Hitting rewind: Collector looks to share VHS nostalgia
Jason Champion is a serious collector. And like anyone with a passion for special objects that stack up over time, he keeps everything in his garage.
This is where the northwest Houston resident houses his collection of movie posters, memorabilia including a Mr. T bust or lurking lagoon creature and the racks and racks and racks of movies on VHS tapes.
There are horror movies so low-budget they make shaky iPhone videos feel hi-def. There are action movies so of the ’80s you almost expect the ghost of Ronald Reagan to haunt them. And there are obscure cult favorites such as the misguided space-vampire flick “Lifeforce.”
In an age when most of us are transferring our media to digital forms and storing it on hard drives that take up less space
than one VHS tape, Champion’s collection is unusual. But it has a purpose that transcends nostalgic hoarding: He wants to share his treasures. There’s just one catch. You need to have a video rental card to access his library of 5,000 tapes.
With video rental franchises long gone, Champion has created a replica of a mid-1980s video store where he used to park his Toyota. It’s organized by genre, starting with horror, then moving to sci-fi and winding the length of the space on multitiered black shelves until you pass a section for celebrity workout videos, Christian kids shows, foreign films and finally action movies with a strong Chuck Norris presence.
And with his months-old venture, Champion has become an overnight star in a niche community that collects, trades and sells old VHS cassettes — whether online or in person. It’s a growing movement of collectors who enjoy movie nights with friends to watch what was once thought of as disposable popcorn entertainment. Call them Tape Heads, call them VHS Nerds, they’ll take it.
“Instead of just having it displayed on shelves like a lot of collectors might want to do, I kind of want it to be interactive, so I’ll have friends that come by and get their membership cards and rent videos,” said Champion, who’s originally from Oklahoma but has been in Houston for 16 years.
Champion fell into collecting VHS tapes after amassing a collection of old video games. He started thrifting for videos over the past three years and meeting with people in flea-market parking lots to grow his current collection — or addiction, depending on how you look at it. He’s even started his own VHS viewing night at Misfit Toys in the Heights called VHS Slaughterfest, which screens movies such as the low-budget, darkcomedy gem “Frankenhooker.”
A good portion of Champion’s stock comes from the former stocks of Houston’s Audio/Video Plus, an epic video rental store that closed its doors in 2012. This is a common tactic for the Tape Heads; Tayvis Dunnahoe, a Houston VHS collector who runs the online Video Sanctum VHS shop, bought out the defunct Bayou City video haven after three years of negotiations with its owners. The store had a library of well over 60,000 tapes, many in the horror and exploitation genre that VHS collectors love.
But Champion credits one friend, in particular, from San Antonio who drew him into this VHS “nostalgia overload.”
The friend had his entire VHS collection in shelving that reached his ceiling. When Champion showed an interest in it, the friend went into a secret stash under his bed.
“He busted out like three or four tubs of VHS tapes, and he said, ‘Help yourself, man.’ ”
Then came that surge of nostalgia, a feeling that caused him to keep searching for more and more VHS tapes. “It got completely out of control but in a good way,” Champion says.
What has followed the past two months is an urge to create his own video service, something he saw in a documentary about VHS collectors. Some video-store movie posters from eBay here, some liquidated video-store shelves there, and Champion Video started to take shape. ‘Their own aesthetic’
In the VHS-collector corners, horror and exploitation movies are the key genres.
The reason is twofold: The tapes were mass-produced, and during the 1980s, a time many collectors are sentimental about, the movies were cheaper for video stores to stock their shelves with, says Georgetown professor Caetlin Benson-Allott, who wrote the book “Killer Tapes and Shattered Screens.”
“Some people might want to say ’80s horror movies are all the same, they’re all just slasher movies. It’s all just blood and guts without a plot,” she says. “It was cheap, but it wasn’t artless. They had their own aesthetic.”
Which is why Benson-Allott also teaches a course on how VHS horror-movie staples such as “Video Violence” or “Sleepaway Camp” have a lot to say about how media culture has evolved.
Part of that evolution includes the near-extinction of video rental stores. A few survive, but most people are familiar only with automated rentals kiosks, such as Redbox stands. But sliding your credit card through a Redbox will never equal browsing store shelves or talking up a video-store clerk for recommendations.
“Most native Houstonians who also love film can recall their fondness for Audio/Video Plus during the 33 years it operated,” says Dunnahoe, 44, who’s better known in videocollector circles as Benny Junko. “The store itself was iconic locally, but it also fits within the national narrative due to its entry at the beginning of the video boom.”
Dunnahoe recognized the potential for retro VHS interest around 2009 when he joined a social media collecting community. The Facebook group Horror VHS Collectors Unite!, created by the Pennsylvania-based VHS provocateur Earl Kessler, has more than 12,000 members who trade, sell and engage in heavy VHS ephemera.
