Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - VHS Tapes

Episode Date: June 9, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why VHS tapes are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

VHS tapes, known for being movies, famous for being 90s, 1990s. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why VHS tapes are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone because I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden. Katie! Yes! What is your relationship to or opinion of VHS tapes? The smell of a hot one like you put it in you put it in the VHS player the deck and you take it out after watching

Disney's Robin Hood with the foxes and the bears. And you've watched that so many times and you take the tape out and it's still warm and you can smell that magnetic tape. Yeah. Yeah. Man, such good memories. There's something very, it engages all your senses. The clickety clack when you shove it in there,

the sound of it rewinding and the way like Pavlovian response I would have to that of being excited to see a movie. You'd of course have like there'd be a part of it because you play it so much you kind of damage the tape a little bit. So there's like one part of it that has a little bit of a fuzzy disturbance in the movie, but you're so used to it that part of the whole experience at that point. Yeah, yeah, it's a very physical experience operating the tape and seeing how it'll

play this time. Yeah. Because yeah, you might need to fix the tracking or whatever. And there you go. Yeah. Did you have a favorite VHS tape that you loved into Oblivion? A couple of Disney movies, Aladdin, Toy Story, Lion King. Yeah, solid. And then also my grandma taped a couple of Jack Benny specials off of television and gave me, my grandma,

she like gave me the VHS of that, which was, I thought I watched it so much. Yes. And we have like a lot of emotional me the VHS of that, which was, I thought I watched it so much. Yes. And we had a lot of emotional connection to VHS because my grandma Schmidt also worked at the VHS department of our local library. Oh, wow, no kidding. So we would go see her, which was great, and then also get tapes. Oh, that's so fun.

Yeah. And then she also had one patron who used to work for the US Treasury and would always rent two tapes with a $2 bill because it was $1 per tape. So then she had like a lot of $2 bills, which are kind of an odd US currency and then she'd give them to us, you know. Yeah, those are kind of rare. That's so cool. Man, I love stuff. I love physical media. I love stuff. I love physical media. It's just, there's something very gratifying about it. Yeah, I remember my grandparents had a tape of like 50 classic Looney Tunes cartoons

or classic cartoons. It had Looney old style Looney Tunes, had Superman on it, it had Casper the ghost on it. It was so cool. And I would have trouble sleeping when I was at my grandparents' house, just because I was a very sensitive kid.

And so they would always let me watch that when I would have trouble sleeping. So I learned that if I would get up in the middle of the night, I could tiptoe my way into the living room, put the tape on. It was just such a comfort. And then after they passed away, I got that tape

and it was a huge comfort to me. I watched it and made me feel like I was back there again. Yeah, I love that. Yeah. There's also a generational thing that's part of that too, of course, where like we were young when this was really going as a medium.

And then I have a few wonderful friends who extended that for me because after college, I moved to Los Angeles with three very good friends. One of them suggested this topic because he's on the Discord. Thank you, Joel Samotaro. But Joel in particular got an old TV with a built-in VHS player, VCR. And then we just, like, found old tapes of stuff. So our favorite was a random VHS tape called Oki Noodling, which is about the practice of fishing in a river by just pulling the fish out with your hands. Catfish!

Putting your arm out and having a catfish grab your arm and you... Yeah, it's called Noodling. I know what Noodling is. Wow, that's so cool. I want to see that. Yeah, I don't have the tape anymore. Maybe he does. Okie. Okie. So like Oklahoma noodling, noodling from Oklahoma. And then Okies, I think it's more the meaning of like hillbillies and traveling people.

Like a California in the dust bowl meaning. Right, because yeah, actually, yeah, people coming from Oklahoma to California. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's so cool. So yeah, I have like, across a lot of my life, fun VHS memories, even though, because our other favorite tape was just a tape of the movie In Good Company, which came out in 2004. And so that was the very end of when they were still making VHSs of new movies. It's a drama about Tofer Grace and Dennis Quaid. It's just like fine. But it was funny that we had a tape of a new movie.

I learned that Dennis Quaid was in Braveheart, Dragonheart. I didn't realize. Oh, good for him. Yeah. Wow. Dragonheart feels like a VHS era movie in a big way. I read the Wikipedia for Dragonheart today. I don't know quite know why, but yeah, I mean, it's so... We do it most days. I don't know. It seems regular to me. Yeah. Every morning I have my little cup of coffee and read the Wikipedia to Dragon Heart. But yeah, it's really interesting.

One of the cool things about VHS tapes is when you would record something that would play on TV, because you don't only capture the movie or TV show or whatever, you capture all of the old ads that would play. And there's something about maybe one thing was the Charlie Brown Christmas special, then you'd have that, but you'd also have the ads

and then you'd have the things that you just keep recording until the tape was done. So you had all the TV shows after it. And so I would kind of learn the rhythm of these tapes where it's like, oh, and now the Tropicana commercial comes on with the guy trying to catch oranges with a straw. And you know, it's such an interesting little time capsule because it captures not just the movie, but sort of all these other interesting,

very time specific things like ads. And then it brings up all of these old childhood memories of that, like this, I don't know, a certain genesequoie of that moment preserved in the amber of fragile magnetic tape. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And I'm so glad folks voted for this in the in the ranaway in the polls on the Discord. And let's get into this such a vast topic. Let's get into all sorts of things about it.

Yes, let's do it. Starting with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics this week that's in a segment called It's the numbers and stats that we've researched. It's the numbers and stats that we've researched. It's the numbers and stats that we've researched. It's the numbers and stats that we've researched for Civ Podcast. Man, I think we should release our own mixtape. Slightly different. Slightly different thing,

but same vein, right? We'll do a TV special and tape it onto VHS. Right. Yeah. With commercials for like Empire Carpet and stuff. Yeah, you know. 1-800-922-237, Empire Today. Great.

Yeah. And that name was submitted by Action Populated on the Discord. Thank you, Action Populated. We have a new name every week. Please make a Missilean Wacky and Bass possible. Submit through Discord or to siftpod at gmail.com. This is why I don't remember song lyrics is all of that section of my brain is inhabited by jingles and commercials.

