A VHS collection is like a window to the soul. Photo / 123rf
Word on the street, or at least the internet, is that VHS tapes are making a comeback.
I know. Of all the things to resurface from the 80s and 90s, it is not Hammer pants, dial-up internet or slap bracelets.
No, it is those clunky black rectangles that used to live beside the telly, or stacked in a bookshelf next to the Woman’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book (a home library must).
They usually had a faint layer of dust and a spine label crossed out in biro, now reading: MAGIC SHOW??
Careful, that could actually be Mum and Dad’s late-night “nature documentary”.
Apparently, Gen Z have discovered them, probably in an op shop while rummaging for something authentic, ironic, and tragically impractical.
Which means at some point, a teenager has looked at a VHS and thought, “Yes, this is the aesthetic I am after”.
Maybe it is the grainy picture that has lured them in, the way seagulls can’t resist a hot chip and hipsters love a typewriter.
But for those of us who never actually got rid of our tapes, we still have a perfectly good player (somewhere in the garage next to the Blackberry phone charger collection) and half a dozen episodes of McLeod’s Daughters that never made it to streaming.
Also Country Calendar: The Best of 1993.
Irreplaceable, even if the start was taped over with Duncan and Rebecca’s wedding.
Your VHS shelf was basically a personality test long before Buzzfeed.
Action movies stacked to the ceiling? You were the adrenaline junkie.
Disney sing-alongs lined up neatly? Closet romantic.
A suspicious number of exercise tapes? Either you were into aerobics or you just liked watching people in lycra jump around, and why so many teenage boys had Aerobics Oz Style will always be a mystery.
And there was an art to watching VHS. The little whirr when you pushed the tape in. That moment of panic when it did not load right away, and you thought you would be pulling black tape out of the machine like pasta from a pasta maker.
Then the screen would flicker to life, and you would get straight into the action.
Unless, of course, someone had left it halfway through.
People talk about how convenient things are now. One click and you are watching whatever you want.
But that is the problem? It is too easy. Too fast.
With VHS, you had to choose carefully.
You could not scroll for 45 minutes, then give up and watch something you had already seen.
You picked a tape, crossed your fingers, and hoped it still worked.
These days, we burn more time deciding what to stream than actually watching anything.
At least with VHS, your choice was limited, and limits were strangely liberating.
And once you had a tape in the machine, you committed.
Because let’s be honest, nobody could be bothered getting up and crossing the lounge just to swap it out.
But the real gold of VHS, and something impossible to replicate if you are buying old tapes off the internet, was the humble video shop.
Friday night at the video shop was an event.
You would circle the aisles like a shark on the hunt. And if the new release wall was empty, you settled for Crocodile Dundee II. Again. (Spoiler: he still thinks that is a knife.)
Now, apparently, new VHS releases are being made.
Indie filmmakers are putting out limited runs. Which sounds less like nostalgia and more like a marketing gimmick for people who also brew their own kombucha.
And really, if your film is not better than Die Hard, maybe keep it as a movie that goes straight to digital. Skip the cinema and skip the VHS tape.
But if VHS really is making a comeback, we need to do it right.
Authentic. I am talking CRT TVs, popcorn in a giant Tupperware bowl, and that classic video piracy ad asking … “Would You Steal a Car?”
What most people have yet to discover is that the music for the anti-piracy campaign was actually pirated from a Dutch musician named Melchior Reitveldt.
Will VHS really come back? Probably not.
But we can still reminisce about the days of no buffering. No log-ins. No algorithm telling you what to watch next.
Just a tape, a screen, and a remote with the back missing and two bits of masking tape keeping the batteries in.