Why I Own So Many Movies. (1 Viewer)

[smithbrad]

Point taken.

However, my point still stands that VHS films/TV shows were never something that the general public purchased to collect - nor did the general public have large collections of commercial (i.e., non taped off TV) VHS films/TV shows. Again, back in the heyday of VHS all the people I knew primarily rented VHS tapes & rarely bought new ones - outside of mass produced & relatively inexpensive widely available films like the '89 Batman (which I saw being sold everywhere, including gas stations, etc.). In early 1988, I remember a kid at my school bragging that he bought The James Bond film The Living Daylights (1987) on VHS tape for $75+!!! At the time, I thought he was a fool to pay that much for a movie - and still feel that way - ha ha. I also remember Return of the Jedi making it's way to VHS tape in Spring '86 (about 3 years after it hit theaters) and it was roughly $50-$60 at the time.

I had no idea that video rental stores sold used VHS tapes for a discount. A VHS tape degraded each time it was watched, and sometimes even new tapes would get eaten by the machine and/or have issues playing, etc. So, buying a used tape would have been risky - at best.

I also never remember going into any kind of retail/electronics store during the heyday of VHS & seeing a huge selection of new VHS tapes for sale.

Also, the majority of TV series were never available commercially on VHS (i.e., outside of people taping them off TV - which I'm not counting). I do remember seeing commercials for mini-series like the Civil War drama "North & South" on expensive VHS sets - but, these had to be ordered exclusively through the mail - and weren't available in most (or any) retail stores.

Conversely, when DVD was in it's heyday (circa 2004-2009-ish, roughly) you could go into stores like Best Buy, Fry's Electronics, Target, etc. & see a plethora of movies, TV shows, etc. on DVD (and later Blu-ray). The physical media sections in stores like this have shrunk considerably since then - but at lot of that is due to streaming, etc.

Note DVD's are prone to scratches (Blu rays less so), but I still prefer DVD to VHS for numerous reasons - but that's me.

If your friend bought "Living Daylights" upon release then they were paying rental store costs.

However, in the late 80's Tower Records had wall to wall shelving for VHS. Best Buy also ended up with multiple aisles for VHS prior to the release of DVDs. In fact, the transition from VHS to DVD within stores like Best Buy was similar to the transition of record stores when CDs first were released, where initially there was a small section for CDs with the rest for LP's, over a couple of years the transition was complete and the opposite was true. Best Buy was multi-aisles of VHS before DVD finally took over, a few years later. Just like you see DVDs sale still out number Blu-ray sales, the same was true with VHS sales trumping DVD sales in the beginning.

Yes, in the mid-to-late 80's Star Wars on VHS cost about $80 each (rental store cost). However, by the early 1990's the Star Wars trilogy was released on VHS for around $60 total.

It is true that TV had a more difficult time being distributed on VHS at two 60 minutes shows per tape. However, i had a friend that had all the Star Trek originals series on VHS. I knew someone else that had much of Dark Shadows on tape. I had a few episodes of Outer Limits on tape. Columbia House even had a tape club for VHS TV on tape.

Late 80's through mid-90's I went to Tower records and later places like Best Buy monthly to see what new titles were released. Advertisements were standard in the Sunday paper. You may not remember any of this or partaken in having a VHS collection, but i did, it was popular with many, and it did exists prior to DVD.

 

[The Drifter]

All good points. Yes, I never got much into collecting VHS tapes - nor did anyone I knew at the time. I didn't like the pan & scan format, the bulky aspect of the tapes/the amount of room they took up on a shelf, the tendency that VHS had to get "eaten" by the players, the need to rewind, etc.

I didn't get interested in collecting films/TV shows on home video until the DVD format, and knew many others who had a similar attitude.

 

[smithbrad]

Point taken.

