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Earlier this week we had a rather wistful experience. One of our all-time favorite Christmas movies is Remember the Night, written by Preston Sturges and starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck. We were anxious to see it again but unfortunately it's never been released on DVD. Luckily Specialty Video still rents out tapes, and amazingly they carry it. We happily brought the box to the counter and handed it to the clerk. He looked at it quizzically and said, "You know this is VHS, right?"
The truth is that VHS is dead, nothwithstanding Be Kind Rewind. The last major supplier, Distribution Video Audio, is abandoning the format, declaring that this is the last Christmas they'll be handling the tapes. The company's president Ryan Kugler says, "I was the last one buying VHS and the last one selling it, and I'm done. Anything left in warehouse we'll just give away or throw away." The History of Violence was the last Hollywood movie to get a VHS release, and that was in 2006. Since then distributors like Kugler have been buying up remainders and overstocks to resell at bargain chains like Dollar Tree, Dollar General and Family Dollar. But now it's all coming to an end. In fact earlier this year, JVC, who introduced the format in 1977, said that it is discontinuing its stand-alone VCRs.
We're certainly glad that DVD came along, yet there are several hundred movies that are still only available as out-of-print VHS tapes (some of them are listed here). One of our favorite movies, Diary of a Mad Housewife, is among them; a VHS copy is going for $25 on EBay. If you're looking for something that's out of print or hard to find head over to Odd Obsession (you can search their database here) or Facets.
If we had to hazard a guess we'd predict that neither DVD nor even the newer Blu-ray are long for this world either. We're betting that in the not too distant future we'll be streaming everything online directly to our TVs, bringing us one step closer to living in a David Foster Wallace novel.
photo by The Joy Of The Mundane
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Infinite Jest is the best and most challenging novels that I have ever read. I mark it as one of my best literary accomplishments. I wonder if Chicago has thought about subsidizing the year - "Year of the Whopper". Could raise some much needed loot.
Another misleading article.
Only prerecorded VHS tapes are going away.
Those of us who refuse to pay TIVO for a subscription will continue to use our machines until they die.
You can still buy blank tapes.
And that distributor is an idiot if he throws the unsold tapes into a landfill!
They could be sold as cheap blank tapes. I use all sorts of prerecorded tapes as blanks. All it takes is a piece of tape to cover the hole where the tab to prevent recording over something important is.
I make "Junk" tapes. They are videocassettes of my trappings of pop culture via television. Music videos, documentaries, stand-up bits, news, interviews, talk show appearances, etc. I started doing this during grade school back in 1987, and I continue to this day. I believe I am presently on my seventy-something Junk tape.
I am confident that I can continue to go to Walgreens to buy blank tapes for years and years to come. Not to mention that VCR/DVD combo players are still readily available at Best Buy for about $50.