Why some people are still buying VHS tapes

Why some people are still buying VHS tapes

Hannah Selinger

14.03.2021 

The last VCR, according to Dave Rodriguez, 33, a digital-repository librarian at Florida State University was produced in 2016 by Funai Electric in Osaka, Japan. But the VHS tape itself may be immortal. Today, a robust marketplace exists, both virtually and in real life, for this ephemera.

On Instagram, sellers tout videos for sale, like the 2003 Jerry Bruckheimer film ‘Kangaroo Jack,’ a comedy involving a beauty salon owner — played by Jerry O’Connell — and a kangaroo. Asking price, $190 (Rs 13,800).

If $190 feels outrageous for a film about a kangaroo accidentally coming into money, consider the price of a limited-edition copy of the 1989 Disney film ‘The Little Mermaid,’ which is listed on Etsy for $45,000 (Rs 32 lakh). The cover art for this hard-to-find copy is said to contain a male anatomical part drawn into a sea castle.

There is, it turns out, much demand for these old VHS tapes, price tags notwithstanding, and despite post-2006 advancements in technology. Driving the passionate collection of this form of media is the belief that VHS offers something that other types of media cannot.

“The general perception that people can essentially order whatever movie they want from home is flat-out wrong,” said Matthew Booth, 47, the owner of Videodrome in Atlanta, which sells VHS tapes in addition to its Blu-ray and DVD rental business. Streaming, Booth said, was “promised as a giant video store on the internet, where a customer was only one click away from the exact film they were looking for.”

But the reality, he said, is that new releases are prohibitively expensive, content is “fractured” between subscription services, and movies operate in cycles, often disappearing before people have the chance to watch them. In that sense, the VHS tape offers something the current market cannot: a vast library of moving images that are unavailable anywhere else.

“Anything that you can think of is on VHS tape, because, you’ve got to think, it was a revolutionary piece of the media,” said Josh Schafer, 35, of Raleigh, North Carolina, a founder and the editor-in-chief of Lunchmeat Magazine and LunchmeatVHS.com, which are dedicated to the appreciation and preservation of VHS. There is, Schafer said, “just so much culture packed into VHS,” from reels depicting family gatherings to movies that just never made the jump to DVD. Schafer owns a few thousand tapes himself.

Michael Myerz, 29, an experimental hip-hop artist in Atlanta who has a modest collection of VHS tapes, finds the medium inspirational. Some of what Myerz seeks in his work, he said, is to replicate the sounds from “some weird, obscure movie on VHS I would have seen at my friend’s house late at night, after his parents were asleep.” He described his work as “mid-lo-fi.” “The quality feels raw but warm and full of flavour,” he said of VHS.

For collectors like April Bleakney, 35, the owner and artist of Ape Made, a fine art and screen-printing company in Cleveland, nostalgia plays a significant role in collecting. Bleakney, who has between 2,400 to 2,500 VHS tapes, views them as a byway connecting her with the past. She inherited some of them from her grandmother, a children’s librarian with a vast collection.

“I think that people are nostalgic for the aura of the VHS era,” said Thomas Allen Harris, 58, a creator of the television series ‘Family Pictures USA’ and a senior lecturer in African American studies and film and media studies at Yale University.

“So many cultural touch points are rooted there,” Harris said of the 1980s. It was, he believes, “a time when, in some ways, Americans knew who we were.”

Some who are rooted in the world of VHS hope that what is currently an underground culture will become mainstream again. Record players, Schafer pointed out, have enjoyed a surge in popularity.

But whether or not the VCR makes a complete comeback, VHS enthusiasts agree that these tapes occupy an irreplaceable place in culture.“It’s like a time capsule,” Myerz said. “The medium is like no other.” NYT NEWS SERVICE

NOSTALGIA FACTOR: Some people still collect VHS tapes because it reminds them of a simpler time