I can recite the Sears air conditioning commercial to you word for word, but any kind of music, any kind of song that actually has some kind of artistic merit, nah, can't help you. They should just give Grammys to, it's another scorcher and so on. Right. That makes sense to me.

Sorry, you said another scorcher? No, Alex, he says, another scorcher. Another scorcher? No, Alex, he says another scorcher. Another scorcher. One syllable off, you're right. Yeah. Yeah. And the first number this week is $75,000 US dollars. 75 grand. That's a moderately large amount of money. Exactly. This is the best number I could find for the most AVHS tape has ever been worth. Whoa. An individual tape. And it's also a really specific set of conditions. In most cases, they tend not to be worth more than a few hundred dollars on the auction market.

Right. But in the year 2022, Heritage Auctions, professional auction company, they sold a copy of Back to the Future, the 1985 movie on VHS. And it was sealed, it was in mint condition, it was still shrink wrapped. But the real reason it was worth 75 grand is that it was the personal copy of actor Tom Wilson. Yes, Tom Wilson. And Tom Wilson played Biff Tannen in Back to the Future, the whole franchise.

Biff, right. Biff was the bad guy, right? Yeah. And so to me, that's the main reason this sold for so much money. I'm also going to link a mental floss rundown of the more common situation where even a rare or well-preserved tape only sells for a few hundred bucks because if nothing else, most movies that were put on VHS were manufactured in massive quantities. So between that and it being recent and a lot of tapes being beat up or perceived to

break down, almost no VHS tapes hold significant dollar value on their own. You should tell this to my brother because I once accidentally lost one of the Star Wars, the HS tapes, the ones that were before George Lucas got back in there and started doing edits. My brother was so mad because I had brought it to high school for us to watch and then I forgot it in the tape deck and then I couldn't find it again. And my brother was like, well, but this is, he changed it. George went back in there and he changed them all. These

were the originals. These are relics. These are now precious artifacts. That's flooding back for me because we had a set of those tapes and we had a set of tapes of faulty towers and they both started with an interview with the creator being very pompous. It was George Lucas for Star Wars and then John Cleese for Faulty Towers. Oh yeah. And because that's a tape, unless you purposely fast forward, like even a DVD that's tucked in the menu somewhere. So like we tended to just watch John Cleese brag about how good

he is at Faulty Towers before every episode. I really like John Cleese in his various comedic works, but man, he really is pompous, isn't he? Yeah, and he would just talk a whole bunch about how well the show was so good, then expectations were too high, and that's why the last couple episodes, it was very self-centered to me But but we would just watch it before watching the show itself

Yeah, that's what's so interesting to me about VHS tapes because it's such a perk like they each have their own little quirks So it kind of unlocks these specific memories Whereas a lot of digital media, right, is not necessarily preserved in the same way that your version, right, that you've, whichever tape you got, whatever weird little quirk, right? I had a VHS tape that had this ad for this movie I'd never seen, like Ricky Tikitavi. And then when I finally read the actual- Oh, I saw that on the VHS tape. Yeah, go on.

Yeah, exactly. The Chuck Jones version of Rikki Tikki Tavi. And I never actually watched that movie, but I remember the ad really well. And when I read the, what is it? Like a Rudyard Kipling kind of story? Yeah, Rudyard Kipling, yeah. And I actually read the story. It's like, oh, this unlocks this core sort of memory of this this core sort of memory of this ad for a movie that I never watch. But that's, it's just so all these like very seemingly inconsequential things that create this interesting, unique quality to VHS versus say just something being kept digitally. That gets us into the next number too, because the next number is about 800 feet,

which is about 244 meters, 800 feet. And in a standard, typical VHS cassette, that's the length of the magnetic tape inside. 800 feet. Did you ever mess around with magnetic tape, Like pull it out and play around with it? Every tape we had was so valuable to me as a kid. I never, no, no, no, no. I didn't want to lose any bit of footage we had of anything. That's very Alex of you. I never did any wanton destruction of theHS, but I did sort of curiously once for, obviously not for Robin Hood,

the Disney version with all the foxes, cause that was the best one. But, and also certainly not 101 Dalmatians, also the best one. But I did for VHS tape of some garbage that I didn't care about, mash or whatever, kind of do a little bit of respectful VHS surgery where I would pull the ribbon out a little bit just to see how it would sort of unspool. And I was curious about, because I was interested in how it went from one spool to

the other and was trying to kind of figure that out. And I think I managed to put it back together and probably MASH was fine. Nobody watched MASH anyways. I was going to say some listener shouted when they heard about you destroying, even if it's the movie that's not as acclaimed as the TV show. They're like, no, Donald Sutherland, because everybody loves their little tapes, you know, we each have our own. War is in hell. War is war. And yeah, and this this big spool of tape is almost the whole technology. It's it's usually a mylar tape coated in something like iron oxide or another very fine particles of something magnetic,

because most of the technology is arranging and rearranging particles of oxides on the plastic tape. That's how you record something onto it. Then also the machine like a VCR reads the way those particles are arranged. We could get super technical about it, but I think it's more fun to get into other weird stories we have. Yeah. Boo. Technical. Who cares? No, but I understand it's just it's slightly different from film, right? Because film, you have each on each slide, right? Again, it's like a long ribbon of stuff, but each slide you project light through it, that hits a screen and then that's how you see film.

Yeah. And you can actually scratch directly on film and then have that show up in the light. If you scratch VHS tape, it just comes across as sort of noise because what's happening is the VHS reader is reading the magnetized surface in a certain way. And so that then does something. Then the little gremlins and the VHS player know what to put on screen. Yeah, it's truly the specific tape is everything for your picture experience. If there's little bits of dust or other debris on it, that's how you get little pops.

