Feb 24, 2024 7 min read

By Brad Hundt

Staff writer

bhundt@observer-reporter.com

It’s hard to remember now just how revolutionary VCRs and videocassettes were when they became widely available in the mid-1980s.

Before then, if you wanted to see an older movie, you would mostly have to patiently wait until a local television station programmed it for an afternoon slot or late at night. Then, you’d have to watch it with plenty of commercial interruptions.

And if there was a television series you liked, well, you had to sit down in front of the set when it was on and watch it right then and there. When it was over, it was over. There was no watching it again until it was repeated and no rewinding to catch something you might have missed. What came over the broadcast airwaves was painfully evanescent.

But when those videocassette recorders landed in homes, you could record the programs you wanted to watch even if they clashed with other obligations or even other programs – just pop a blank videocassette into the recorder, and you were set. VHS tapes could hold as much as eight hours of material. You could build your own library of your favorite series, talk shows or cooking programs right in your own abode.

VCRs and videocassettes also allowed cinema history to be thrown open like Aladdin’s Cave. Not only could you now watch movies minus the ads, but you could also get a membership at one of the Blockbuster stores that cropped up across the landscape and see contemporary movies just a few months after they were in theaters, old Hollywood favorites, or even sample revered foreign directors like Federico Fellini or Akira Kurosawa. Video stores that were more specialized, usually in cities or college towns, offered even deeper dives into foreign, classic and independent offerings.

Then, almost as quickly as it began, VHS was knocked from its perch by DVDs, and then not long after, video stores perished like pterodactyls after a meteor strike thanks to Netflix, which brought a virtually infinite library of movies to our mailboxes. More recently, DVD sales have been dropping at a rate of about 30% a year because of streaming, which makes the library of tapes or DVDs that once would have occupied a wall full of shelves available by pushing a few buttons on a remote.

Unlike vinyl records, which have staged a comeback in recent years, VHS tapes and the VCRs that once played them have not retained a lot of sentimental value for most people. No one has ever tried to make a case that videotapes offer better picture or audio quality than DVDs or streaming. There are still a lot of VCRs out there, but most are gathering dust in basements, garages and storage units. The same goes for VHS tapes. The millions of VHS copies of “Titanic,” “Jerry Maguire,” “The Godfather” or “Gone With the Wind” that were sold now sit mostly unwatched. You can go online and buy a grab-bag of 50 VHS tapes for as little as $25.

However, videotapes and VCRs have not entirely lost their allure for a dedicated subset of collectors and consumers. There are some fans who keep their VCRs humming after all these years and remain devoted to the videocassette.

One of them is Charleroi resident Cathy Heinlein. She has older, picture tube television sets that play those tapes just fine, so has seen no reason to part with her VHS copies of movies like “The Truman Show,” “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” “On Golden Pond” and many more.

“They all still play fairly well,” she explained. Due to financial concerns, Heinlein added, signing up for a batch of streaming services is “just not a possibility for me.”

Even though movies have not been released on VHS in the United States for almost 20 years, people like Heinlein can still purchase tapes in abundance at area thrift stores. On a recent visit to the Washington Goodwill outlet, a customer could purchase VHS copies of “Forrest Gump” and “Free Willy,” both of which were released in the heyday of the format, as well as a Three Stooges movie, a classic like “His Girl Friday,” the comedy “Love in the Afternoon” and many more.

If Heinlein remains devoted to VHS out of practicality, the format also has fans who were children when it was at its zenith. Josh Schafer, who is based in Raleigh, N.C., runs the site Lunch Meat, which is dedicated to all things related to “VHS culture.” It sells magazines, stickers, clothing – including sweatpants with a VHS logo – and, of course, VHS tapes. Much of the VHS culture Schafer and other collectors celebrate are the straight-to-video horror movies that populated the back shelves of so many video stores three or four decades ago and have never made the transition to DVD or streaming.

Schafer was born in 1985, and cherishes his memories of childhood stops at the video store.

“I never really let go of VHS,” he explained. “I always thought it was a very cheap, efficient way of building a film library. I never left it. I like the feel of them, I like the look of them.”

Schafer said it’s “hard to gauge” how many VHS devotees are still out there, but he noted that he has 34,000 followers on Instagram. Some of it is fueled by nostalgia, he admits, and he also believes that video stores were “really special places that people took for granted.” He pointed out that when people would shell out $3 to rent a movie for a couple of nights in, say, 1988, they were making a more conscious and thoughtful choice than just rummaging through a list of movies on a streaming site.

“There’s absolutely something deliberate about it,” he said.

Matt Steck agrees. The McKees Rocks resident takes collecting videotapes a step further than many of his compatriots by amassing a library of tapes in the Betamax format, which lost out to VHS in the format wars. Steck estimates he has about 250 Beta tapes and 40 Beta VCRs on which to play them. He also has one VHS VCR.

Steck first became interested in Beta tapes around 2002, when he was a freshman in high school and would go with his uncle to flea markets. He is so fascinated by Beta that he recorded his wedding to his wife, Nicole Chynoweth-Steck, on a Beta tape.

“It was always known as the better-looking format,” Steck said. “It was one of those underdog things. It was always fun going to stores to find it.”

Nicole Chynoweth-Steck echoes Schafer’s sentiments that settling in with movies pulled from their Beta collection allows them to think more about what they watch.

“You kind of have decision paralysis with all these choices anymore,” she said. “It’s exhausting having all the choices we’re given.”

Their collection, she added, offers “the feeling of being at a Blockbuster.”

People who are still keeping their VHS tapes are also performing an important job for history, Steck believes. Because things get lost, erased or otherwise vanish, some television programs and commercials from 30 or 40 years ago are now only available because they happened to be recorded on somebody’s VCR.

“It’s all on people’s home-recorded tape,” he said. “It’s the only archive we have.”