So... Alright - Be Kind, Rewind

Episode Date: February 13, 2024

Geoff explores interesting facts about VHS, and waxes nostalgic about a bygone era. Sponsored by Shady Rays: Go to http://shadyrays.com and use code ALRIGHT24 for 35% off polarized sunglasses and snow goggles. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So today isn't exactly a history of the VHS. It's more of just a compilation of weird and interesting little facts I found out about VHS when I was... Well, actually, I was watching a TikTok the other day and... God, does that make me sound old? I was watching a TikTok. God, does that make me sound old? I was watching a TikTok. Nah, I was watching TikTok the other day,

and there was one of this mom filming some teenage girls getting a Taylor Swift CD, and they couldn't get the CD out of the case. They couldn't figure out how to do it. Because, obviously, it's 2024 now, and they've never needed to use a CD. A CD is a dead technology to them, in the same way punch cards were a dead technology to me when I was growing up. And it was a pretty cute little video and I just thought it

was funny. And that got me thinking just about legacy media in general and all the media that I have used in my life from, you know, records to eight tracks to cass to CDs, to DVDs, VHS, obviously, and all the stuff that was around me in the periphery that I didn't participate in, but I was fascinated by, like LaserDiscs or the mini-CDs, or I could never afford Betamax. It was supposedly better quality, but you could only record for an hour,

so nobody wanted that. You know, that might be a good video in itself one day, just talking about all of the different dead legacy medias like uh mini discs and uh oh what was the one that I used to have it was like hdv hd dvd that's what it was yeah I used to have one of those for my xbox like a external player for it, I think. Jesus Christ. Anyway, I was thinking about all of those dead formats, and I guess maybe in my lifetime, the most important or the one that I participated in the most,

that I used the most, has to be VHS, right? Commonly referred to as VHS tapes. That is redundant. A VHS is the tape. You can just say VHS, although I, along with most people, am guilty of doing it. I don't really know much about VHS as a format other than it was the predominant format of my lifetime, I guess, until well into my adult years. I mean, I was born in 1975 the vhs player or the vcr was born i guess in 1976 there were previous versions in the 50s but they were very very expensive and they weren't consumer friendly they were designed more for commercial use and it was really jvc that took

on the task of shrinking this technology and making it easier and cheaper and lighter and more portable and able to fit into a consumer's home. I actually read an interesting thing about that. Where was that? In 1971, JVC put together a team to develop a VTR for consumers. I don't want to get down in the weeds with these acronyms and shit. Just like the first version of a VCR, right? for consumers. I don't want to get down in the weeds with these acronyms and shit. Just like the first version of the VCR, right? And then by the end of 71, they had created an internal

diagram called the VHS Development Matrix, which established 12 objectives for the new VCR. I thought these were interesting. The system must be compatible with any ordinary television set. Done. Picture quality must be similar to a normal air broadcast. Pretty sure that was the case. The tape must have at least two hour recording capacity. VHS. Done. Betamax. Not done. Tapes must be interchangeable between machines. Nailed it. The overall system should be versatile, meaning it can be scaled, expanded, such as connecting a video camera or dubbing between two recorders. I guess so. Recorders should be affordable how easy to service anything was by the 80s, but they definitely nailed most of those. They definitely nailed most of those.

Interestingly, though, they took a big hit in 1972. And so they had to scale things back and they cut the funding for the VHS project. But two of the engineers worked on the project in secrecy. I guess they just still believed in it. So then by 73, by 1973, those two dudes had actually produced a functional prototype. And then things kicked back off. This is actually interesting. Sony was making Betamax, their version. And if you're old like me, you may remember, you could go to the video store to rent a movie. And at least when I was a very young child, the left side of the video store was VHS,

and the right side of the video store was Betamax. And they were there pretty much in equal measure, at least for my earliest memories. VHS eventually took off like a rocket ship. And we'll talk about that in a little bit. But VHS, I think, almost didn't happen. Or maybe I should correctly, I should say it might not have happened until much later. But in 74, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry desired, they wanted to avoid consumer confusion. They'd heard about VHS technology being developed, even though it was on the back burner at that point. Sony had Betamax, they were pushing that to market. So what happened was they wanted to pick one or the other. Sony persuaded them to adopt Betamax as that standard

and then allow to license the technology to other companies. However, JVC believed that an open standard that would be shared among competitors without licensing the technology was better for the consumer, clearly. And so to prevent the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, just rolls off the tongue, right, to stop them from adopting Betamax, they worked to convince a bunch of other companies, in particular Matsushita, who was the largest electronics manager in