The group brings collectors together from across the country and has helped give the culture of VHS collecting its contemporary boom — it inspired the 2013 documentary “Adjust Your Tracking” as well as a traveling museum.
Many of the rare VHS tapes Dunnahoe acquired from the shuttered Audio/Video Plus ended up in the collection of an Ohio man who later sold off hundreds of tapes to Yale University, creating the country’s first university-owned horror and exploitation VHS archive.
According to Aaron T. Pratt, a former Yale doctoral student who joined former Yale librarian David Gray to get funding for the archive, the VHS titles are important historical documents that need to be preserved because of their insight into U.S. culture between the late ’70s and very early ’90s.
For instance, exploitation movies such as “Breeders” and “Psychos in Love” were packaged to be consumed outside movie theaters and represented some of the first instances of ondemand home media.
Pratt, who now works as a rare-books curator at the University of Texas at Austin, says early VHS tapes and the boxes and art they were packaged in were key to understanding consumer culture.
“I can see the VHS tapes themselves and the industries that emerged around VHS like video stores and sleepover parties, a lot of those things were shaped by VHS. It shaped the way people interacted with motion pictures and the way people interacted with each other,” Pratt says.
And that social interaction is right at the heart of Champion Video. Thrill of the hunt
In west Houston just off Texas 6, a huge Goodwill looms. For Champion, this has been a gold mine for VHS hunts. He walks in with Michael Flores, a local VHS collector who specializes in locating hard-to-find Japanese anime titles.
Dressed in Converse sneakers, shorts and a T-shirt that reads “Video Violence” — a seminal ’80s horror movie — Champion takes a shopping cart — for good luck, he says, but also because he just got paid and is ready to haul in a good share of tapes.
What awaits in the back, beyond musty-smelling clothes and knickknacks, is a VHS bonanza — racks on racks of tapes, along with three six-level shelves packed with cassettes. Champion is in his domain. “I can’t take them all,” he mutters, grabbing tapes and ingesting their covers’ images with his eyes.
It’s the odd and the unique he’s looking for but also titles that grab his attention and help round out his collection. The first tape to get tossed into his shopping cart is the 1988 Patrick Swayze action flick “Tiger Warsaw.” He skips over a Cold War era-looking movie called “American Cop.” He grabs handfuls of tapes, scans them, moves them to an empty area of the shelf, restacks them. And repeats.
“There is this inimitable rush of excitement and feeling of adventure when rummaging through the wild, whether it be at Goodwills, second-hand stores, flea markets or some dank basement you found via Craigslist,” says VHS enthusiast Josh Schafer, who is cocurator of the traveling Museum of VHS and wrote about Champion Video on his popular website Lunch Meat. “Finding a VHS gem in that style is just so much fun, and it’s one of the joys of VHS collecting.”
The thrill of the hunt has Champion’s shopping cart getting fuller by the minute. He eyes a row of tapes of the old helicopter-driven TV show “Airwolf.” About a half-dozen copies are scooped up at once. He does the same with another row of old TV, this time “Space: 1999,” a not-so “Star Trek” series with a bit of a cult following.
These are the tapes that will maintain and grow Champion’s rental store, which he hopes will grow to be a legitimate enterprise. Currently, he rents only to friends or people he meets through Facebook.
“Video stores were important social spaces, ranging from the expertise of the clerk behind the counter to the long conversations between groups wandering the shelves debating what to rent,” says Josh Greenberg, who seven years ago wrote “Blockbuster: Video Stores and the Invention of Movies on Video,” a book that examines movierental culture. “Interactions with people were a core part of the experience, and that’s something that has been lost in the move to algorithm-driven recommendation systems like Netflix. From the Facebook page, Champion Video looks like it could be exactly that sort of community space.” And it is. If you give Champion your ear and let him walk you around his small garage space, he’ll wax on about his favorite female martial arts movies (Cynthia Rothrock vehicles), his favorite shot-on-VHS movie (“555,” about a hippie slasher) and what exactly is behind the little curtain in the back (hint: It’s the adult section).
Champion, who is a single dad with a teenage son, does his video hunting almost weekly, although sometimes he skips thrifting dates to play with his punk rock band, Robot Island. Still, with his collecting enthusiasm, he’s built his rental library up to some 5,000 tapes and counting. And he’s ready to share in the spoils.
There’s just once catch with this VHS resurgence: It can’t last forever. Experts say the shelf life of these tapes, which lose quality every year because of gradual magnetic remanence decay, depends on storage conditions. Even with optimal storage, they’ll eventually lose their content. But the love for the format is likely to continue beyond the day the last tape pops or is no longer able to rewind.
COMPLETELYIT GOT OUT OF CONTROL BUT IN A GOOD WAY. Jason Champion, on the nostalgia for VHS tapes that spurred his collecting