re talking about the iconic puffy Warner Home Video ‘clamshell’ boxes here, rather than subsequent three-for-a-tenner versions knocked out in Woolies, of course.
These obelisks either featured covers that were faithful to the spirit of the original film poster art or hand-drawn scenes of licentious debauchery that bore no relation to the content of the film whatsoever. Either way, they were infinitely preferable to the barely coherent airbrushed nightmares that adorn the very same films as released on disc.
Trailers haven’t changed in their basic execution, but even these seem somewhat less exciting and gleefully unhinged than they used to be. Current trailers routinely restrict themselves to the latest art-house crossover or high-concept action behemoth, but back in the day they used to be an entirely random and often highly inappropriate selection of promos: ‘On Golden Pond’ would follow ‘Maniac Cop’ and nobody batted an eye.
Nowhere was this laissez-faire attitude more apparent than in the case of the infamous Medusa Home Video, whose trailers were regularly peppered with oodles of swears, full-frontal nudity and graphic torture. But even these were less unpleasant than the ubiquitous explanation of the ratings system trotted out to camera by Radio One dinosaur Simon Bates, in which he memorably warned us to be aware of any upcoming “sexual swear words”.
Obviously, the films themselves are the same on either format. But stripped of the distractions of commentaries, picture modes and superfluous alternate endings you are presented with viewing experience that’s far closer to the director’s original cinematic vision.
Sadly, after valiantly seeing off the Betamax and the Laserdisc, the jig was finally up when the bells and whistles of DVD put the venerable VHS out of commission. Video recorders were all but discontinued, cassettes disappeared from high street retailers and magnetic tape became the province of crackpots, bores and Luddites – or, as I like to think of us, hobbyists.