Japan at the time. I don't know if they still are or not. But also Panasonic and a couple of other companies agreed to work against Sony to stop them from essentially owning the format. And eventually JVC won out and so

i think like hitachi mitsubishi sharp a lot of other competitors to sony realized that it was in their best interest to help jvc create an open standard that they could all share in and that no no one individual company would profit more than the others off of so So I think around 76, the first VCR hit the markets by JVC. It was very expensive. They were about somewhere between $1,000 and $4,000, which in today's money is between like $4,000 and $7,000. So you had to be pretty well off if you were going to buy like a $5,000 VCR in 1976. And then what were you going to watch on it, right? Like what was the first movie even released on the VHS? Well, I looked it up and I can't say that I'd heard of it. Maybe you have, but it was a South Korean film called The Young Teacher. It was released in 1972. I'm not sure why it became

the very first movie to be released on VHS, but it was. Here's a synopsis of it. It says, the movie's about a young idealistic teacher who wanted to uplift her students, so she organized a volleyball game for them,

but the principal did not approve and fired her. Hmm. The age-old story of a teacher who comes to a school and tries to motivate unmotivatable kids via unconditional methods and succeeds and is then punished for it by cold and archaic establishment views.

The Young Teacher. I bet if that movie still exists somewhere, it's worth a lot of money. And I'm going to look into that in just a second but I don't want to get ahead of myself so here we have the 70s god this is kind of turning into a history of the VHS and I didn't mean it to be I just think it's interesting that so we now have these competing formats VHS and Betamax I talked about how I saw them both at the video store when I was a kid well here's the deal VHS although they were bigger and bulkier

and had arguably worse quality, you could record for up to two hours, whereas Betamax would record for only one. I believe VHS was a little bit cheaper as well. And so it eventually won out. Actually, by 2005, which is at the very, very... Actually, it's not even at the end. It's like the bullet's already been put into Vhs's head it's just bleeding out at this point but in 2005 95 million americans still owned vcrs i think you could say they probably

officially died in 2006 i wonder how many they had in their heyday though man it's hard to find any uh any hard numbers on how many vcrs were sold throughout the history of vcrs but almost every family owned at least one there were millions and millions and millions of units okay here's some information. In 1985, an estimated 11.5 million VCRs were sold in the US. I assume that means just that year alone. By 87, 90% of the $5.25 billion VCR market in the US is VHS. So you can see right there, that's the death knell of Betamax right at the end of the 80s there. In 1999, consumers spent – this is fucking crazy. In 1999, consumers spent $12.2 billion a year on VHS rentals and purchases, a figure that decreased to only $100 million annually by 2007. So in 1999, VHS rental and purchase revenue is $12.2 billion. Think about Blockbuster and how big and influential they were, what a powerhouse they were. And then eight years later, it was down to $100 million. Down $12.1 billion.

Now, that money didn't go away, right? It did not get spent. It just all got spent on DVD, I assume. So the wealth just transferred, probably within the same company, right? Because every company that's making a VCR is also making a DVD player at this point. It's just crazy to think that in eight years,

an industry can go from generating $12 billion in revenue a year down to $100 million in revenue. In 2002. So Blockbuster goes under in 2014, I believe. So in the early 2000s, they had almost 3000 stores worldwide. And that's another it's just crazy to think that all of that went away. It felt like overnight. I wish I could go back and live through it again and see how like experience it again in real time. Because my memory truncates everything as memory does tends to do right truncates everything to such a degree. I didn't realize I guess I realized I was going through it. I guess I just didn't realize how interesting the future me would find what current me was going through

