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With modern eyes we now see them as ugly, primitive-looking things affiliated with old plastic cassette tapes and perhaps somewhat related to those equally-redundant computer floppy discs. How quickly technology has progressed from the days when having variable fast-forward and rewind speeds (fast, double fast, Triple Fast!) on VCRs warranted praise and worship, and how stubborn I was when DVDs first came out, adamantly insisting that I would never (ever) convert, clinging desperately onto my collection of VHS movies with their inconsistently-sized and ripped cardboard covers and maintaining passionately that being able to record from TV was a basic human right. And indeed, by not making recording a standard feature on DVD players haven’t we all turned into JB Hi-Fi bargain pile-raiding uber-consumers, needing to own entire series of shows and collector’s editions of movies when we could have easily taped them for free?

Well anyway, before I allow the nostalgia to forever be replaced by the progress of DVD and Blu-Ray user-friendliness, here are several of my fondest childhood and adolescent memories of VHS.

- Frequently getting the tape – the actual black/brown physical tape – caught inside the VCR and needing to manually wind it back in with a kitchen utensil that would fit (usually the handle end of an egg beater) after pressing that little square button to open up the latch to straighten out the crumples.

- Memorising the times of certain favourite scenes of movies, e.g. 1:10:05, and playing a game where I’d rewind or fast-forward to as close as possible to that exact timepoint, taking into account the slow-down speed of my fast-running VCR and trying to estimate how long before or after that point I would have to press Stop.

- Pressing Pause and seeing the image stretch and struggle on old CRT TVs, hoping the tape wouldn’t burn or melt on the hot metal VCR heads after leaving it for too long.

- Getting fined at the video store for not rewinding movies upon their return and watching the staff at Video Ezy and Civic Video utilise those sports car VHS rewinder machines, objects made specifically for rewinding purposes. Oh, how those rewinder manufacturing companies would have shaken their fists in anger during the DVD takeover.

- VCR head cleaner solution and the awful smell of alcohol, needing to wait an hour for it to dry in order for your video to be watchable. Hiring ‘The Specialist’, starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas and Sharon Stone (which constituted an all-star-cast back in the 90s) and having the tape snap inside the player when I was too eager to watch it after cleaning, and then making up a story at the Video Ezy saying that the tape itself had screwed up my player and getting a Free Hire voucher in return. I still feel guilty about that (but hey, free movie), and apologise for the bad taste in films.

- Those useless, generic stickers that came on a strip with every blank tape, with the little letters of the alphabet, the ones displaying the length of the tape, 90, 180, 240, 300 minutes, whether the mode was LP or SP, and various label stickers of different sizes and shapes for placement all over every edge of the tape. These stickers were all so very pointless, but I enjoyed making patterns out of them before realising that some of them peeled off inside the VCR upon pressing Eject, no doubt further contributing to the potential fire hazard of the device.

- SP vs LP recording. Taping football matches, including the football World Cups of 1998 and 2002 in their entirety on LP 300-minute videos (which meant a massive 10+ hours of terrible quality), with a gigantic stack of videos. All labeled and covered garishly with those aforementioned useless stickers.

- Taping over previous recordings and seeing their long-forgotten remnants lingering around either behind the image of the  most current recording – etched into the tape like an image burnt into one’s retinas, my favourite being old Disney cartoons hanging about as the background to a Schwarzenegger movie – or watching them reappear after a short period of static at the very end of the tape, usually consisting of old TV shows and ads with antiquated channel logos and bad hairstyles and fashion.

- Having tapes get stuck in an old, malfunctioning VCR, and needing to ‘trick it’ into allowing the ejection to take place by unplugging the power cable, plugging it back in, turning the VCR on and quickly pushing against the stuck tape to force the annoying thing out. Luckily no electrocutions ever occurred during this process.

- Eventually upgrading to a good quality VCR with a dial that allowed you to watch scenes frame-by-frame, especially useful for bone-crunching football tackle analysis in slow-mo and reviewing in awe the shattering of the T-1000 in Terminator 2. There really was something special about watching those paused, overworked images covered in tape static on the TV screen and hearing the groans of the VCR motors with each and every frame advancement and reversal.

- Before the advent of subtitles in DVDs, incorrectly guessing movie quotes due to bad accents/acting commonly found in Jean Claude Van-Damme, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Sylvester Stallone movies. Having never had the desire to repurchase Universal Soldier on DVD, I still to this day do not know what JCVD was saying at the end after the fight with Dolph Lundgren – “Ironed?” “I wronged?” “I ronned [sic]?” “Eire rammed?” None of my guesses ever made any sense in the context of that scene, but then again, what was I thinking watching that rubbish in the first place anyway?

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Got any other stories? I’d love to hear about your own personal favourite VHS memories =)

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