Shamefully, I don't look at my VHS collection that much anymore. Aside from a brief return to taping movies on TCM and the occasional Horror Fest cameo, the VHS function on my DVD/VHS machine doesn't get much use. The tapes have been sitting in the remains of an entertainment center-cum-bookshelf, and I just don't give much thought to them.
The reason this is a shame is because without those tapes I wouldn't have the foundation of cinematic geekery the Cap'n draws upon. Packing up those tapes today reminded me that not only did I tape a significant amount of X-Files, MST3K, and The Twilight Zone, but I also learned to appreciate film history in the best possible way: trial and error.
While I can't advocate film piracy or copying tapes or any of that jazz, in my younger, dumber, days, I would copy the shit out of some movies from Carbonated Video. Unlike many video stores, they didn't put scrambling signals into their tapes, so you could straight up copy a movie if you had two vcrs. I should feel worse about this than I do, but the honest truth is that I rented so many movies from that store and gave them so much business that it must have offset the copies.
It's not like I copied stuff and then didn't rent anything else. I would - quite literally - rent three or four movies at a time, make copies of them, and then rent four more. If it was summer, I did this all the time. I burned through their "twenty rentals for twenty bucks" or whatever it was in two to three weeks. In that time, I had lots of exposure to movies I would never have rented otherwise, and the tapes reflect it. Some of the tapes are embarassingly bad; others are just amusing.
For some reason, I rarely went by "theme"; I'd just rent four movies that looked interesting, get a six (and later, eight) hour SLP tape, and put them together. It's how you end up with tapes that have the following combination:
The Postman
Spice World
The Lost Boys
The Untouchables
So the upside is that I have The Lost Boys and The Untouchables. Unfortunately, they're the second half of a craptacular 8 hour tape. Admittedly, it's not as bad as the tape where I had to fast forward through The Island of Dr. Moreau and Shock Treatment to get to Edward Scissorhands, but what I love is that I rented indiscriminately. I don't rent like that anymore, so that willingness to try out just about anything and keep it on tape makes me chuckle. I'd end up with random stuff like Beavis and Butthead Do America, Ghostbusters, Animal House and Die Hard on one tape. Three comedies and... Die Hard. Beats me.
Those years taught me what I did and didn't like, what I gravitated towards, and helped lay the foundation for what I looked towards when I got older. Looking back at the tapes is like looking at other juvenalia: you can see where you were heading, warts and all.
I had originally considered giving these tapes away on the Free Shelf at work, but I think there's some value in having keeping my "sequel" tape of Halloween II, Dawn of the Dead, and From Dusk Til Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money (or whatever it's called. the tape is in a box now). If I'm willing to embrace the dead format of HD-DVD, I can keep giving those tapes a shot. They teach me a lot about where I've been and where I'm going in film studies.
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