from a media standpoint in the 90s. A couple of weird things I learned about VHS. Did you know that if you pull the tape out of a VHS, you know, for you young kids, a VHS cassette is, instead of being digital, it's analog, right? And so there's two spools, and the spools have a bunch of tape on it. The tape has magnetically imprinted with audio and video on it, and that's how the image is transferred onto the TV through the player. However, if you pull that tape out from one end to the other, it would measure, on a standard VHS tape, it would measure 1,400 feet. I know I mentioned that the young teacher was the first vhs tape to to release there see i said it vh was the first vhs release

however in north america where i live uh the first three vhs's to release uh came out in 1977 it was a threefer it was the sound of music patent andASH at a retail price of $50 to $70 each. So the first American movies you could buy were those three. Or rather, the first movies you could buy on VHS in America were those three. The most successful VHS tape of all time? Anybody have any guesses? I figured it would be Disney, and I was right. I wasn't right on the Disney movie, but it's 1995's Lion King. Best-selling VHS movie ever, selling 32 million copies and generating $520 million in revenue all by itself, five times what the entire industry was worth just a few years later in 2007. That's crazy to think about.

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God damn it, I did it again. All right, I know what the first VHS is. I know what the first VHS to come out in America is. I know what the most successful VHS movie is. What is the last VHS to come out? And when was it? Okay, interesting. Interesting.

The final VHS ever made. I shouldn't say that. That's because that's definitely not going to be true. The final VHS to be mass produced in a major release kind of way was 2005 or 2006, and it was Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello and Ed Harris and William Hurt in the David Cronenberg film A History of Violence, which, if you've never seen it, is a really, really fucking good movie.

And William Hurt is tremendous in it. Worth seeing just for his performance alone. Also worth seeing because it's a Cronenberg film. Also worth seeing because Viggo Mortensen is pretty badass. And it is the last one. I wonder if they knew when they were making it. Yes, this is going to be the last movie ever made on this format it wasn't alone though there were a few that came out just before it so if you're

interested the last couple saw two uh there was a yeah ryan reynolds comedy just friends uh jarhead was in there yours mine and ours pride and prejudice but history of violence is the one that capped it all off i I think it was officially 2006, and they call that the end, and I love this, I love that this is what it's referred to as, but they called it the end of the Be Kind, Rewind era. I guess that's how we sum up the VHS

chapter in human history. Also, as I'm sure you know, physical media is becoming highly collectible. I have been collecting physical shit i've been playing baseball cards my whole life but uh i know a lot of people now are collecting video games andrew who i do the face podcast with he collects unopened video like graded video games uh i know a lot of people are doing that with even dvds and stuff but vhs is not exempt from

that there are some vhs tapes that are selling for so much fucking money. I haven't done a lot of research into this, but these were all sold on auctions. You can see the auctions. I'll give you the, let's say, the five most expensive VHS tapes of all time, according to a heritage auction sale. On June 9th, 2002, a sealed, unopened copy of Jaws, I don't know if it's great or not, but it was sealed, sold at auction for $32,500. Yeah, $32,500. The Thing, John Carpenter's The the thing a movie that's been coming up a lot in my life lately for some reason uh sold at auction unopened and graded by whatever this grading service is the grades cgc universal i guess that's like psa for vhs tapes sorry for vhs it sold for thirty seven thousand five hundred dollars on 31st. Oh, that's cute because it was the thing that sold on October 31st.

Goonies. I've heard about this. I've heard that Goonies is incredibly sought after in VHS form. Unopened, $50,000. Yeah. And then number two, Back to the Future. Unopened, I assume graded or whatever, sold for $75,000. And then the highest selling VHS of all time is an unopened copy of Star Wars A New Hope,

which sold in October of 2022 for $114,000. I don't even know what to say about that. I mean, it's, I know a lot of people, I know there's been a lot of, I've read at least a lot of stuff, a lot of people saying that the video game grading and movie grading market is a way to embezzle and funnel cash illegally, maybe. Maybe there's a lot of that going on. Hard for me to believe that a copy of an unopened VHS tape that was created in my lifetime is worth over $100,000. But then again, if you think about it, when was the last time you saw an unopened copy of anything? I see VHS tapes all the time. I can go to every thrift stop in Austin right now and find thousands upon thousands of VHS tapes. They are readily available, but very rarely are they unopened. Still hard to wrap your head around, though. I guess keep your eyes open. If you ever see an unopened VHS copy of a popular movie, it may have some sort of a value. Also, be on the lookout for a copy of Jerry Maguire on VHS. It may not be worth a lot of money, but if you're not

