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Hank Dearborn · 03-08-2008, 01:21 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary OS

I've only read of a few people on these boards who make this claim of having everything they want on vhs. I can assure you that the majority of us do NOT have everything we want. Not even close! To be honest, it kinda comes off as boasting and school yard bragging akin to "my father/mother/home is better than yours" that little kids engage in. I'm not speaking to you personally, but of the larger message that says we should all have the series we want from taping 20+ years ago. Some of us just flat out weren't in the position to do that, for many, many reasons.

Gary "most of the 50's and early 60's shows have not been on tv for close to 2 decades, and unless you were quite well to do in the early 80's I don't see how the average joe could have taped everything they wanted" O.

I have access to tens of thousands of series episodes, from my 25+ years of collecting, from friends that I made over that time who are also huge collectors and from a couple of friends who passed away whose vast collections I inherited. And, even with all of that, I don't have close to everything that I want. For one thing, even if you were recording heavily in the 80s or knew people who were, there was so much classic rare product being shown that it was impossible to get it all. CBN, Lifetime, BET, USA, HA, WOR Satellite Feed, Fox Net, A&E, early TV Land. Stuff was everywhere and no 5 people could have recorded it all. There was just too much out there. But I can name you dozens of obscure shows I would want that never made it to air anywhere in the taping era, not to mention things that did which people missed recording. For instance Bravo in England ran a lot of great stuff but it was so hard to get a contact and they would just run through a show one time and that was it. But they aired things like Dan August, Smith Family, Saints and Sinners, Pruitts of Southhampton and loads of other rarities. And then of course there were shows that you killed yourself to get that are now readily available to everyone. Things like The Fugitive, The Invaders, Man from UNCLE, etc., were all hard to find shows in the early 80s. And this is in the 16mm days, not the pre-cut time sped airings from the 90s.

But regardless of what shows I got or didn't get, I had a blast with the whole hobby. The excitement of getting those tapes in the mail, of finding a market running a rare show, I wouldn't trade those days for DVDs of every series ever. Some of the best friends I have in the world I made through the hobby and I have friends all over the world that I made through tape collecting. That's something you'll never be able to get from DVD. Yeah, it's great to be able to click a mouse on amazon at 3 o'clock in the morning and have a whole series show up on your doorstep in pristine condition a few days later. But I'll take the fun of the hunt and the chase and the experiences and friendships I made over that any day. It kind of reminds me of the Twilight Zone episode, A Nice Place to Visit. Getting everything you want easily takes all of the joy out of it. It's the process and the struggle that makes it worthwhile.