Then there's a feature called tracking, which is where you can align or realign how the tape is seen. And the other thing with this length of tape is that 800-foot-long tape usually had a runtime of three hours, like a maximum amount of video you could put on that. That's part of why a bunch of VHS tapes added previews for the other Disney movies you could buy on tape or little special features or something with basically every media format in history. If it's super limited in size, that changes the art. If it has extra space, a lot of movies, especially for kids, are less than three hours, so they

could just put other stuff in there and it was not a big deal. That's why for some movies like Lawrence of Arabia, there's a part one and a part two. Yeah. Another childhood memory is I was asleep over at a friend's house and their parents started letting us watch Titanic, but they only played the first of the two VHS tapes in order to skip the nudity. They said, well, the tape's over. So, yeah. And then they didn't play the second tape and we all had to go to bed. Everyone was fine. You know, the story of the Titanic where everyone has a good time and everything's fine?

Right, the ship didn't sink. It was obviously not over. It's an unsinkable ship. What, you thought it was gonna sink? They said it was unsinkable. I don't remember, but I assume there was some kind of little interstitial at the end of the first tape that said you should put in the second tape.

And I don't know, they just moved on. Because Titanic is three hours and 15 minutes long, so you can't put that on a three hour tape. No. But basically every other movie VHS was great for as a one tape thing. Yeah, no. And even that, it's like part of the experience, right? Because you get a little intermission.

They used to do that in actual movie theaters. They would have a little intermission where you'd get up, you'd go to the bathroom, you'd get some more milk duds and raisinets. And that was- Right, let's all go to the lobby. Let's all go to the lobby. Let's all go to the lobby.

And then they'd have little dancing hot dogs. We need that back. I have, listen, I sometimes drink large quantities of water and or soda when I'm at a movie theater. And I would like to be able to urinate in a reasonable period of time. And I feel like it is unfair for me to miss important plot points just because I'm trying to avoid a bladder infection. Yeah, you want to see every camel army go over that hill with Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia.

Exactly. You need a break in the middle. Come on, Lawrence, finish it up. I got to go to the bathroom. That's not how it works. And another number here is 2018. 2018 is when YouTuber Tom Scott visited an effects company that generated a popular artificial filter to make digital footage look like VHS.

It's just the year of a good video, but that was a year when people were developing really good ways to make new footage look old. The way that we really like to create artificial imperfections in our new media where it's like, ah, for a while it's just like, so HD, you'll feel like Cersei is in the room with you being a weird incestual queen. But there's also, especially with horror movie, like what is it? It's Quijibo, it's not Quijibo. What is it?

Skibbity boop. It's not that. Oh, Skibbity toilet? Not Skibbity toilet. No, that horror movie that has Skidamarink. That had sort of an element of a lower quality of video. A lot of horror movies do this. And the reason is the brain fills in missing information. And I think that for horror,

it works super well because you can do an effect that's like maybe a little cheesy. That's a lot creepier because I think it's more convincing. So that's such an interesting psychological thing. And I wonder if that's going to change though with new generations, right? Because we grew up with that understanding of like something on VHS, this real thing. And we know about the low quality of video, et cetera. Since video quality is just getting really good and everyone has iPhones that can basically take cinema quality video everywhere. I wonder if younger generations, that kind of like low quality, horror movie filter type thing is just not going to have the same effect.

I agree. Because yeah, this stuff really shifts generationally just with the technology and that VHS effects, it turns out through the process of seeing a media company, they're called Red Giant, they're in Portland, Oregon. But seeing a media company simulate it helped me understand what goes into something looking VHS. And it's basically two things. One is you down sample the colors because the camera's making these recordings and then getting them put on tapes. It was just less colorful and duller than the current cameras are now.

So that they could just kind of move a dial in their software. The other thing they wanted is the blips, the glitches, the other visual noise. And to make that they used physical gear. Like they got a secondhand VCR, they put a blank tape in it, and then they took panels off the VCR so they could damage and mess with the tape and the player as much as possible and then record the problems. Ah, that sounds like a job for me. Let me in there. Man, I would love to be paid to be a gremlin. Can you imagine?

Just let me get in there. Let me be a little saboteur. Yeah, like they ran magnets over the play heads. They stabbed the VCR's belt with pencil erasers. Ah, so jealous. They also got an example of a scrolling wrinkle by jamming a piece of the tape, and then that jam repeats across the whole spool inside the tape. And VHS is an interesting technology because a new one is already kind of broken because

either the VCR or the tape will just have issues as it plays often. But also we don't know how long these tapes last in the long term. According to gizmodo.com there's a kind of fake estimate on the internet because here's the estimate. The tape quality degrades by a range of 10 to 20% during a time span of 10 to 25 years. Gizmodo does a good job pointing out that this is two interlocking guesses for just the vibe of how subjectively worse the video is. The internet repeats this all over blogs, I checked, and it's just not really anything. We don't really know how fast or quickly a VHS degrades.

It really kind of varies by tape and varies by how they're stored. I wonder if it depends on where on the planet Earth you are too, because we have a whole magnetic field around the Earth. So would the VHS tapes stored at, say, the North Pole fare differently than those stored at the equator? Oh, that's fun. I wonder. Yeah.

Yeah. And the other thing we weirdly don't know is the rate of something called disk rot. Disk rot is a name for the degradation of CDs, DVDs, other optical disks they're called. That would be such a good vaporwave band name. It really is. yeah. Perfect. With VHS and with its competitors, we don't quite know how fast that physical media breaks down. We just have some guesses that are very bloggy. And so it's fun that it's kind of mysterious and it really varies on how a tape gets treated or a disc gets treated. That makes a lot of sense.

So it's like whether it's in Alex's house or in Katie's house. And that might determine how long the tape survives. I just imagined myself as a child but in a little janitor outfit, lightly brushing the tapes and carrying them, you know? I'm chewing on it. And I'm just chewing on it. I broke toys.

I wasn't weird, you know, but yeah. And yeah, and then the last number here is June 4th, 1977. Because June 4th, 1977 was the North American debut of the VHS format. Ooh. Introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago, a big trade event. Apparently with VHS and later DVD, they're both created by Japanese companies and then about a year later introduced in North America.

In North America, we got VHS in 1977. It was a brand name of Video Home System. It was a pitch. Then DVDs came almost 20 years later in March 1997. So like 77 to 97, that's kind of the window when VHS almost ruled the earth, but we're about to talk about a bunch of ways it had competition. All right. Was there like one size and one format that was really popular or were there weird different sizes, weird different players going on?

