Andy Sullivan: Against the Grain

Thu, 04/13/2023 - 8:00am — Diane Dyer

Picture this, it’s 7 pm on a Sunday in 1985. Knight Ridder is on NBC but Murder, She Wrote is about to start on CBS. 2/3 of American households will have to make an impossible choice: David Hasselhoff or Angela Lansbury, The remaining third will be watching both. How? There was no such thing as a DVR in the ‘80’s. The VCR, of course! When they first came on the scene, however, not everyone was a fan. Motion picture director Jack Valenti, however, was not a fan. “The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is to the woman home alone”.

In the 1950’s, companies were trying to crack the storage code. The thinking was, “if you could record audio on magnetic tape, why not video”? A company called AmPex figured out that instead of moving tape around heads at ridiculous speeds, the heads themselves should spin. AmPex introduced the Mark 4 in 1956. The device, however, was the size of a desk. It also cost $50,000($500,000 in today’s dollars). That’s not exactly an affordable gift. The Cartrivision, debuting in 1972, was one of the first practical home recorders. They used 8-inch plastic cartridges inserted into a compartment to record shows. The blank tapes were about $15 for fifteen minutes of recording time. Cartrivision dodn’t take off. Along with the obscene price, you needed two hands to program a recording(one to press the button and one to hold the knob). And when it did work, the picture quality was poor. By 1973, Cartrivision was done. You had to basically buy an entire tv just to get the recorder.

The You-matic was developed in concert between Sony and JVC with Matsushita-now known as Panasonic) in 1971. There were problems. The You-matic weighed 59.5 lbs, about the same as an 8 year-old. Second, the cost. The You-matic went for about $2,000(that’s $13,000 today). The system went away because people were more apt to buy, oh I don’t know, a car for that same price back then. Sony felt they should limit the size of the tapes. JVC did not. Shizuo Takano, GM of Products division at JVC, didn’t want tapes of different sizes and length. It would only confuse consumers. He wanted a worldwide standard. He knew it would take years for people to develop the technology. He even compared it to the steady growth of a banzai tree. He also knew he needed to cooperate with other electronic companies to get more tapes in more hands. After a year of discussing tape size, JVC and Sony realized they couldn’t come to terms and went their separate ways. This set a war between Sony’s Beta-Max and JVC’s Video Home System, better known as VHS.

Selling VHS tapes became lucrative, and not just for stores like Wal-Mart. McDonalds got into selling videotapes in 1992. Yes, THAT McDonalds. “Dances With Wolves, Babes In Toyland and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels sold for $7.99 each in 9,000 restaurants. Even though MacDonalds only offered the movies for 2 months during the holiday season, they sold 10 million tapes. That made them the 3^rd-largest seller of videocassettes that year, behind Walmart and K-Mart but ahead of Blockbuster Video. Even though Jack Valenti dismissed VCR’s as a “parasitical instrument”, they wound up being very good to studios. By the 1990’s half of all studio revenue was from the home video market. However, there was a big change. Once people had VCR’s in their homes for years, the novelty started to wear off and rentals experienced a decline. Videos kept pushing titles like Batman, which sold 13 million copies, and rushed to release them outside of the holiday buying season. But the days of coming out of a video store with an armful of rentals were history. All told, the format survived about 20 years before DVD’s began encroaching in 1996. DVD’s offered better resolution in a smaller, more attractive disc format. Not even something called D Theatre, which offered a high-definition picture on VHS tape, could turn the tide. For its part, Sony had finally thrown in the towel and started manufacturing VHS VCR’s in 1988 although they kept making Beta Max machines through 2002 and Beta Maz tapes through 2016. Funai Electric made was reportedly the last VHS VCR in 2016, putting a bookend on an era that began with an argument over tape sizes. Even though we have thousands of movies at our fingertips that can stream immediately in high-definition, VCR’s aren’t totally obsolete. Horror movie fans have found that obscure titles are found only on VHS, and have been known to pay a premium for vintage copies. Others are nostalgic for the days we wandered through video stores enticed by clamshell cases that promised action, comedy, thrills and romance. Maybe you’d pick up something you never thought you’d watch. Maybe you’d meet someone special in the new releases section. That one reminds me of the Friends episode where Monica ran into Richard at the video store. Head to www.mentalfloss.com for interesting videos every Wednesday and interesting articles daily. Check the links below for my podcast, Blendertainment