Nostalgic for video stores yet?

[Splitty]

Had close to 1,000 at one time.

OMG you have Ben!! That puppy's hard to find. errr, I mean rat.

I love love love cheesy 80s horror or martial arts flicks. I try to only collect ones with no DVD release, but when I'm out G-saleing I have no way to check. Sadly all of our local actual VHS carrying stores have dropped off like flies.

I used to work at a cheap Video Store chain (that folded in a few years) in the 90s hey day. It was a golden age of fun. Us employees used to get into shenanigans, relentlessly made fun of customers behind their backs, and poked around in their renting history (good way to tell if someone was date-worthy). I almost feel bad.

I picked up some handy skills too! I can now completely take apart and splice VHS tapes. And take apart VCR's and extract tangled tapes.

I wish I could say that skill came in handy today.

[mazinz]

I miss that musty odor I'd smell as I browsed the horror section. In the early 2000s when they were either going out of business or making futile attempts switch over to DVD, I built a pretty big collection of horror VHS. It's a shame I did not have the money nor the foresight to buy them ALL out. Because some of those old horror VHS tapes are worth a LOT of dough and I got back into the not long ago.

But oddly enough, VHS is getting harder to find. It seems not even the flea market sellers are even bothering to try and sell them.

Nice collection you have there! What I have been noticing is sellers completely jack knifing the prices on most of these tapes, especially any cult titles that came in a big box. While just a few years back you could score most of them for under 30 (don't be afraid of the dark being one exception to that rule)

I too acquired most in these later years. The Mom and Pop store by me STILL has vhs on the shelf to rent and the owner gave me the key to the kingdom to buy whatever the hell I wanted and was given access to their no longer renting basement. I would honestly say I spent over $2000.00 within these last 3 years because he has been trying to close the store for just as long

Mazinz, great looking collection there. I too collect VHS. I am jealous, would love to get my hands on a copy of Nocturna or any of the old Meda releases.

Thanks for the heads up on the Nail Gun Massacre VHS/DVD combo and Sleeper, I didn't know about those. I bought the House of the Devil from Diabolik, and now I will have to get the other two as well.

You're welcome-- Oh about the Sleeper- the film is pretty bad and essentially a rip off of the 1970's Black Christmas. So if you do get the combo box be sure to WATCH the vhs version. The dvd version has a clean and polished film and it hurts the throw back feel they wanted to achieve. The vhs version was made with actual analog noise, color bleed, pan/scan etc and this in turn helped out the film tremendously. This version is not on the dvd

[cjefferys]

I used to work at a cheap Video Store chain (that folded in a few years) in the 90s hey day. It was a golden age of fun. Us employees used to get into shenanigans, relentlessly made fun of customers behind their backs, and poked around in their renting history (good way to tell if someone was date-worthy). I almost feel bad.

I picked up some handy skills too! I can now completely take apart and splice VHS tapes. And take apart VCR's and extract tangled tapes.

That sounds familiar. And yeah, we had to take apart plenty of tapes to repair them. We had a neat little video tape splicer that did a great job. With rental tapes costing us almost $100 each, we kept those tapes in circulation as long as we could, no matter how many times we had to splice them back together. And it was always fun when someone sheepishly brought in their whole VCR with the rental tape stuck inside. I got pretty good at taking VCRs apart to remove the stuck tapes.

[samurainoir]

I'll have to go through my VHS tapes in storage. I only got rid of my piles of taped off of LD or duped tapes recently as a compromise, but given that you did pay much more back n the day for VHS, than what most DVD's cost these days for what you assumed would be your lifetime movie collection, it is tough letting go. It'll be hard letting go of DVD soon as well.

One thing I had noticed last time checked, many of the oldest VHS tapes I owned were degraded in an alarming fashion anyways.

[Bruce Banner]

One thing I had noticed last time checked, many of the oldest VHS tapes I owned were degraded in an alarming fashion anyways.

Yeah, the degradation of VHS tapes is sadly inevitable.

With the passage of time, the magnetically encoded electronic information on a tape will deteriorate, and the magnetic iron particles will degrade and eventually rub off as a tape is played in a VCR.

Some recommend fast forwarding and rewinding your tapes periodically to maintain ideal tension and avoid build up of residue, while others recommend not doing that to avoid potentially stretching the tape.

There's a good article on magnetic tape maintenance here:
Ch35

[ctc]

>With the passage of time, the magnetically encoded electronic information on a tape will deteriorate, and the magnetic iron particles will degrade and eventually rub off as a tape is played in a VCR.

Yeah.... sometimes there are weird incompatabilities too. A lot of my oldest tapes have funky sound problems when I convert them to disk.

>others recommend not doing that to avoid potentially stretching the tape.

We used to do that before recording on blanks.

Don C.

[mazinz]

Yeah, the degradation of VHS tapes is sadly inevitable.

With the passage of time, the magnetically encoded electronic information on a tape will deteriorate, and the magnetic iron particles will degrade and eventually rub off as a tape is played in a VCR.

Some recommend fast forwarding and rewinding your tapes periodically to maintain ideal tension and avoid build up of residue, while others recommend not doing that to avoid potentially stretching the tape.

There's a good article on magnetic tape maintenance here:
Ch35

>With the passage of time, the magnetically encoded electronic information on a tape will deteriorate, and the magnetic iron particles will degrade and eventually rub off as a tape is played in a VCR.

Yeah.... sometimes there are weird incompatabilities too. A lot of my oldest tapes have funky sound problems when I convert them to disk.

>others recommend not doing that to avoid potentially stretching the tape.

We used to do that before recording on blanks.

Don C.

depending on where you live (climate) and how you store them as well as how often it was played, can also accelerate or slow down the aging process. I have some tapes (inc betamax) bordering on being 30 years old and still look and work fine

here is another pic for you:

[Gorn Captain]

I don't rent. My last rented DVD destroyed my player.
If the DVD isn't new, I don't want it near my new player, I don't care if it's the holy grails of "lost" movies...

I still have a pile of VHS tapes. Movies that I had a very hard time finding, back in the 80-90s, and I find it impossible to let go of these, even though I have them on DVD.

[HardyGirl]

Although I don't really rent anything anymore, I remember the 80s and early 90s when I was married, my hubby and I would go to the video store a couple of blocks away, and while were out, we'd get pizza or frozen yogurt. I remember when I first went into a Blockbuster Video store near my job. It was AMAZING! All these videos of every possible genre. And that's also when stuff from the 70s was easier to find. I remember once I went to a Blockbuster, and rented all the 70s Saturday morning stuff I could get my hands on, took it home and made Saturday morning videos from them. I still have those videos (the ones I made) today.

[ctc]

HAW!

You got "Brain 17!" I love that one! "Chief, I've got a plan! And it's a humdinger of a doozy!"

Don C.