The first time it occurred me how much the way we consume media had changed was when my son Dominic was three years old. We were at my parents’ house and I asked him if he wanted to watch something on TV.
“Yes,” he said. “I want to watch the Mickey Mouse where the Clubhouse disappears.”
“Oh,” I said. “That episode isn’t on right now.”
He was confused.
“What do you mean, it isn’t on?”
I struggled to explain that on “regular” TV, you could only watch what was airing at that time. You couldn’t pick the show, let alone the episode. I think I said something along the lines of, “This TV doesn’t have as many choices.” Then Dominic asked if we could go home.
To be fair, if I could’ve gone back in time and told my childhood self that someday you would be able to choose any movie or any episode of any show and watch it with a few clicks of your remote, that would’ve seemed like absolute magic to me. For anyone who grew up in the days before Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus and the like, you really could only watch a show when it was on. In fact, many of us subscribed to a weekly magazine that informed you of what shows would be on when. If there was something you wanted to see and you weren’t going to be home, you would have to go to the lengths of setting up your VCR to record it onto a VHS tape.
If you ever pushed the little flap of the VCR door open when there was no tape in it and looked inside, you would see there was so much crazy-looking gadgetry in there that it didn’t seem like it should even work. When you would insert a tape into the machine it would make noises like you were somehow inconveniencing it, cranking and whirring as all of those little gears and doo-dads loaded the tape and got ready to play it. Eventually you could wear a tape out from watching it too much. Who else remembers seeing the slow, gradual degradation of the picture as those little static lines would begin to creep in from the bottom and top of the screen? You could try to adjust the tracking to get rid of them (I still don’t even really know what that was actually doing), but after a while it became futile. And don’t even get me started on the horror of pulling a tape out of the machine to find that your VCR just “ate” your favorite video – seeing a trail of the tape’s innards being stretched out from the back of the cassette and into the mouth of the machine was like it was some kind of carnivorous animal that had turned against you. It was a stinging betrayal.
Well before DVD box sets existed, I would try make my own sets on tape. The first time I remember doing this was in 1989 when I made collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episodes. It was a sort of “Best of TMNT” tape of only my personal favorites. Every day after school I would have a tape in the VCR ready to go, and I would wait for the title card to come up to see which episode it was. (I only had the theme song recorded once, at the very beginning of the tape.) If it was an episode I wanted, I’d hit record. If not, I’d wait for the next day and try again. (If you’re wondering which episodes made the cut, the four Eye of Sarnath episodes were on there, the Baxter the Fly origin episode, the first Casey Jones episode, and the episode where Leatherhead meets the Rat King.)
There was a fine art to what setting you would have the VCR on when you recorded something. Most had at least two, or possibly all three of the following options: Standard Play (SP), which could fit two hours of high quality video on a single tape; Long Play (LP), which could fit four hours of okay-looking video on a tape; and Extended Play or Super Long Play (EP or SLP) which could fit six hours of pretty crappy looking video on a tape. I would almost always record in EP/SLP because my not-very-discerning young mind emphasized quantity over quality. I wanted as much content as I could get on a single video. The fact that it didn’t look as good wasn’t something I paid a ton of attention to. This was in the days before high definition and wide screens, so shows didn’t always look all that great even when you watched them live. Compared to the 4K resolution we’ve become accustomed to nowadays, TV recorded onto a VHS tape in SLP would look like an impressionistic painting.
If you buy a movie on DVD or Blu-ray, or purchase it digitally on Amazon, Apple TV, or Vudu, you have the exact same copy of it as everyone else. If you recorded something off TV, you had captured that specific airing of it. It might have the commercials that aired along with it, unless you took the time to “cut them out” by pausing the recording each time the show went to break and unpausing it when it came back. We had a tape of Christmas specials from the 80s, and the ads were just as much a part of the holiday magic as the shows. Who could forget the 7-Up commercial with the Countdown to Christmas calendar, or the bizarre Isotoner gloves ad with the nerdy guy who had eight girlfriends?
Speaking of that Christmas tape – sometimes you might have only part of a movie or show recorded, and that became ingrained in your mind as the complete version. Our recording of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer began a few minutes in, when Mrs. Claus is imploring Santa to “Eat! Eat!” because he was too skinny. Obviously I knew that wasn’t how the special actually started and that we’d missed the very beginning of it. Yet, even now, when I watch Rudolph at Christmas time, the first few minutes of it seem foreign to me. I watched our truncated version so many times as a kid that it feels like the special should start abruptly with Mrs. Claus fattening up her husband.
You could also form associations between movies that had nothing to do with each other just because you had them on the same tape. For example, we had Clue and the Martin Short movie Clifford taped back to back from a time they had aired on Comedy Central. In my mind, those two movies still go together, even though there is nothing else that connects them besides the Dimino family having them on the same cassette. Same with Batman: Mask of the Phantasm and Daffy Duck’s Quackbusters, both of which we recorded off of Cartoon Network. Somewhere burned in my brain is the idea that after Batman finishes saving Gotham City from the Phantasm, Daffy comes in and recruits Bugs and Porky to start catching ghosts.
If you taped a movie off TV there was a good chance you were recording an edited version of it. I will never forget the time in high school when I had some friends over and one of them referenced the movie Space Balls. I proudly announced that we had it on tape and suggested that we watch it. I didn’t think about the fact that I had recorded it from Comedy Central and it had been edited for language. My buddies gave me some grief for having a toned-down version of the movie, but we ended up watching the whole thing and laughing even harder at the dubbed-over curse words and awkwardly censored scenes. (The line “We ain’t found shit!” when they are combing the desert was completely omitted, which was the scene we’d been talking about in the first place.)
My penchant for assembling “Best of…” tapes lasted pretty much right up until VHS went obsolete. In college, I made a tape for my then-girlfriend (and now wife!) Amanda of her favorite episodes of Full House by waiting for each one to air on ABC Family. Some guys made their girlfriends mix-tapes of romantic songs; I made mine a mix-tape of a T.G.I.F. sitcom. Now of course we have the whole series on DVD, and it’s also available to stream on Max, so we have multiple ways to view any episode at any moment, but at the time that video I gradually assembled was the only way to have those specific episodes in anything resembling an “on demand” form.
Everything is so accessible now, and there is a kind of magic in that. Again, my kid self would’ve absolutely flipped at the idea of having an instantaneous library of movies and shows at his fingertips at all times. But there was a magic in the VHS era too, in being able to capture that movie or that show as a moment in time. I’m not saying it was better. It was clunky, time-consuming, and if you missed the episode you wanted to tape you were out of luck until it came around again in reruns. But I will always look back on it fondly, and remember how it felt to push a tape into the VCR, listen to the sound of the whirring gears, and, at just the right moment, press “Record.”
It’s not too hard to imagine an alternate timeline where technology never advanced past the VCR. I’m sure in that reality I would’ve been making “Best of…” tapes of all of my son’s favorite episodes of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, so he could watch the one where the clubhouse disappears any time he wanted to.
Despite Reality 