familiar with the video editing group, Everything is Terrible, they have done this thing where they're creating a Jerry Maguire temple, like pyramid temple. I think it's just called the Jerry Maguire pyramid. And so they do this, they do that like Instagram, they do video mashups of old weird clips that they find found video footage and stuff they find it's incredibly hilarious. They do live showsups of old, weird clips that they find, found video footage and stuff they find. It's incredibly hilarious. They do live shows. I saw them when they came to Austin and did their live show. It was absolutely amazing.

But one of the things that they do is that they accept donations of Jerry Maguire VHS tapes. Because I think the reasoning behind it was no matter where you went and looked at VHS tapes, there was always a copy of Jerry Maguire there. and looked at VHS tapes, there was always a copy of Jerry Maguire there. Like no matter if you're at the Goodwill or at the FYE or like at, you know, at your grandma's house looking through a clip, you're always going to see a copy of Jerry Maguire. And so they have been accepting donations and they have probably hundreds of thousands of copies of Jerry Maguire at this point and that they are arranging into this giant Jerry Maguire pyramid. of Jerry Maguire at this point, and that they are arranging into this giant Jerry Maguire pyramid.

Actually, I think you can go to jerrymaguirepyramid.com. Even my wife, I believe, has donated VHS copies to Everything is Terrible for the Jerry Maguire pyramid. So if you have something laying around, maybe you can donate to those people. Because they're doing something interesting and weird with it, which is kind of how I feel about the VHS industry after reading all this. It was really interesting. It was weird. It was a weird place in time. You get locked into these ideas that things are the way they are and they always will be the way they are because they're the way you first experienced them.

I was born into a world. I was born the same year that VHS became readily available, I guess, or at least became commercially available, if not readily available. And so my entire life for the first, well, until 2006, you figure that puts me at 31. So VHS was a part of my life for the first 30 years, and it was the predominant form of sit-down entertainment. It's gone now. I mean, it makes sense that it was replaced by a better format. Clearly, tapes were, records were, well, records were only replaced by tapes.

I think they're different at this point. But tapes were replaced by CDs, right? VHS tapes were replaced by DVDs. What's interesting to me is we had this 30-year run of VHS, and then we had, I don't know, maybe a 15 year run of DVD and then physical media died, which I have no problem with. Gus and I were early adopters into digital media and we, you can go back and listen to old RT podcasts from the mid 2000s where we're begging physical media to die so that we can get everything digitally because of ease and convenience. And we definitely got what we asked for.

And the world is pretty easy and convenient. I didn't anticipate it happening in the way it did. You know, the reality is that the future tends to be built by the lowest bidder. So we got a lot of the stuff we asked for or demanded. And most of it doesn't work for shit. And everything's like 70% what I would want it to be. But that's kind of how the world works. One thing I do miss though, and I think about this from time to time, you go home, you sit down in front of the TV with your wife and your kid, and you scroll through Netflix or Hulu idly, just looking for anything interesting to watch.

Something about that process is not as much fun as it used to be when you had to. And I understand that it's effort that we don't have to make anymore. You can go home from work after a shitty, long, exhausting day and sit on your sofa and then hit a button and then you've got the world of entertainment in front of you, an embarrassment of riches. But there was something about piling into the car at the end of the day, driving down to Turtles or FYE or Blockbuster or United Video or Hollywood Video or West Coast Video or whatever fucking video store you went to in your town and doing the exact same thing, but doing it under fluorescent lighting, standing up,

looking at row after row of films alphabetized. There was something there grabbing a tape, trying to like running across the blockbuster to your mom, showing her to her and being like, can we watch Predator? Can we watch Predator? And her saying, you've already seen Predator. Let's get something that your grandparents are going to want to watch it to her and being like can we can we watch predator can we watch predator and her saying you've already seen predator let's get something that your grandparents are going to want to watch too and you're like oh right it's not just about me and just like that trying to figure out what the family all watched together in the video store surrounded by movies is really no different than it is on your sofa but there's just something tactile and experiential that if you never did it, and I guess if you were born after the end of video stores, you probably never did, that

was, that had value. I'll say that. That had value. It eventized things a little bit more, and I think we could use a little bit more of that in our lives anyway. Things are very easy. Things come to us very easily now. Things are very accessible, and that's great.