Yeah, let's talk about it in Takeaway Number One. VHS and Betamax both competed with earlier videotape formats and sparked a myth about pornography. Oh, boy. I don't know if folks have heard of a format battle between VHS and another magnetic tape video system called Betamax? Betamax. I had heard of that, but I didn't know those both defeated earlier video tape formats too. The popular imagination is just that two companies parallel invented tapes and then one one, but there's a lot more to it Okay, tell me Alex about this and be sure not to leave out the pornography

Yeah, and folks this won't be like lurid it's just which formats let them put pornography on it that's kind of it So yeah on it. That's kind of it. Ah, dang it. Key sources here, an amazing piece for Popular Mechanics by tech and science writer John Wenz, a piece for Smithsonian magazine by Jason Daly, and then a book called Epic Fails, the Edsel, the Mullet, and Other Icons of Unpopular Culture. That's by Salvador Jimenez Morguea, professor of sociology at Akita International University. There's some truth to the conception that VHS defeated Betamax in the market. Betamax was a Sony product and VHS was mostly a product of JVC. Those are both Japanese tech companies.

They debuted Betamax in Japan in 1976, VHS in Japan in 1977. Both products were pretty much hits, but VHS started outgrowing it out selling Betamax as soon as 1978. One year after it debuted. Was it just kind of kismet or were there technological aspects to VHS that were superior to Betamax? There's one here that I feel like everybody involved should have seen coming as just the obvious reason for how this was going to go, which is that the first Betamax tapes had a capacity of one hour of footage.

And a movie is almost always longer than an hour. So a VHS that can hold three hours. Yeah, of course. Like game over. To me, that's kind of it. That's it. Yeah. Dust them off, boys.

Apparently Sony, who makes Betamax, they realized this problem just a little too late. They made add-ons and new upgrades that let a Betamax hold a feature film, but they did that after VHS was on the market and had made too many inroads. This tech stuff moves really fast. VHS within really a year beat Betamax in the long term. Yeah, they fumbled the moment. Yeah, exactly. People who were not way bought into Betamax already just started buying VHS. Yeah, that makes sense. Unless you're watching a VHS tape of a Charlie Brown Christmas, I don't know what's going

to fit in an hour. Oddly, another reason VHS outcompeted Betamax is that the leadership of Sony tried to corner the entire home video market and their competitors got mad. Again, Sony is Betamax. Right. According to Salvador Jimenez, Merguia's book, the chairman of Sony, Accio Morita, like once they started putting out Betamax, he went to their rivals and said, there's pressure now from me. You guys need to make Betamax players because you'll benefit, but really I'll corner the

market. So I've already won. You need to go do this thing with us. And then JVC, Matsushita, RCA, all these other companies basically collaborated on VHS. It was a JVC product, but everybody else was mad at Sony and willing to get into it. Right. Because there's a significant buy-in from the consumer. You don't want to have to have a different video player for every single type of video

format. You don't want to have a VHS player and a Betamax player and whatever else. So there's actually some incentive for companies that are producing the format they want to be successful to make sure that consumers are buying in and investing in the player that will play your tapes. Yeah, like financially and just feeling like a doofus or not, there's so many pressures on each customer to get the format that's going to be the thing. Right. There's so many pressures on each customer to get the format that's going to be the thing, right? Like I recently heard somebody joke about the Zune

versus an iPod. That's from very long ago as a format battle, but like people are still dunking on old formats like forever. Remember Circuit City and you'd go in there and they'd have have the Zune display case. Please buy our Zune! Zune display case. Please buy her Zune. Please. Zune. It's the future. We promise. Yeah. It's such an immediate capitalistic pressure on these companies. And so they want to win. And yeah, Sony, the take on the corporate history is that they overplayed their hand for like a couple months and then lost. Like that was kind of what it took. That and the huge error of not fitting a movie on a Betamax. Yeah, I mean, that's- Come on.

Stupid. The wild thing is this also partly led to a myth about pornography because there was a claim that the people at Sony running Betamax blocked the pornography industry from using that format. How would one even do that? Yeah, so that it seems like the truth is they discouraged the pornography industry, but the porn industry could always get blank Betamax tapes or reverse engineer this some way or you can't actually stop that really. No, there's no magnetic coding that can detect a butt and prevent that from being encoded on it, right?

Right. And what if it picks up a regular movie? Ah, nuts. You can't watch Titanic. Yeah, then you can't watch The Terminator. Yeah, sure. Yeah, Terminator, right. We chose very different movies.

And then the other flip side of it is it's not like the companies making VHS chase down the pornography industry. They just made tapes that some porn producers used. It wasn't like they primarily sold their technology on porn. You know that warning at the beginning of movies where it's like, it is a federal crime to show this movie unauthorized in a theater or to copy and distribute this film, you will be arrested. We promise.

Imagine that, but like it is, we will not allow and stand by and let you be horny with our technology. Stop it. Stop it right now. Stop being horny. That's another thing. Anybody who had like a tech forward parent who liked sports has probably seen tape of the message saying that you can't tape the game without the express written consensus of Major League Baseball.

People are going to tape what they're going to tape. Sony couldn't stop this. It's like that mattress tag that says, it's a crime to remove this tag. And then you remove it and you're like, I'm a criminal. So then this led to a myth among some people that pornography was the entire reason VHS outcompeted Betamax, despite the other big reasons. That influenced a later format battle because VHS won and then got replaced by DVDs for the most part. Apparently by around 2003, sales and rentals of DVDs past VHS. DVD was kind of its own format for the

most part. And then Sony and their rivals started fighting again. Because in the late 2000s, that first decade, Sony said, Blu-ray is better than DVD, get Blu-rays. And their competitors said HD DVD is better than DVD get HD DVD hmm, and apparently all sides of this format battle said we absolutely must not block the pornography industry because that's what killed Betamax They they didn't like primarily sell it as porn, but they were they all like made sure to be open to it and Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like that had a big influence either way, especially because this was right on the verge of internet pornography really advancing. It didn't matter in the end.