However, my point still stands that VHS films/TV shows were never something that the general public purchased to collect - nor did the general public have large collections of commercial (i.e., non taped off TV) VHS films/TV shows. Again, back in the heyday of VHS all the people I knew primarily rented VHS tapes & rarely bought new ones - outside of mass produced & relatively inexpensive widely available films like the '89 Batman (which I saw being sold everywhere, including gas stations, etc.). In early 1988, I remember a kid at my school bragging that he bought The James Bond film The Living Daylights (1987) on VHS tape for $75+!!! At the time, I thought he was a fool to pay that much for a movie - and still feel that way - ha ha. I also remember Return of the Jedi making it's way to VHS tape in Spring '86 (about 3 years after it hit theaters) and it was roughly $50-$60 at the time.

I had no idea that video rental stores sold used VHS tapes for a discount. A VHS tape degraded each time it was watched, and sometimes even new tapes would get eaten by the machine and/or have issues playing, etc. So, buying a used tape would have been risky - at best.

I also never remember going into any kind of retail/electronics store during the heyday of VHS & seeing a huge selection of new VHS tapes for sale - other than maybe a large amount of 1 film, etc.

Also, the majority of TV series were never available commercially on VHS (i.e., outside of people taping them off TV - which I'm not counting). I do remember seeing commercials for mini-series like the Civil War drama "North & South" on expensive VHS sets - but, these had to be ordered exclusively through the mail - and weren't available in most (or any) retail stores.

Conversely, when DVD was in it's heyday (circa 2004-2009-ish, roughly) you could go into stores like Best Buy, Fry's Electronics, Target, etc. & see a plethora of movies, TV shows, etc. on DVD (and later Blu-ray). The physical media sections in stores like this have shrunk considerably since then - but at lot of that is due to streaming, etc.

Note DVD's are prone to scratches (Blu rays less so), but I still prefer DVD to VHS for numerous reasons - but that's me.

To follow-up, I found the falling old article online from 2002.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2002/01/07/daily34.html

Silicon Valley Business Journal
DVD sales top VHS sales for first time, 1/9/2002

One out of every four U.S. homes is equipped with a DVD player, leading to DVD sales topping sales of VHS tapes for the first time, according to figures released Tuesday at the Consumer Electronics Show by the DVD Entertainment Group.

Last year consumers spent a record-breaking $16.8 billion buying and renting movies on video, up 21 percent over 2000, and more than twice what they spent on movie tickets ($8.1 billion), the group says.

Consumers spent $4.6 billion buying DVDs, 2.4 times more than in 2000, an increase that put DVD purchases ahead of VHS purchases for the first time despite an installed player base of 25 million DVD households versus a VCR installed player base of 96 million households, it says. Consumer spending on DVD purchases and rental combined was $6 billion, 2.4 times more than in 2000. Rentals of VHS tapes still exceed rentals of DVDs, however.

 

[TJPC]

Here in the Toronto area before DVD, we had “Sam The Record Man”, “A&A Records”, “HMV”, “Tower Records” and “Future Shop” jammed with every conceivable VHS tape. Gradually these gave way to DVD. They are all gone now.

 

[The Drifter]

To follow-up, I found the falling old article online from 2002.

https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/stories/2002/01/07/daily34.html

Good article. I didn't get my first DVD player until early 2003, and knew a small # of others who still didn't have a DVD player even then - though most of the people I knew had them. So, it makes sense that VHS rentals would have topped DVD rentals in 2002, since IMHO DVD hadn't fully penetrated the home video market by that time.

For what it's worth, I was in the now-defunct Border's Books & Music around 2003 and I remember hearing an employee there mention to someone that they stopped getting in new VHS tapes that year; so, while they were still selling VHS tapes, they just were shifting over to DVD to a great extent by that time.

