By Travis Johnson
Japanese company Funai Electronics have announced that they will cease production of video cassette recorders this month. Given that they are the last producers of VCRs in the world, this is pretty much the death knell for the VHS format.
It’s impossible to understate the importance of the home video boom in propagating film culture. The video store explosion brought Hollywood to the suburbs, and Gen-Xers growing up in that period were the first generation to be able to really immerse themselves in the world of movies without going to great trouble or expense. Prior to the rise of the home market, movies got their theatrical run and then, maybe, cropped up on TV once in a while, or at a revival theatre if you were lucky enough to live near one.
VHS (and its unsuccessful cousin, Betamax) changed all that, putting a wealth of cinema at the fingertips of anyone with the financial wherewithal to afford a VCR and rental fees (One new release and 5/6/7 weeklies for $10!). It also meant that your more obsessive movie fan (like those who would, say, go on to a career writing about film) could watch their favourites over and over again, or build up a body of knowledge about directors, producers, actors, studios and so on. Look at how film is discussed in the wider culture now, and the deep knowledge of the industry and the medium even the average punter has – there is a direct correlation. The prevalence of VHS in the ’80s and ’90s made all this possible.
Of course, DVD is better than VHS, and Blu-Ray is better than DVD, and so on and so forth, but every time we undergo a format upgrade we lose movies, or at least the ability to access them easily. Not every film was released on VHS, and not every VHS release was re-released on DVD, and that trend will continue beyond Blu Ray and 4K into whatever forms we use to view our movies in the future. Early VHS distribution was the wild west, with companies desperate for content buying up the rights to all kinds of madness and foisting them onto the shelves of neighbourhood video libraries, and from there into the hands of impressionable teenagers whose parents probably should have kept a closer eye on what their kids were watching. Before imdb and Rotten Tomatoes, renting a video was like Russian Roulette – you only had the garish display covers and hyperbolic sleeve blurbs to go by, and any rented tape could be an absolute turkey or a total mindscrew.
What that means is that, for the really dedicated film geek, there’s still value in owning a VCR, even after the cessation of production. It’ll be interesting to watch the market in parts and repairs in the coming years, as collectors try to keep alive the machines that let them watch the largely forgotten and carefully hoarded “classics”. Sure, you can always digitise and upload the movies themselves, but that’s not quite the same thing, is it? The physical form itself has intrinsic value; for some, the crackle of a poorly-tuned VHS drumhead is like Proust’s madeleine.
It might be weird to mourn what is, when you break it down, just a technological format, but VHS enabled multiple successive generations of cineastes to pursue their passions unfettered, and that is, whichever way you slice it, a pretty great thing. So thanks for the memories, VHS: you were awesome.
There is a VCR collectors market. I have been burned via a counterfeit copy of RAD. Seems a bit of a pissy way to make money. Some collectors are buying up entire mom and pop VCR stores for their own collections.