Whose Golden Age Was This?

I Have a Library ... Maybe 4,000 Titles, says Video Enthusiast Martin Scorsese. This 1985
Ad Couldn't Be More Quaint If Marty Were Wearing Beads and a Nehru Jacket

Video Cassettes --- Now There's Extinct

Holy Cow --- Look At These Prices!

Belaboring the past weekend's topic about the very survival of old pix.

Home video was the first legitimate, mass-market way of owning movies. You could get chunks of them before on 8 or 16mm, even more-less complete back in Kodascope days, a pursuit limited to niche (and well-heeled) hobbyists. The first time I saw home video was in the mid-seventies, a recollection so dim as to question reality of it. Did I dream the woman who'd worked in a TV station and snuck out video recording equipment years before, just so she could capture episodes of Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea off ABC each week? Her archive, and OCD to surpass my own, foresaw home video years before anyone came to the concept, the reward a full run of Voyages with vintage commercials intact. Never mind bulky (and probably balky) tape that was an inch, three-quarter inch ... can't recall which ... and a recorder taking up half the lady's den. You had to be impressed by anyone who loved Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea enough to go through all this to have it.

Something They Had That We Don't --- Republic Serials on Legit Home Format

Remember How Lovely Vertigo Looked on VHS?

I disdained video for a long while because it wouldn't project. To have Beta or VHS wasn't "really" collecting. What was to brag about owning a cassette anyone could get? By late 1978, the bug had bit, though after chasing film fourteen years, it seemed steps down. Frankly, the romance of (collecting) celluloid had dimmed a little by then as well, even as I was years admitting that to myself. Plunge into VHS amounted more to resignation than commitment. Bigger fulfill might have come of being younger at the time, but there are finite seasons any of us have for maximal joy at any pursuit. For me, the peak was 1968-78, highs never quite so high afterward. Not that video wasn't fun, and certainly a novelty. For a first time, you could record off TV! If only I'd had this when Dr. Evil was showing Universal horror on late-night Channel 3 ...

The First Batch of Pre-48 Metros To Be Offered on VHS

My set-top monolith was from RCA, with piano-looking keys you had to push hard to get down. Myriad means were there to foul up, all of which I came round to. Blank tapes being scarce made each recording a decision judiciously arrived at. Memory suggests they cost $20, maybe a little more. You could squeeze just under 130 minutes on a cassette at standard play. First features I recorded were a Selznick quartet that CBS ran as weeknight Late Movies during 12/78 holidays, being The Spiral Staircase, Portrait Of Jennie, Rebecca, and Spellbound. These were network-played as opposed to syndication via an affiliate, so prints were 35mm and excellent. Rebecca gave suspense beyond story values for being 130 minutes on the nose with doubt as to whether one tape would hold it. I got to moments before the end title and fritz-out, OK despite that because this was Rebecca and now she was mine. I'd spent two-and-a-half hours pausing precise on commercial breaks and felt at an end as though Everest itself had been scaled.

Making The Club Scene, But Few Real Oldies Were Offered

Unless I'm Mistaken, The First Disney Classic Offered on VHS

There came local movies I'd stay up to wrangle. One was Treasure Of The Sierra Madre off Charlotte's Channel 36. They unspooled at 3 AM, so there went a night's sleep, but I'd be spared edits, this being late, late night. At 126 minutes, it would be a haul till dawn, but reward seemed equal to effort, this being, after all, a Golden Age for Classic Movies I was living in. What didn't reveal itself till too late was Channel 36's intent to stop the movie after two hours, a reel at least before the end. No finish nor promise of same at a later time. I sat with a useless tape of an incomplete feature, neither a first nor last letdown dealing with yokel broadcasts. A brighter dawn would break when American Movie Classics opened doors (10/1/84). A lot of us recorded old RKO titles from there because all were complete and uninterrupted, a welcome idea in movie presentation. Sometimes the Showtime network would license post-48 MGM's like The Bad and The Beautiful, also sans breaks and from 35mm source. Tapes recorded from these were for me as near to collectable as VHS could get.

Creative, or Obnoxious, 80's Video Marketing, But Maybe This Is
What It Took To Peddle Deep Libraries Thirty Years Ago

Ivan Would Be Less Terrible Once Corinth Color-Corrected It

Eventually the companies began putting stuff out, or sublicensing to small labels who would. An outfit called Nostalgia Merchant dealt King Kong, Citizen Kane, and others from RKO (sourced off 16mm). Their box art appealed, but movies cost $50 at least. Pricey tags slowed public acceptance for pre-records. There was a strange sort of photo kiosk in the center of a Gastonia, NC parking lot where they kept one VHS of Sunset Boulevard for $60. I'd slow down at the drop window and ask if the price had lowered, the teen clerk saying no, and left to ponder why I'd want it to begin with. Screwy were release choices made by distributors ... CBS Video or Gold Key or whoever the H was handling pre-48 Warners at the time floated Captain Blood on VHS, and OMG, it turns out to be the lost-since-1935 119 minute version! No fanfare, drumbeat ... nothing. Then there was Wild Orchids (1929) with Garbo among Metro "classics" at $25 or so a pop. Turns out to be the first to my knowledge release of a silent feature with an original music-and-effects score. Would miracles of video mass-marketing never cease?

RKO's Was Among First Vaulties To Come Into VHS/Beta Homes

There were video clubs you could join, like earler LP membership with minimum purchases per year. For every It Happened One Night offered, there'd be a dozen Norma Rae's. Frightful lore of record clubbing from the 60's (kids join, parents cancel) kept me from signing on. Came VHS releasing onslaught through the 80's and much of the 90's during which I stuck with 16 and even 35mm film, capitulation timed with a new century when DVD and projection TV made giving up celluloid viable at last. Now we can drop by a flea market and have Psycho for a quarter on VHS, or hit the landfill on a flush day and score it plus a thousand other cassettes for nothing. There is for me no sentiment coming across nests of them in a closet, other than faint regret I'd bought them in the first place. And yet a Castle Film on 8mm in its original box can bring tears to the eye (GPS has no footie pajama stories to tell about VHS). Was I too jaded by home video's arrival to properly engage the format, or allow it to engage me? There are surely those that hold dear a first cassette as gateway to a life loving film, and maybe they're the ones who will cry when flea marketers hand over Psycho and precious childhood for the bargain price of a quarter. Everything's got meaning for somebody. Are there ones out there for whom a choice VHS box would make the perfect gift?