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VHS is back!

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Fortunately, I still have my old VHS tapes, although I don't think I have any of these little gems that are fetching thousands on ebay and other online auction sites.  Back to the Future appears to be the holy grail, having collected a whopping $75,000 on the open market.   Why, you might ask?

Part of the reason is that there are apparently a lot of forgotten titles on VHS, particularly campy horror classics.  There was even a "found footage horror anthology" entitled VHS that came out in 2012 honoring this tradition.  The same must be true for obscure foreign titles like Taxi Blues, which I was unable to get on DVD but found an old VHS tape at amazon some years back.  However, the titles fetching the biggest bucks are blockbusters like Jaws and The Goonies.  I think it is a nostalgia that won't last long, so you better cash in before this 80s feeling evaporates.  It has me looking through my old titles to see what I can fetch on ebay.  Unfortunately Taxi Blues is not in hot demand.

When I first came to Vilnius in 1997, we would go to a little video store tucked back in a courtyard of the old town to rent black market VHS tapes.  The quality was often very poor as the tapes were transfers from handycam video cameras like this one, shot in the movie theater.  Someone would do a voice over in Lithuanian.  I would try to listen to the garbled English underneath.  Good Will Hunting was such bad quality I demanded my money back.  

It was a tradition in Eastern Europe that stretched back to the communist era. wonderfully captured in this Romanian documentary.  At that time, VHS tapes would be smuggled into the country and copied so that you could catch the latest action movie coming out of the United States.  Chuck Norris was a huge star in Romania.  Even here in Lithuania, where Walker, Texas Ranger was a very popular television show for many years.  However, the collapse of the Soviet Union meant it was no longer communist authorities who cracked down on these illegal operations, but federal officials trying to curtail entertainment piracy.  

I started buying VHS tapes through amazon.  They weren't very expensive and I would load up to offset the set price for shipping.  Most were watched only one time, so they are still in good shape.  Although the tapes are worth more if factory sealed.  By the early 2000s, DVD's had taken over and I have a basement loaded with these compact discs, which I hope one day will similarly garner this misplaced nostalgia.

The technology was nothing special, which is why DVD's quickly overtook them.  Ease of use being the determining factor.  No rewind necessary.  You could also pack much more footage on a DVD than you could a VHS tape and theoretically a DVD could last forever, provided you didn't scratch it up too badly.  I suppose there is that whole analog v. digital debate, which has led to a boom in vinyl and cassette sales, but I don't think it matters that much visually, unless you try to blow the image up for an outdoor movie.  The biggest problem has been sound quality as I found out with the DVD box sets of The X-Files.  You have to turn the volume up full blast to hear anything.

Whatever the case, it is funny to see these old VHS tapes fetching such high prices.  I imagine ebay will soon be flooded with titles, slashing the current asking prices.  It's hard to believe there are so few copies of Back to the Future, but maybe that one was a special edition.

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