Posted
by Joel Mathis
January 31, 2005 at 12:43 p.m.
Kicking and screaming
Goodbye, "You Got Served."So long, "Elvira's Haunted Hills."Au revoir, "The Santa Clause," and "The Santa Clause 2."You're fat. You're clunky. You're old. Just like all the rest of your brethren on VHS. That's so 20th century. DVDs are where it's at these days.And so it was with a heavy heart that my friend Doug Redding, manager of Liberty Hall Video, found himself last week thinning out the store's inventory of videotapes to make way for discs, the final step in a gradual but inexorable conversion to the new technology."I'm not going to get rid of them, because I can't," Redding said of the tapes - and here his voice went up an octave. "I can't."Instead, he'll store the tapes - probably 300 or so - in the building's attic or basement. If anybody comes in looking for the movies on videotape, he said, he'll ask them for an hour or a day to go hunting."I don't think everyone's thrown out their VHS player," Redding told me. "It might be a little bit of a Hail Mary, but there are some titles that aren't on DVD that people might want to watch."I have to admit, I didn't quite get his attachment to VHS. After all, DVDs have been a boon to movie lovers: They're crisper and clearer to watch than the tapes, plus they have the space for commentaries, deleted scenes and other features that cinephiles can feast upon. Besides, the big video chains long ago made the decision to offer mainly DVDs to their rental customers."I'm going to miss the fact that they're sturdy. You have to be quite negligent or quite malicious to destroy a videotape," Redding said. DVDs, he said, are "more fragile."Nostalgia also plays a role. Redding has worked at Liberty Hall, off and on, since 1991. He remembers when many of the tapes first came in, nearly 3,000 when the collection was at its largest. Now the store has nearly 1,500 DVDs."I guess what I'll miss is, I know a lot of these titles," he said.Redding hasn't been plucking tapes off the shelf willy-nilly. He's tried to find movies that the store already owns on DVD, or tapes that haven't been rented very often.On the other hand, Liberty Hall's VHS copy of "Ben Hur" has only been rented 11 times since 1999."I don't know if I can get rid of 'Ben Hur,'" Redding said.While we were talking, Jerald Hopkins came in to rent a quartet of obscure movies on tape - "Maya Deren Experimental Films" was the label on one box. Hopkins has been holding out against buying a DVD player."Obviously the market is going that way," he said. "I feel I'm going to have to get one soon."Redding said some videotapes will remain on the store's shelves."We want to be the last place on the planet with VHS," he said.And he's worried that as soon as consumers get comfortable with DVDs, another technology will come along to take its place. He doesn't want to go through another conversion."Keeping up with the Joneses," Redding said. "That's sick."
Comments
Lawrence.com does not necessarily agree with comments posted below - responsibility lies with the relevant user alone. Read our full policy.
murderama (Rob Gillaspie) says…
What? has the Cult section been completely thinned out, too? That was the best area of ANY local video store!! say it ain't so!!!
Joel (Joel Mathis) says…
It probably isn't so, but I didn't look to see what they'd done in the cult section. Like I said, there will still be some VHS on the shelves -- probably the specialty stuff like what yer talking about.
squishypoet (anonymous) says…
I understand the need to appease the masses by converting to new technology, but even I can't bring myself to throw out my VHS tapes. It seems redundant and wasteful to purchase the same films on DVD when the tapes are still perfectly good. I love renting videos at Dillons because they have all sorts of older 80's and 90's films on VHS that are far down the list of movies to convert to DVD. Then again, I adamantly stated that cassette tapes were superior to CD's back when those were changing over, despite all the evidence to the contrary, and eventually I realized I was being silly. I just know my kids will laugh at me one day for being familiar with such ancient things as VCR's and cassette players, just as my generation smiles at the talk of 8-tracks and record players.
Joel (Joel Mathis) says…
Uh, squishypoet: Your profile says you were born in 1986. Assuming you waited until, say, 5 years old to begin your music collection, how did you ever have casette tapes instead of DVDs?
Or is your profile birthdate a dirty, dirty lie? ; )
OtherJoel (anonymous) says…
I have wholeheartedly embraced the DVD. And the trend towards putting old TV shows on DVD is a really fun waste of money, I find. I used to make compilation tapes of certain shows in high school and college: Kids In the Hall, Monty Python's Flying Circus (they were on A&E -- I'm not THAT old), X-Files, Twin Peaks, Space Ghost (back when it was funny). Now that those tapes are wearing out, I have been working on replacing them with the DVD versions, and I have to say that I don't miss the tapes one bit. It gets a little old (and is hard on the tapes) constantly rewinding and fast-forwarding to find the episode you want, and some of them have commercials (which can be somewhat entertaining as the years go by). Plus the bonus features are usually worthwhile.
With the cassette/CD debate -- cassettes sucked. I had a bad habit of spilling Coke on my tapes. When that happens, your're done -- especially if you don't notice the spill and pop it into the tape deck. CDs are washable, and you can use car wax on them if you scratch them up too bad. I do have a bit of nostalgia for vinyl, however. Anything recorded before 1990 sounds far better on the vinyl version, I think, than any CD remastering job.