It's awesome. It's the way it should be. But I actually went to the last open blockbuster and at that time it was still a functioning blockbuster I have I think I saw an article recently that said it's converted into like an Airbnb now or something where maybe you can like watch the tapes and stay in the place I don't know I haven't looked into it I hope it's still open I did buy a tote bag from them so hopefully that helps support them. But it was wild because it was like walking into the past in a way that you forget. You forget how the aisles were laid out

and then you walk in and you're instantly reminded. You go from genre to genre. Then there's all of the embarrassment of candy and popcorn riches in front of you because when you went to the video store, you didn't just go to buy videos. You went to buy a big ass thing of popcorn

and like 14 different kinds of candy. And it, oh man, it was probably the best impulse section of all time was at a Blockbuster video. They just, they had so much candy. And I guess that that's, you know, it makes sense that it's gone. It makes sense that the's gone it makes sense that

the format has been replaced and then replaced again and it makes sense that there is some nostalgia for the lost format and now some collectability around it i wonder what the long term effects of that will be like would baseball cards still be as valuable and as sought after today if they quit making them in 2006 like would people still want to buy a mickey mantel card for seven million dollars maybe they would maybe it'd be worth 10 million dollars because it well i guess that particular card wouldn't be any rarer but the industry as a whole would be rarer but i also got to think that you need, at least in collectability, you need new content to chase. You need new things to chase, right? To keep it fresh. And because they're not making any more VHS tapes, it keeps

fresh eyes from finding it. So I wonder if it'll just become a niche thing, collecting physical media that has died, or if it will maintain and endure. I kind of hope it does. For the same reason we have museums, you want this stuff to be preserved so that people can see it and touch it and understand it and get a sense of the way the world used to work, the way information traveled, the way we used to entertain, you know? So now that I've said that VHS is a dead format format let's talk about the vhs that's still being made because of the collectability aspect of it uh let's see in 2010 the movie the house of the devil was released on vhs as an amazon exclusive deal to keep with the film's intent to mimic 80s

horror films the very first paranormal activity which was produced in 2007 had a vhs release in the netherlands in particular i think in 2010 the horror film vhs2 was released as a combo in north america included a vhs tape in addition to blue ray and dvd obviously that makes sense but 2019 it's getting pretty recent paramount pictures released uh quantities of the 2018 film bumblebee uh as promotional contest prizes in vhs format and then in 2021 professional wrestling promotion impact wrestling i'm sure eric is familiar with those guys produced a limited run of vhs tapes containing that year's slamiversary which quickly sold out the company later announced future vhs runs of all their pay-per-view events. So I guess that was a fucking home run for them.

So that, I guess, gives us some idea that there's enough collectability that, or kitsch value to it, that at least some production companies see it as at least a marketing tool. Hopefully, we'll get to see more stuff like that in the future. Hopefully, you have a couple of sealed copies of Jaws the terminator or back to the future in your house that you can sell and buy a new car with or maybe pay off the mortgage and uh if anybody knows where the young teacher on vhs is i would love let me see it vhs copy so i did some. I wasn't able to really find anyone selling or even really talking about the value of the young teacher. The very first VHS released that we talked about earlier. If you know anything about the young teacher, I would love to find out more information about that VHS. Is there a copy like, I don't know, in a museum somewhere? Has it sold at auction and I just couldn't find it there must be at least one copy of the very first VHS floating

around somewhere and if not there surely there's some sort of a search for it right because it has to exist even if it hasn't been identified yet it has to exist somewhere in some grandmother's house in South Korea or who knows maybe at a thrift store somewhere in Idaho.

But I would love to know. I'd love to see and find out a little bit more about that. So if you have any info on The Young Teacher or anything about VHS in general that I may have missed or any particular insights you want to send my way, as always, email Jeff at what? Oh, yeah. Email Jeff at ericsboss.com or eric jeffsboss.com i don't care all right