Yeah. Then the other reason we think that pornography really didn't swing this is that both VHS and Betamax successfully defeated previous tape formats. I had always just believed their first because they're talked about so much, but they weren't. Yeah, there was also Sigma Thrust, which was an earlier VHS format. Sigma Thrust?

Sigma Thrust, you know, is the direct competitor to Betamax. Oh, I see. It was like a giant, it was, you know, like the giant coins that they used to have that were really big. It was like that, but just a giant tape. Yeah, like home video technology was just older than this because a full five years before Sony made Betamax, they made a different tape format called U-Matic. The letter U-Matic. It's a plastic cassette full of magnetic videotape. It's basically the same technology, just a different format. I'm looking at it. It looks similar. Yeah. Well, it will link pictures that's surprisingly VHS looking. Apparently, the

cassettes were a little bigger because the tape spool, it was three quarters of an inch wide instead of a half inch wide. In each direction, length and height, it was about an inch and a half longer, but that's still a size a consumer can use. It was basically just as likely to be successful. Right. Just timing, Kismet. Exactly. Yeah. People were just getting used to home video in general and also Sony replaced it with their own Betamax. And then another surprising forerunner was 1972. Again, four or five years before Betamax and VHS, there was an entire business called Cartrevision. And they had a very ahead of its time idea of selling single use disposable

videotapes as rentals through the mail. Oh, so like you would... But what do you mean by disposable? Like it explodes after you play it? This was one of their problems. It was just not rewindable. And then Upset customers figured out how to break into the tape and then spool it backward. Right, of course. You put a pencil in it. Essentially. It's not that hard. Yeah, Cartravision, they mailed you a cassette tape of a movie, and then you would pay them a subscription fee to get more tapes in the mail, which both failed and is almost the first version of Netflix where they mail you DVDs. KS It's a really weird forerunner of all of it and it was a playable tape.

KS And then after the DVD is done playing, it spits it out of the DVD player with such force, it shatters against the wall. It's like odd jobs hat in James Bond's. Yeah. DVD complete mirror. And yeah, with all this tape technology it's so much plastic. We won't really get into the rest of what the tapes are made of because it's all just different plastics and maybe a few metal screws.

That's it. Yeah. Well, I'm sure that was fine. Yeah, we're good. Yeah, we're good. Half of our bloodstream is microplastic, but you know. And then a whole other amazing technology thing here is takeaway number two. In the 1990s, VHS tape was a popular option for backing up computer data. Okay, that's interesting.

A few different companies, especially in the former Soviet Union, built hardware and software that let you export a computer's data and files onto the magnetic tape in a VHS cassette. I mean, it makes... It's wild. That kind of makes sense. It sounds like witchcraft to me. I don't know how it works, but it makes sense, right? If you have something that can read whatever information is put on that magnetic tape and then convert that into a language the computer can understand, then that's just a data transfer, I guess. It turns out.

Yeah, I'd never even imagined it because I'm so used to VHS containing a Disney movie. But there are people who did the equivalent of file compression. The one example here is a Russian service called Arvid, short for archiver on video. Apparently when they exported the files, they would remove any color or sound elements. It was just like black and white visual versions of the files. I see. But still writable and usable and still the file. If you compress it that much, you can fit a lot of computer files on a VHS tape. What would happen if you played that tape in a VHS player, just random noise on the

screen? Apparently, yes. Yeah, people have tried this. And yeah, it just looks like snow. Yeah. Right. That makes sense. It works both directions technologically.

You can export to them and then you can re-import the file from a VHS tape to a computer and use it again. Wow, that's so cool. And there was a specific 90s window where this made financial and technological sense. And one key source here is business and tech blogger Jacob Philipp, who writes about Arvid in Russia and in former Soviet republics. It was very complicated to set up. What you would do is you would buy a bundle of hardware and floppy disks. The floppy disks you install are with software

on your computer. Then you plug a big physical card full of wiring into the motherboard of your computer and then plug a cable into a port on the card running to your VCR. So I've got a question. Why not just use the floppy disk for the data transfer? Why involve the VHS at all? Yeah, it turns out a floppy disk held almost no data size-wise. And in the time when people were doing this, in order to get a hard drive, like an actual hard drive that holds one gigabyte, you needed to spend about $150. Or you needed to buy about 1000 floppy disks, you could buy RVid for about $80 for the whole system and then a couple dollars per VHS tape.

Each VHS tape could hold more than a gigabyte initially. All right. Then that makes complete sense. I'm surprised. It's shockingly sensible. Apparently the second generation of Arvid doubled the space. You could hold 2.16 gigabytes on a typical VHS tape, like an ordinary one. Wow, that's wild.

Yeah, especially tech people. That was massive. It was a game changing amount of data storage at the price. People who set up Arvid, they would arrange all this gear and then they would need to do specific calibration of their VCR's remote control to talk to their computer. Like you needed to tell your computer this button on the remote control is play, this button is rewind, because all remote controls are different. From there you would do a test batch of writing data to the tape. Then the software would tell you which

of six different tracking settings made the fewest errors. You manually pick the tracking setting and then you can select files you want to write to the tape and it just batches it all onto the tape for you. Wow. And it would also make a table of contents type file and make chapter markers for where each file starts. Whoa. Okay.

So then when you're trying to get the files from that tape then back onto the computer, you load it into that system and then just how do you use the chapter markers? You're like directing it to go to specific timestamps on the video? Yeah. And apparently the other direction, putting stuff back on your computer, the software could do a lot of it for you. Cool. It was as simple as selecting the files you want in a menu, and then the software would

line up the tape and pull them out and do all of it. Wild. Yeah. It's amazing. That's so wild. And I bet there was so much cool spy craft you could do with that. And the way that you get nobody interested in your tape

is you're like, this is Leprechaun's too. Nobody watches that. Or yeah. This is platoon. Nobody's gonna watch that again. Yeah. Yeah, and apparently this tech lasted longer in Russia and in Eastern Europe because technology and data storage just advanced a little quicker in the US. Two different US companies parallel

invented this or copied it. Corvus Systems in Silicon Valley and Alpha Microsystems in Orange County, California, both developed a version of doing this. And then DanMir Technologies in the UK also built something called Baccar that let you store four gigabytes of computer data on a VHS tape. Man, the data storage stuff changes really fast. I recently- So fast.