Also worth nothing: Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (2005) was the first Star Wars film to only be released to DVD, not VHS (at least in the U.S.). So, to me this shows that the home video market - at least in the U.S. - was strongly shifting over to DVD by the mid-200X's.:

https://www.ign.com/articles/2005/10/07/no-vhs-psp-for-episode-iii

 

[Jasper70]

Far more movies were released on VHS than have been released on DVD. I read an article awhile back, sorry no link, that stated of all the movies ever made less than 50% had made it to VHS and far fewer to DVD.
I didn’t really collect VHS, I probably had 50 or so , not counting tapes I recorded. Just core collection stuff like Star Wars, Star Trek, etc. I bought my first DVD player in the late 90’s and that is when I started a library.
I’m a seller of media online. VHS still is a viable medium. Sure it’s nowhere near what it was but I sell 50 tapes per month on average. It’s a combination of movies unavailable on any other format and people who still have and use a VCR.
Just yesterday I sold an 80’s workout tape for $25. Today was a movie for $15.
I have several good condition working VCRs. I rarely watch a VHS these days but occasionally I’ll get a movie I want to watch and will fire up a player. I find the tapes usually play just fine even though some are 30+ years old.

 

[English Invader]

Remember this?

No, unfortunately but that Diet Coke ad is awesome all the same. I don't know if we got that in the UK. One thing I remember about Batman is that it got a very early TV premier on the BBC (Christmas 1991, if memory serves) when you usually had to wait 3-5 years for a film to appear on mainstream television.

When I was a kid back in the early-mid 90s, video tapes were affordable if you had your own income. I didn't and had to rely on pocket money, Christmas, Easter and whatever manipulative strategies I could devise to get my parents to buy them for me.

 

[cineMANIAC]

All I know is that if I were somehow thrust back in time to the mid 80's knowing what I know now, I'd be pretty pissed. Small, square TVs, only 3 broadcast networks and, um, VHS as the primary mass-market format. Yikes.

 

[The Drifter]

Far more movies were released on VHS than have been released on DVD. I read an article awhile back, sorry no link, that stated of all the movies ever made less than 50% had made it to VHS and far fewer to DVD.

I don't dispute this at all. There are whole articles out there about films that were only on VHS & have still never made it to DVD. However, again, I didn't know people that had huge personal VHS collections that they had purchased - I'm not saying they didn't exist, just that I didn't know them. That being said - I would be surprised if a huge # of people would have bothered to have built up such an expensive collection - given the extreme inferiority of the VHS format. Yes, they may have had a collection of VHS that were taped off of TV - but, again - that's not the same thing.

I still believe that DVD was a much more popular & affordable format, and that people may have been more likely to buy DVD's than rent them. Conversely, in the heyday of VHS more people were likely to rent VHS than buy them.

Plus, as has been discussed - even in the heyday of VHS, TV shows were never widely available on the format - if they were available at all. It wasn't until DVD took off (in the mid-200X's) that TV shows on DVD started getting popular, with new seasons of shows being released on an almost-weekly basis, etc.

It's tough to quantify how Blu-ray fits into all this. I love the format & prefer it to DVD - but, it's more expensive, hasn't fully penetrated the home video market by any means (and almost certainly never will), and the selection of movies/TV shows on DVD still far outweighs those on Blu - and probably always will.

All I know is that if I were somehow thrust back in time to the mid 80's knowing what I know now, I'd be pretty pissed. Small, square TVs, only 3 broadcast networks and, um, VHS as the primary mass-market format. Yikes.

Truer words were never spoken. With the plethora of great movies & TV shows available on DVD, Blu, and especially streaming these days - I don't have time to watch everything I want to. There are all the older TV shows & movies, new TV shows/movies - and more new material being released every week. So, there is a wealth of material to see right at your fingertips - literally.

Going back to the '80's with the limited technology & even more limited availability would be like going back to the stone age - from a TV show/movie home video perspective.

 

[smithbrad]

That being said - I would be surprised if a huge # of people would have bothered to have built up such an expensive collection - given the extreme inferiority of the VHS format. Yes, they may have had a collection of VHS that were taped off of TV - but, again - that's not the same thing.

Prior to the 90's I would say VHS collections were primarily taped off TV. After 1990, I recall a major shift to building collections from commercial VHS releases. When it comes down to it, it was actually much easier to buy a commercial release then wait for something to be broadcast and taped off TV. Plus, the quality of the commercial releases were much better. Another thing is that with the advent of commercial VHS releases, new catalog titles were being released weekly, so it was quite easy to build a collection quickly. Again, I had purchased a few hundred over just a couple of years, though storage was more of an issue than when DVD became prevalent.

