REWINDING VIDEO TAPE
We kick off our 80s flashback with a nostalgic look at how VHS and Betamax changed our world.
WELCOME TO THE 1980s, and a little flashback for those who were there, a lesson in appreciation of the modern world for those who weren’t. As you ponder over which 4K Dolby Vision Dolby Atmos movie to stream next, just remember we’ve never had it so good. Here we step back some 40 years to a time when you had to walk to the shops to borrow a hardback-sized cassette of video tape. These were the first days when you could choose a movie to watch at home, even own a movie.
So don’t let the cumbersome aesthetic fool you: video tape was a God in its day. It enjoyed a tantalising title position with ‘sex’ and ‘lies’ in a breakout indie movie hit. It formed a movie title with the word ‘drome’, promising illicit delights within. It spawned a rental sector, a generation of collectors and the careers of free-thinking directors. And it saw off a moral panic, endearing itself to us forever in the process.
Nowadays, we are long past even the time when notes in charity-shop windows would politely ask customers to stop donating old collections. Yet even after its decline, the VHS video cassette holds a top-loaded spot in film fans’ affections. Forty-five years after it began to click and whirr towards our homes, VHS intermittently re-emerges to remind us of its one-time promises, whispers of possibility heard down the years from home cinema’s birth.
Its influence shows in books, retro packaging, exhibitions, games, rock albums, horror movies and beyond. Most of us ejected our last video years back, but its after-effects spool ever onwards.
Track back
To find out why, hit rewind. The popular arrival of VCRs (video cassette recorders) began about four-and-a-half decades back. For its origins, go further; for its peak, aim for the early ’80s. The hairstyles will guide you.
The origin story begins in the 1950s, when Bing Crosby Enterprises first demonstrated video-tape recording in Los Angeles in 1951, extending tape’s role from audio — key developments in which took place in Nazi Germany during WWII when the low noise achieved by bias had fooed the Allies into believing Hilter’s speeches were live, not recorded. But it took decades for consumer video to become available; it was the mid-’70s when Sony and JVC became locked in a format war. In Sony’s corner sat the boxy Betamax tape; JVC had the Video Home System. Other formats also emerged — Philips fans will remember Video 2000 — but these two were the giants.
As with any David-vs-Goliath stand-off, one had to fall. The first VCR to use VHS standard arrived in 1976 — and VHS soon streaked ahead in the market. Some aficionados claimed Betamax to be the better format; others claimed the advantage came from JVC’s fewer qualms about porn on VHS than Sony’s for Betamax. But the deciding factor was surely length: Sony initially limited Betamax recording times to one hour, while VHS stretched to two. By the time Betamax changed its timings, VHS had won in most markets.
Players remained costly into the early 1980s. But that would change. The rise of VCR/video rental stores and, later, affordable players shifted the market dramatically. By 1989, 60% of Australian households had at least one VCR in the household, one of the highest rates of uptake in the world. By 1990, more than 200 million VCRs a year were being sold globally. During the 1980s, home-viewing habits had changed forever.
Home invasion
“Ooh, have we got a video?” asked Rik Mayall’s would-be anarchist Rick excitably in cult BBC comedy The Young Ones. In houses around the world in the ’80s, similar cries rang out.
Cover your children’s ears for this reminder, but back then TV shows could be watched only once (repeats aside), and movies only when they were on. Schedules ruled. TV even presumed to tell you when to turn off. As the telly in The Young Ones commanded,
“Go to bed, spotty.”
Videos, VCRs and rental stores became the stuff of liberation, transforming living rooms and bedtimes. Weekends had something new to offer, as families traipsed to the rental store and bonded or brawled over which movie or two to be rented. But TV shows could also be recorded and re-watched, a process that raised even blank VHS tapes into coveted Christmas gifts for kids, and made collectors of us all. Unless errant siblings failed to respect boundaries and ‘accidentally’ taped over cherished copies, favourite films could now be stored for revisits and pause-button analysis. (What is happening to the dog in The Thing?) As the Buddy Holly-esque skeleton from a UK 1985 Scotch tapes advert sang, “Tape what you want both night and day… Re-record, not fade away.”
True, the format was not without issues. Fast-forwarding or rewinding often took you to the wrong spot. Too much whirring back and forwards could tangle your tape. Survivors of the format’s heyday still tell war stories of hours spent fathoming the deep mysteries of the tracking knob. Repairs were beyond all but the most techno whizzkid.
But we loved the blocky boxes and happily surrendered shelf space to them. We loved the rental ritual, the retail high, the sense of involvement. Viewers learned to exercise like Jane Fonda, or kidded themselves they could dance like Michael Jackson on scary nights.
Many filmmakers’ futures were shaped by VHS. In Tom Roston’s terrific filmmakers’ oral history book, I Lost It At The Video Store, Darren Aronofsky eulogises the smell of rental stores. One-time videostore clerk Kevin Smith recalls seeing video and thinking, “It was the power of cinema in my hands.” David O. Russell describes a VHS of Chinatown as his filmmaking education. Video rental’s most infamous offspring, Quentin Tarantino, was a star among local movie fans due to his time at Video Archives on Manhattan Beach.
Of course, large chains such as Blockbuster bulldozed many smaller rental stores off the block, though now remembered with fondness by movie fans. But other developments and innovations eventually nudged VHS off-road altogether.
When DVD players appeared in the market in 1997, the warning signs were clear. Videos were clunky, DVDs slick. Videos took aeons to navigate, DVDs had chapter headings. VHS images required tracking, DVDs just shimmered. Slim on your shelf, they hosted goldmines of extras within. And studios could sell their collections to buyers again. It took only six years for DVD rentals to overtake VHS rentals. By 2005, Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge Of The
Sith became the first ‘Star Wars’ film not to be released on VHS in the US.
Gone with the (re)wind
It would not be until 2016 that The Guardian reported the VCR’s final gasp, when Funai Electric halted production of the machines. Even so, the format continues to be revisited, from comedy musicals (The Elvis Dead) to documentaries (Rewind This!) and beyond. With footage that has not been tinkered with, VHS copies of ‘Star Wars’ are even held dear by some fans. More recently, VHS packaging has been revived for a string of era-nodding disc releases, from Stranger Things to Jaws, The Thing and Ti West’s House Of The Devil. Pomp-rockers Muse invoked VHS art with the cover for their retro-leaning 2018 album Simulation Theory.
Perhaps fan culture’s sense of ownership has something to do with video. But don’t hold that against VHS. Clunky, low of quality and space-consuming, VHS was not perfect. Superior formats would follow, but it was where today’s viewing practices began to unspool. With a pleasing irony, the last Hollywood film released on VHS is thought to be A History Of Violence, whose director, David Cronenberg, made prescient hay out of VCRs (he used Betamax tapes on screen, but still) in 1983’s brain-teasing Videodrome. And he knew the score.
“Any person who is a control freak must certainly find video the most threatening thing ever,” said the Videodrome director, as quoted in Chris Rodley’s Cronenberg On Cronenberg. “There’s freedom to record, to change, to edit, to freeze-frame and look again, to exchange tapes. The video cassette is freedom of the image.”