Yeah, recently-ish replaced my computer and I can actually do a lot more in terms of recording podcasts compared to a computer I got only seven years ago. It's wild. Mainly because of just how fast technology advances, this became obsolete. But for a couple of years in the mid 90s, it was cutting edge and legitimately useful to back up your computer or use a VHS as an external hard drive. Sounds like it. It gets wild. Did anyone record a movie with computer data and then put it back on their computer to

watch the movie on their computer? That, and I guess it ties into the pornography. It always does video as a file has been so massive until very recent like you could not watch a video on a computer until shockingly recent I think young people will think. Yeah. It's really weird. That's another reason VHS was like a workable hard drive.

Yeah. In my day we had to go into the woods and hope we found some creepy old man stash of magazines. Or like he's a creepy old man and very advanced. Like he has our vid all set up, all kinds of weird tapes. He's actually invented VR, but it's all for butts. Well folks, while we think about cutting edge things, that's two takeaways, tons of numbers about VHS. We'll take a quick break, then celebrate two more amazing uses of VHS tapes. Support for this week's show comes from The Best Idea Yet, which is a podcast about the

amazing origin stories behind products and brands that you're obsessed with. For example, did you know that the Patagonia Fleece has its origins in toilet seat covers? Or that Taco Bell once used a paint sprayer to coat taco shells in Dorito dust, or that the Super Soaker water gun was invented by a NASA engineer. Actual rocket science. Again, that show title is The Best Idea Yet. You can follow The Best Idea Yet on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back and let's get into

takeaway number three. VHS tapes invented and prototyped online dating. Whoa! Hey, you know what? I actually vaguely know about this mostly from jokes made about this in more modern media, right? Because I was not of the dating age when VHS tapes were abound, but I certainly learned about VHS tape dating later. I've even watched some videos of it on YouTube, just like, I don't know how these became public, but people on dating tapes with all those mustaches, hair just piled up on hair, amazingly loud shirts. It's art. It's just such art. Yeah. And it's like a video of online dating. It turns out basically every cultural and emotional element of online dating got prototyped

by initially a company called Great Expectations that helped Los Angeles singles find love in the late 70s. Yeah. No, I mean, it's a great idea. Because you would make a videotape of yourself that's basically a dating profile. You would say, this is who I am. This is what I'm interested in. I hope you find me funny and attractive and I hope I wore the right shirt. And here we are. I mean, before then, people used to take out classified ads and newspapers going like, I'm 45 and young. Wait, I'm 45 and fun. I love toy poodles and I love to but I don't love it if you toy with my heart And and the whole ad includes all of the mistakes and the ums and

awkward pauses They're extraordinarily expensive too. Like it's so much more room in the paper. Yeah So much more room in the paper. Yeah. Right. Yeah, there's a few sources here. Peace for J's Tour Daily by Aaron Blakemore, Peace for Alice Obscuria by Kara Giamo, and Peace for Vox.com by Michael Waters. Valentine's Day, 1976, an entrepreneur named Jeff Ullman changed the world.

He opened the doors of the first member center of his startup called Great Expectations. It was one windowless room in a high-rise office building in Century City in Los Angeles. Customers would show up, they'd fill out a questionnaire, and then sit in front of a camera where Jeff would ask them a few questions about themselves and they'd try to be fun. Then customers reviewed the tape, approved it, and paid a membership fee of $200 a year to look for and wait for matches from other people's tapes. What was it like? Because we have essentially like dating apps now and people used to be back in my day, people would make fun of you for using a dating app and now everyone uses them. For

some of them, it's like both of you have to swipe right or whatever it is to match. What was the matching system like for this video dating? Excellent question because they essentially invented both of you swipe right, but the format was their physical tapes. I wish I had which tape format he used initially because they were using VHS when that took over, but 1976 in the US it was probably Betamax or Umatic because it wasn't quite, it was like one year away from being here. But it was physical media, it was very centralized, so the customers never had the tapes.

They would either drive to the office to watch tapes of new people and approve some, or they would receive a postcard by mail telling them that another member had gone to the office, seen their tape and liked it. And the postcard says, come to the office to see this tape and see if you like them too. Wow.

That all feels very familiar to us because of online dating, but every element of it was brand new. Like, like classifieds don't work this way and don't have the person's face or vibe. There, there was nothing like it. Yeah. We kind of think of online dating or dating apps as a symptom of our culture where it's like, ah, it's harder to meet people and stuff. But it seems like as soon as technology made it possible, people are looking for ways to make dating easier. Yeah. There used to be formal dances where you'd learn

how to dance and you'd meet, you know, dancing, you'd have your dancing card, right? You'd have Cotillion. So you'd have a matchmaker. And you'd get there with a brand new automobile or something. Every technology advance makes it more possible. Yeah. Right.

So if you're out there and you're finding dating hard, I think every other human being, for the most part, has found it hard throughout all of history. And at a certain point, we're gonna have like brain chips that match us automatically. It's gonna be a nightmare but it'll at least reduce the awkwardness of dating and that's what's important. Yes and video dating it's called. It had every trend like that that online dating later had in particular being mocked as a trend

thing. The wider culture decided that this was for losers, apparently. There would be people writing articles that said, you know, video dating is getting more popular. It's not just for losers anymore. And Jeff Ullman talks about seeing that and saying, people think this is for losers, huh? Great. I mean, I don't know. I feel like that, that idea of like, Oh, this is for losers because obviously what you do is you go to a bar where everyone's had too much to drink and you're sweaty and you just go up to a random person and start to ask them what their sign is. And that's not weird or awkward at all.