As for "extreme inferiority of the VHS format", we may say that now, but we didn't back then. Especially, given that commercial VHS gave us something that we never had before, ownership to watch content whenever we wanted within the original aspect ratio, no commercials, no cuts, and content based on the original ratings. None of this was available taped from a broadcast or on a previous format (other than those that actually collected 16mm film elements). VHS was the every man's format of the time (like DVD now). Especially, when you consider hard core collectors were invested in Laserdiscs. You may be surprised as to how many parents owned VHS copies of all the Disney movies. You may not have noticed this, but plenty of us lived it.

Also, one must remember the heyday for purchasing commercial VHS titles to build a collection only lasted less than a decade before DVD hit the scene. DVD has now been around for over two decades, and DVD is good enough for most to consider blu-ray unnecessary. I stopped buying VHS the moment I read about the upcoming DVD format.

I still believe that DVD was a much more popular & affordable format, and that people may have been more likely to buy DVD's than rent them. Conversely, in the heyday of VHS more people were likely to rent VHS than buy them.

I will agree, primarily because DVD was the next stage in the deployment model. DVD's were smaller, provided higher quality, required no rewinding, and handled wear better. However, there was more to it than that. During the heyday of VHS, you could only purchase catalog titles from years past. New releases were really only available for rental for close to a year and then sold used from rental shops. Since new movies are generally always in higher demand, it makes sense that more would rent VHS then purchase. With DVD the time frame from theater to being available for home purchase has continued to shrink each year. Why rent when you can purchase in a few months, which is why the once very prosperous rental model has pretty much dried up.

Plus, as has been discussed - even in the heyday of VHS, TV shows were never that easily available on the format. It wasn't until DVD took off (in the mid-200X's) that TV shows on DVD started getting popular, with new seasons of shows being released on an almost-weekly basis, etc.

Yes, TV on VHS was always difficult. Only the most popular or cult related shows, or best of's made it on VHS. But as you pointed out TV on DVD was not an immediately available, and now appears to be dwindling quite a bit, at least for older TV shows.

It's tough to quantify how Blu-ray fits into all this. I love the format & prefer it to DVD - but, it's more expensive, hasn't fully penetrated the home video market by any means (and almost certainly never will), and the selection of movies/TV shows on DVD still far outweighs those on Blu - and probably always will.

Blu-ray for many is viewed as an unnecessary upgrade. Especially, given the number of DVD's that make it into $5 bins. For the average screen size DVD is seen as enough. As more people expand to 60"+ screens that may change some. UHD 4K is really on the outside looking in and will probably go the route of Laserdisc. The more people stream the less they will even think about formats.

 

[TJPC]

I had a top of the line 26” Sony and later a 40” rear projection Hitachi. I bought many pre-recorded VHS tapes for myself and had like said above, just about every Disney movie available for my daughter. I remember being astonished by the wonderful quality of the “Star Wars” films when they finally were available. (And no, I don’t have the “three lithographs suitable for framing” that came with the set anymore!)

 

[Jasper70]

Some VHS tapes looked damn good on a regular television before the flat screen HD days. Some of the cheaper companies recorded in the EP mode and those generally didn’t look that good plus a lot of them had tracking problems.
At a thrift store today I saw a still New/Sealed Friends Season two 4 tape set. Back in the day that’d been expensive.

 

[English Invader]

All I know is that if I were somehow thrust back in time to the mid 80's knowing what I know now, I'd be pretty pissed. Small, square TVs, only 3 broadcast networks and, um, VHS as the primary mass-market format. Yikes.

But imagine the killing you'd make as the inventor of DVD, LCD TVs, digital television and mass implementation of the internet.

As mentioned earlier in the thread, I built up a huge collection of VHS in the mid 2000s when I bought them in charity shops for as little as 20p a time. People were chucking out their tapes for DVD and I was right there to take advantage of it. I was living on unemployment benefit at the time and, if I'd had more money, I would probably have gone for DVD as well and the tragedy of that is that I would never have known what I had missed.

