A dinosaur. Perfect.
Variety, the Hollywood trade paper, saluted the format's trudge into oblivion with a snarky obit, noting that VHS "died of loneliness" and that it's "survived by a child, DVD, and by TiVo, VOD and DirecTV."
The passing of VHS is not exactly a news flash. Most video shops have long since erased tapes from their shelves. And good luck stuffing a cassette into one of those little red Netflix envelopes.
But the familiar, boxy tapes have been around so long - and endured such extended death throes - that it can be hard to remember what a craze VHS and its doomed archrival, Betamax, touched off when they dropped on pop culture.
Rewind your mind to a time when the simple ability to freeze a TV image seemed like some mystical video voodoo; when taping programs for later viewing was such a rush that users filled shelves with instantly ignored compilations of "Knight Rider"; when whole weekends were planned around acquiring a first-day copy of "Sixteen Candles" or "Flashdance."
The heady sense of control over the entertainment experience that the VCR offered - such a revelation then - is what ignited the home-video revolution. And it's what continues to drive pop-tech breakthroughs of today, from the endless extras and options on DVDs to the portability of video iPods to the bottomless promise of downloadable everything.
"For many, many people, video was - in its time - the new medium," says Deirdre Boyle, associate professor at The New School for General Studies in New York and author of "Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited," which chronicles the earliest days of video.
"And it had all the promises of democratic, egalitarian access that we now think about when we talk about the World Wide Web, the digital revolution."
Mark Palgy was so taken by the retro wonder of the pre-TiVo Era that he named his Louisville, Ky.-based band after a pressing question of the time: VHS or Beta?
It also struck him that the phrase gets at the transience of pop culture, since it's a question no one asks anymore, now that VHS and Beta are both relics.
"The thing about just having a movie in your house was really cool," says Palgy, who was born the same year as VHS. "Before that, I guess you just caught a movie on TV, or you had to go see a movie at the theater.
"Now, they don't even keep a movie in the theater longer than two weeks before it's out on DVD."
'BIG, CLUNKY AND EXPENSIVE'
"Watch what you want, when you want it," chirped the jingle for Video Library, a pioneering rental chain that launched in 1979 and grew to 43 stores before Blockbuster bought it out in 1988.
The slogan promised something so novel that figuring out how to follow the advice proved confounding for some first users.
"When I started, that whole first year we could not advertise 'VCR,' because nobody knew what that was," recalls Barry Rosenblatt, Video Library's founder. "We had to call them 'videocassette recorders.'
"And there was rarely a day that somebody didn't rent a cassette, call us up later and ask where to put (the tape) in their TV. It happened time after time."
Rosenblatt would gently advise the perplexed that they needed to have a VCR first.
Those initial machines, he recalls, were "big, clunky and expensive," and most early buyers wanted them for recording TV shows - what we now like to call time-shifting - since prerecorded movies barely existed.
His first shop opened with about 30 mainstream features, and about 90 adult titles - an indication of how strongly the adult-video segment drove the adoption of VCRs.
Adult movies also would play a pivotal role in the famous "tape wars" of the 1980s, a phenomenon that's being replayed today in the market battle between the rival Blu-ray and HD-DVD disc formats.
Sony launched Beta a year before JVC debuted VHS, and seemed to have the inside track, partly because its image quality was considered superior. For a while, rental stores carried copies of movies in both formats.
But when the adult business turned to almost exclusive VHS distribution, Beta faded quickly.
Guy Hanford, who co-owns the independent Kensington Video in San Diego, says his store still has a stock of about 800 Beta movies, which he sells for maybe 50 cents apiece to the occasional customer with a functioning Beta VCR.
Kensington Video, a neighborhood landmark that opened in 1986 and has long specialized in hard-to-find movies, is one of the few around town that still carries videocassettes.
As big outfits like Blockbuster have gone all-DVD, Hanford says he's actually seen business pick up for the store's VHS tapes.
"It's been a boon," says Hanford, who notes that the shop's 30,000 VHS titles represent about 25% of its rental business.
"It started about two years ago, when Blockbuster started abdicating videos completely. They got rid of videos that are impossible to find on DVD."
For the business in general, though, shedding VHS seems a sensible move. The Consumer Electronics Association, an industry trade group, estimates that only 310,000 VCRs will sell in the United States this year.
That's less than half the number that sold in 1980, when just 1% of Americans owned VCRs. (The figure grew to 95% in 2000, but has been dropping since.)
And in 1980, the average price for a VCR was $771. Today, it's plunged to just $52.
A single movie cost way more than that in VHS's heyday. Hanford remembers 1986's "Platoon" as being the first to break the $100 price barrier. Rosenblatt says a typical retail price was $79.95; those cost him $60 apiece wholesale, which made it hard to keep enough rental copies of popular movies on the shelves.
BE KIND, REWIND
It'd be hard to find anyone who's nostalgic about the prices and the scarcity and the long lines that were common at video shops in the 1980s.