Yeah, and video dating created that thing where some trend people said, oh, this is dumb. And then the actual public absolutely loved it. Yeah. Great expectations grew massively. It was more than a dozen offices in less than a decade. All kinds of competitors copied the idea. There were also competitors chasing nicheses like Jewish people or black people

Exact same thing happened later with online dating farmers only Yes, where I met my husband I Used to do stand-up about sea captain date comm which is apparently real Yeah, sure And yeah, also like online dating tech forward people were some of the first people to appreciate it. There's a truly wild quote about it. Here's the quote, where else can you have access to so many potential companions without spending every waking hour hustling

and having to go out on dates that may turn out to be nightmares? End quote. Yeah, man. Not only is that a good description, but it's from a 1978 magazine article written by Harlan Ellison, the prolific science fiction writer. This was so advanced as science fiction writers for some of the first people to say, yeah, obviously, this is the future. Great. Yeah. I think I finally made my full turn to online dating after I got hit on at a dog park by a magician who had like cards and little pieces of string in his pockets and notably did not have a dog and I was like, you know what?

I'm done with this. Maybe the dog was under his big tall hat or something if you stuck around. Right. Yeah. Damn it, Nibble. She didn't stay for the second act. Yeah, I met my wife online. Yeah, it's great. Yeah.

Yeah. Me too. I also met your wife online. Say hi to Brenda for me. It's like the classic Reddit joke of I would also sleep with this guy's wife if she was around. But yeah, and so like this really took off and it basically relentlessly grew until internet dating replaced it purely just because the internet got so popular. Like there was nothing wrong or inefficient or ineffective about video dating.

Yeah, exactly. wrong or inefficient or ineffective about video dating. Yeah, exactly. And the other truly wild thing about it is apparently the concept of video dating was the origin of YouTube. Whoa, really? This is in 2016, two different co-founders of YouTube confirmed this. Steve Chen did a talk at South by Southwest, and he said that when they created it in 2005 quote We always thought there was something with video there, but what would be the actual practical application?

We thought dating would be the obvious choice Hmm and then co-founder Joed Careem said that quote we even had a slogan for it tune in hook up Whoa, that was their slogan idea for YouTube. Wow. I mean, and that didn't happen at all. YouTube doesn't seem to have been used in any kind of dating capacity. Yes. And apparently when they were starting to make this little video player online get going, they could not get enough dating videos. And so then they tried opening the website to any other kind of video and a video of an elephant was really popular. And so then they tried opening the website to any other kind of video and

a video of an elephant was really popular. And then within one year they sold the idea for $1.65 billion to Google. People really want to date this elephant. I mean, it's tall. People like tall. People do like tall. A lot of junk in its trunk. So like the creation of videotapes and then the ubiquity of VHS that changed dating and romance for the world and also invented a lot of the internet and it was all that medium

change. That was it. Yeah. Incredible. It's so cool. Yeah. Yeah, incredible. It's so cool. Yeah Horny gets us places. This is what the early VHS Betamax people didn't understand is that is that horny is the mother of invention and The elephant no horns only tusks doesn't that's right. That's why it wasn't a dating service in the end. Yeah only tusks

Only tusks. Then our very last main show takeaway about VHS, takeaway number four. Law enforcement and bizarre collectors are relentlessly hunting down specific VHS tapes of movies. This is a few quick stories of people getting arrested for keeping a tape too long and a few quick stories of obsessively gathering the same movie. This sounds like an us piss episode actually. Wow. I think it's only not because usually state lines aren't crossed. The result is like somebody doesn't return a rental and then gets pursued.

So it's usually local. That's the only reason us piss is not... We're the blockbuster busters. Yeah, it's not the mail that it's within the county usually. These criminals, the sound of a jail door clinking, these criminals didn't rewind. Kissing sound, kissing sound, kissing sound. Yeah. Folks should listen to the Inspector's Inspectors by being members to maximumfund.org slash join.

It's great. Yes, please. All right. Well, tell me these stories, Alex. Yeah. So there's two particularly wild examples where not returning a VHS tape to a rental store has led to warrants that then the police reluctantly carry out when the person happens to have a different brush with the police.

Okay. All right. In 2016, North Carolina police- 2016? Yeah. Because the warrants last even though VHS is outmoded. So in 2016, James Myers of North Carolina, he had a broken tail light and was pulled over by traffic police. And then when they ran his info, they found a warrant for his arrest because he kept a rented VHS tape of the 2002 movie, Freddy Got Fingered. A notorious flop by the comedian Tom Green,

Freddy Got Fingered. Freddy Got Fingered. Remind me, what's the premise of this movie? I know what anybody else knows. I know the title. I truly don't know the rest. I haven't seen it. And so Myers, according to NPR at the time, he was facing a class three misdemeanor and a fine of up to $200. And then this made enough news that the New York Daily News newspaper, kind of a tabloid, but they contacted Tom Green and Tom Green promised to pay the fine if that came to pass, just for the principle of the thing. He seems like a nice guy. Yeah. I mean, so that's wild. I thought that they really were just mad bluffing with those

warning things at the beginning of films where it's like, you will be pursued by the full extent of the law. If you keep our videos, also be kind and rewind. These arrests, it's very specifically related to the video rental store. If you owed the money, it'd probably go to a collections agency, but because you owe them a tape, it goes to the police and for arresting you somehow. And the other example is 2014, still recent. Kayla Michelle Finley of South Carolina, she went to the Pickens County, South Carolina Sheriff's Office to report a problem. She needed help.

And then when they pulled up her info in the system, there was an arrest warrant because she hung onto a VHS of the 2005 movie Monster in Law starring Jennifer Lopez and Jane Fonda. Hmm. Okay. Good choice though, to get arrested over. Yeah, that's all right. And then this sparked a whole argument where the police said she was mailed reminders from them.

She said she never got them. I believe her, the mail and changing addresses, it can be wonky. And also the store she checked it out from was an independent store called Dalton Video that is completely out of business. The arrest warrant lasted beyond the store's existence. Do libraries ever pursue people for not returning books? I remember when we made the CIF episode about libraries, we talked about libraries abandoning fines in a lot of cases.

And it seems like usually they just kind of give up and settle for you can't use the library anymore if you just never give something back. Right. Which is, I mean, that's the worst punishment of all. Yeah. And then like these private businesses renting tapes put out a warrant for your arrest. Yeah. Great. Cool.