These days, DVDs are in the charity shops and they've never managed to capture my heart the way VHS did. The black screen, the glow of the CRT, the whirr of the VCR, the copyright, advertising and trailer reel, the warm analogue sound and finally the movie - they were all part of the experience. One thing I don't get is that lots of people want to listen to music on vinyl these days yet no one wants to watch movies the old fashioned way. What's with that?

 

[TJPC]

I found both DVDs and CDs so overwhelmingly better, that I could not get rid of VHS tapes and LPs fast enough. I had an indecently vast collection of both, so it took me years to replace or dub them on to disc if they were not available in the new format.

I actually have vivid memories of finally getting rid of the last few.

 

[Dick]

Collecting movies (some would say hoarding them) represents a deep-seeded desire as a child in the 60's to own copies of movies to run at my own leisure, if possible in a home theater venue. In those days, of course, if you missed a film at the theater, you wouldn't be likely to see it again until maybe it showed up on network t.v. or local channel like WOR-TV, often cut, but always panned-and-scanned (unless they were pre-1952) and with intrusive commercial breaks. Castle Films were expensive (exactly $4.17 at Masters Discount Center in Elmsford, NY in my day), but I began collecting those when I had a fiver to spend from mowing our yard and field. When VHS came out, I, like most of us here, was ecstatic. Full-length features with no commercials! Then laser and CED discs, at which point my tapes went bye-bye. Hello to DVD...And we all know the rest. That stubborn subconscious need to assure I have copies of movies I like that I can watch anytime forever has made me into the owner of 4,200 discs, most of them Blu-ray, 200 of them 3D. I'm an old dog and don't care to stream movies, which is why I now rebel against Netflix by cancelling my subscription (boy, that's gotta hurt 'em!). It seems insane on the one hand, even to me, but collecting movies has been more of an avocation for me than a hobby, and I love having them all on my shelves.

 

[Alan Tully]

I found both DVDs and CDs so overwhelmingly better, that I could not get rid of VHS tapes and LPs fast enough. I had an indecently vast collection of both, so it took me years to replace or dub them on to disc if they were not available in the new format.

Yup, I got shot of all my LPs (& I still love CDs), but I wish I'd kept some of them, for the covers really, they look great framed on the wall. For me, there's still about a dozen LPs that have yet to make it to CD, mostly classical, maybe a few of them will make it before it's too late.

 

[TJPC]

I played all the rate LPs into the computer, made wave files, depopped them, burned them on to CD-Rs and then sold them.

 

[Mysto]

VHS and Beta tapes were wonderful. Why? Because for the first time in history we took some of the control away from movie and tv studios. Before that you pretty much had to go to the show or turn on a the correct time and day to see what you wanted. Now you could buy - or tape delay your choices. It was the start of a major shift that continues today with current delivery methods.

Let's not forget Cartrivision. This was the first system that allowed you to buy movies in 1972. Before that the only format you had was film.

 

[TJPC]

I had 1000s of VHS tapes I bought or made myself. As I mentioned above, when I switched to DVD, I replaced what I could, and dubbed the unobtainable (Hollywood Series) on to discs myself.

All these tapes had been kept in air conditioning and never abused. What was sobering, was the amount which would not play. The tape itself in all cases was fine. What was broken often was something in the inside mechanism of the tape cases. I would break the tape out of glued cases, and put them into a case that screwed together for one last play.

(Someday I’ll write about dubbing my audio cassettes to CD and the dreaded brand called BASF with its crumbling sponge pads inside!)

 

[cineMANIAC]

I played all the rate LPs into the computer, made wave files, depopped them, burned them on to CD-Rs and then sold them.

I'm about to embark on a similar project soon. Actually, I've been putting it off for several years because the task seems terribly daunting. I've watched a handful of youtube how-to videos and it seems fairly simple and straightforward but that's for people who are knowledgeable about computers - I'm far from it. I know how to turn a computer on and get online but that's about it. Maybe this is the year I'll finally do it.