But like any cultural movement, VHS leaves its own peculiar folklore as it recedes.
Who can forget that pesky 50-cent charge for failing to rewind one's rental movie? (Which spawned a cottage business in little gizmos that did nothing but rewind tapes.)
Shops lived and died on their reputation for enforcing the rule. Kensington Video never instituted it, but the failure to rewind "did drive us nuts."
Not a problem with DVD - although Hanford maintains he has more damage issues with discs than VHS tapes, because DVDs are mishandled and easily scratched.
Then there was the tracking control, which turned a fuzzy picture into a slightly less fuzzy picture - if you could make it work. ("We still have people who haven't figured out what their tracking control is for," Hanford says.)
There was the little tab that had to be pulled out so as not to accidentally tape over the home video of Johnny's bar mitzvah. And VCR Plus, which addressed confusion over how to program a VCR by introducing an entirely new breed of confusion over keying in long strings of numbers.
And while a VHS tape is a pretty stout device, it has a significant weakness: If one part of the cassette is played repeatedly, the picture starts to drop out, and the tape can even break.
Funny, Hanford could generally guess which parts of certain movies would be affected when they came in for repair.
"'Splash' - Daryl Hannah's heinie," he observes, referring to a scene in which Hannah's mermaid character becomes an unclad human. "Definitely Phoebe Cates' topless scene in 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High.' And 'Animal House' - John Belushi looking through the girl's window."
When pop-punk band FenixTX recorded an ode titled "Phoebe Cates" in 2001, it included the lyrics:
"I've been in love since the day I saw 'Fast Times'. It's on permanent rewind and can you guess my favorite part?"
Even with its glitches, one of the most powerful aspects of VHS was that it simplified and standardized the video medium like nothing before.
"From the standpoint of recording, it was a lot more foolproof," Boyle says. "Idiot-proof, in a sense. Also, it made it a much more stable platform for distribution."
"The cassette standard was very, very important because it made things more predictable."
At VHS' peak, video stores were so ubiquitous that even small towns could have five shops within a quarter-mile of each other, as tiny Ramona, Calif., did in 1985. Some 700 million movies were rented nationwide that year.
Rosenblatt remembers the mania around some of the biggest releases.
"'Star Wars,' definitely," he says. "We'd have special events, bring someone in costume as Darth Vader. People would line up like crazy."
"That would attract almost as many people as when we'd bring in Playboy's Playmate of the Year" - another promo gambit the company employed.
Boyle remembers the shops as being an integral part of a town or neighborhood's social scene.
"Soccer moms or singles on a Saturday night, browsing for videos and hooking up," is the picture she has in her mind.
"I'm certainly having a difficult time watching the video stores going out of business all around me," Boyle says. "It's not just the stores; it's the whole access to the culture.
"It was a place you could hang out. A lot of my students in the past would work their way through school at places like that," some of them becoming filmmakers eventually.
"I'm old-fashioned in wanting a social context," she adds. "And I think that's one of the things that does get lost. Not just the technology of VHS - but that sort of hitching post."
Rosenblatt, who has come out of retirement to start an audiobook-rental business, isn't sure the VHS craze can ever be duplicated. But he looks back upon it with both satisfaction and some amazement.
"It was quite a business," says Rosenblatt. "I feel proud I was involved in something that became so big.
"Now, when you say 'VCR,' people know what you're talking about."
SIDEBAR
VHS timeline
1975: The Sony Betamax goes on sale in the United States. The LV-1901 console, consisting of a VCR and a 19-inch television set, retails for $2,495.
1976: The Japanese electronics company JVC's "Video Home System" (originally called "Vertical Helical Scan") - or VHS - debuts at a price of $1,000.
1977: RCA begins selling the first VHS-based VCR in the United States.
1978: Magnavox releases its Magnavision videodisc player, along with "DiscoVision" movies on disks. The player sells for $695, while the 12-inch disks are $15.95.
1980: Household penetration of VCRs reaches 1%, on sales of 805,000 machines. The figure would reach 6% two years later, and about 30% by 1985.
1984: After years of "format wars," VHS achieves clear victory over Beta; 80% of VCRs manufactured are in the VHS format. The previous year, VHS machines already had outsold Betas 3-to-1.
1985: Walt Disney releases the first direct-to-video title, "Love Leads the Way" (on both VHS and Beta).
1993: Sony stops offering Betamax products in the United States.
1995: "The Lion King" debuts on tape, and becomes the top-selling home video of all time. It's the high-water mark for VHS.
1997: Digital Versatile Disc - or DVD - is introduced.
1999: "The Matrix" hits 1 million in sales - the first DVD to do so.
2002: DVD - now the fastest-growing consumer-electronics product in history - surpasses VHS in sales, with 65% of the total video market.
2006: Hollywood studios announce they will no longer release new movies on VHS.
SOURCES: Entertainment Merchants Association, Consumer Electronics Association
- Compiled by Jenna Zbik