We live in a society, bottom text. Yeah, and as these stores vanish, as tapes kind of get forgotten or thrifted, the other kind of story here is people turning that into obsessive projects to gather all of the tapes they can of one movie. Fun thing people do now. Is it? The most ambitious one is a project that was initially called the Jerry Maguire Video Store and was then upgraded to the Jerry Maguire Pyramid.

Jerry Maguire is a movie. It's from 1996. Tom Cruise is a sports agent. Right. Named Jerry Maguire. Yeah. No, no, I know. Yeah. 1996, that's prime, make as many VHS tapes as possible territory for a hit movie. There's a comedy collective called Everything is Terrible that finds and digitizes embarrassing

and weird VHS tapes. I know them, yes. Okay, good. Yeah, they're great. Yeah. They had a joke idea that was just like surprisingly easy to accomplish. They said, what if we gather enough tapes of Jerry Maguire to set up a video store that is only Jerry Maguire?

Mm-hmm. Like fill the shelves. Yes, on board. And this was way too easy. In 2017, they did it thanks to an overwhelming amount of donations of Jerry Maguire tapes. And then they said, OK, our next goal is to get more than 50,000 Jerry Maguire's to construct a monumental pyramid structure built from the tapes like their bricks. So they're doing a Jerry Maguire, a ziggurat it sounds like. Yeah, and I don't know how updated their website is.

Their website says their past 35,000 tapes. There's a leaderboard for which fans have sent the most tapes. And they did a photo shoot of themselves in like fake ceremonial robes with some initial stacks of the Maguires. I mean you say fake ceremonial robes, but they built a ziggurat. So at that point, like when does the bit become a legitimate cult, I think? Yeah, they also want to do the Finnish pyramid in like the middle of the desert in as remote of a location as possible.

So I think it really is becoming a spiritual quest. Yeah. Yeah. Did Moses not go to the desert and build an entire pyramid out of Jerry Maguire VHSs? No, he didn't, but they are. So what does that say about society and man? Apparently, these guys are not a total outlier. In 2024, The Guardian covered a man named Josh, Not a total outlier. In 2024, The Guardian covered a man named Josh who has collected more than 2,600 of the tape sets of Titanic. And then Atlas Obscura covered a few years ago there was like a local news curiosity in Brooklyn.

Already a weird place. But pedestrians got excited about a parked van in Brooklyn that seemed to be filled with nothing but VHS copies of the movie Speed from 1994. Like just a lot of tapes of Speed that you could see through the windows. I feel that would make me really suspicious that they're trying to recreate some of the, you know. Right in a vehicle. Yeah, that's right. A vehicle. I'm like, I don't know, should I call the police? And then they arrest, I call them and then they arrest me because I forgot to return who let the dogs out Or

Airbud three air buddies. I Also, hope you read to the CD of the Bahama. That is also an issue. Yeah I'm trying to remember there was a movie that featured that song heavily, Who Let the Dogs Out. I feel like most VH houses did. That was such a hit. Yeah. Anyways, one of the earbuds is probably going to get me sent to the clinker.

Yeah. And like this medium really lives on as these stunts. Like we said at the beginning, unless you're buying Back to the Future from Biff personally, the tapes are inexpensive or free. People are just finding a hobby through the odd gathering of the tapes. It sounds like they could also be used as a construction material. We could be killing two birdies with one stone. We could be making housing out of tapes. Yeah. They're like an unrecyclable mixed material. We should probably build something instead.

Yeah. A giant homage to Jerry Maguire. Yeah. Like the Jerry Maguire community housing zone. Right. Like, right. Yeah. It's also, I think part of the joke is that the whole cover art is Tom Cruise's face. So like that's, that's fun too. He looks at you, you know? Yeah.

You know, I can't think of what better to line my walls with than Tom Cruise's face staring at me from every angle. Ha ha ha! Folks, that's the main episode for this week. Welcome to the outro with fun features for you such as help remembering this episode with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one, VHS and Betamax both competed with earlier videotape formats and sparked a myth about pornography determining media formats. Takeaway number two, in the 1990s VHS tapes were a popular option for backing up computer data.

Takeaway number three, VHS tapes invented and prototyped online dating. Takeaway number four, law enforcement and bizarre collectors are each relentlessly hunting down specific VHS tapes of movies. And then lots of numbers this week about the collector's market for VHS tapes, the dimensions and technology of VHS tape, the timeline of this whole medium, and more. Those are the takeaways. Also I said that's the main episode because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now If you support this show at maximum fun org

Members are the reason this podcast exists So members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode This week's bonus topic is the amazing theory that VHS democratized media and culture until that got squished by DVDs. Visit safpod.fun for that bonus show, for a library of more than 20 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows, and a catalog of all sorts of max fun bonus shows. It's special audio, it's just for members. Thank you to

everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at MaximumFun.org. Key sources this week include an excellent book called Epic Fails, The Edsel, The Mullet, and Other Icons of Unpopular Culture by Salvador Jimenez-Morguea, professor of sociology at Akita International University. Also a lot of excellent tech writing, in particular John Wenz writing for Popular Mechanics, Jason Daly writing for Smithsonian Magazine, and then a lot of coverage of VHS in the modern day, in particular from NPR, from Atlas Obscura, and The Guardian. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca.

I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Lenapehoking, the traditional land of the Munsee Lenape people and the Wapinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skatigok people, and others. Also KD taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, Native people are very much still here. That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIFT Discord where we're sharing stories and resources about Native people and life.

There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the discord. And hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 54 that's about the topic of the US Forest Service. One fun fact there, Smokey the Bear originated in World War II, replaced the campaign featuring Bambi, and is technically just called Smokey Bear.

I guess that's kind of three facts. Anyway, I recommend that episode. I also recommend my cohost Katie Golden's weekly podcast, Creature Feature, about animals, science, and more. Our theme music is Unbroken Unchaven by the Boodos Band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand. Special thanks to Chris Souza for audio mastering on this episode. Extra

extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners. I am thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating. So how about that? Talk to you then. Maximum Fun, a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.