There was no farewell for videotapes. No grand gesture, no celebrations, no paying respects or giving thanks; as soon as DVD emerged in 1996, tape’s days were numbered, and the only thing allowing any stay of execution was prohibitively high retail prices for both players and DVD’s themselves. Hollywood was also relatively cautious about putting excessive pressure on their audience, having witnessed the protracted and messy switch from vinyl to compact disc made by the music industry in the late-1980s. By 1996, people weren’t just frequenting video rental stores, they were building their own collections, with commercial videotapes finally “priced to own”—you see this phrase in so much home video advertising, and while I do remember it floating in the air—just like the particular quality of the announcer’s voice as he introduces a stack of trailers with “Coming soon to theaters!” Or “Now available on home video and DVD!” The final decade of VHS was “priced to own;” up to that point, most videotapes were prohibitively expensive. You could buy VHS and Betamax tapes for private use in the late-1970s and early-1980s, but only if you were willing to spend between $75 and $100. This was true until the early-1990s, when studios began releasing blockbusters like Batman and Top Gun in massive first runs, all “priced to own.” The film industry encouraged people to begin building their own little libraries—twice.
It worked! By the year 2000, the DVD was the most rapidly adopted consumer technology in history. Never before had the public taken to something so quick and without resistance; the compact disc had obvious advantages over vinyl (mostly space, both on the disc and the disc itself; you can fit 80 minutes onto a standard CD, as opposed to around 40 minutes on an LP, and the dimensions of the CD made shipping, storage, and display cheaper and more convenient), and competing home video formats like Betamax and LaserDisc flamed out fairly quickly. The quality of a LaserDisc was slightly higher than DVD, but they were expensive and unwieldy next to the handy videotape, which endeared itself to people in ways that discs and even albums never managed. Videotapes became a part of the culture, a byword, as integrated into lives and conversations as much as the telephone. Just as the outline of a rotary phone remains in every smartphone, the word “tape,” as in “to record,” is still in regular use, though declining. It only took 20 years.
What does “Be Kind, Rewind” mean to someone under the age of 40? It’s certainly closer to the surface than “See you in the next reel,” or, “This is where we came in,” which has shed its original context despite sticking around as a familiar phrase. Even past Psycho in 1960, when Alfred Hitchcock insisted that movie theaters prohibit their patrons from entering his film any later than 15 minutes in, people still went to the movies whenever they felt like it, happy to “come in” during the middle and stay for what they missed at the beginning. “This is where we came in” is a cue to leave, as opposed to its current usage, which invariably involves beginning or continuing on with something. The only quirk of the DVD to survive in the lexicon is the “Easter egg,” a relic of an era when studios put more effort into premium home video formats than the films themselves: click up on your remote twice, then left three times, then down once, then up two more times, and you’ll get a three minute interview with Blake Edwards talking about his lovely wife Julie Andrews. At least that’s the kind of Easter egg you got on the Victor/Victoria DVD.
By 2002, a year before DVD sales over VHS for the first time, tapes were already prostituting for their replacement: the first thing you see when you put in a tape of American Pie 2 is a commercial for the DVD of American Pie 2. Tapes made even earlier in the late-1990s and 2000s have ads not for specific films but simply DVD’s themselves, where picture is “BIGGER,” sound is “BRIGHTER,” and you can watch it in WIDESCREEN, and in DIFFERENT LANGUAGES, with DIRECTOR’S COMMENTARY, and OTHER BONUS FEATURES! There are price comparisons, with affordable players displayed alongside a scroll of “classic titles” already available and ready to own. VHS has endured because of the culture it created, not the format itself, which most agree is inferior to DVD and Blu-Ray in just about every respect. You’d have to go to Quentin Tarantino to get a spirited, sensible defense of tapes over discs: “You can take a hammer to a VHS tape.” He also spent the first half of the decade waxing rhapsodic about the warm, saturated look of a quality videotape; when one particularly tickled him, he said he “could smell the emulsion.”
I really had no idea what he was talking about. I understood that some tapes were sourced from release prints rather than some other lower generational copy, but that’s true of many DVD’s and Blu-Rays. It wasn’t until I looked at Six Days, Seven Nights cropped from 2:35 widescreen to 1:33 that I saw the light. It’s not a superior format, but there’s something endearing about tapes in an age of instant, invisible downloads and streams. The one advantage tapes have over discs, their size, is also one of their most cited drawbacks. Tapes are a bitch to move, and you can shelve and store far more DVD’s and Blu-Ray’s in the same amount of space than tapes. But with a shelf of tapes, you notice the spines bulging, a little louder and prouder than DVD spines, often hard or impossible to read; when you have a tape collection, the movies simply take up more physical space, and they’re that much more a part of your life. A shelf of tapes used to be something to show off, a picture of your personality and taste. DVD’s and Blu-Ray’s, less so: God, are these video games? Hmm. Oh, no. Just DVD’s… Not that anyone had time to build solid DVD and Blu-Ray collections: DVD sales peaked in 2004, and Blu-Ray, introduced in 2006, was able to snuff out competitor HD-DVD before plateauing, never gaining widespread support but kept alive by main manufacturer Sony and their precious PlayStations. I can’t get too frustrated with video games and the adults who play them: the PS3 might be the reason the world has high definition discs of thousands of films.
—Follow Nicky Otis Smith on Twitter: @NARCFILM