Blank VHS Tapes

My Personal Time Machine

I brought home another unlabeled VHS tape and watched it last week. The TV/VCR combo in my office is old and beaten up, and the fast-forward button doesn't work; it would have been thrown away, but I brought it home for free.

I'll watch a tape in the periphery while I'm at my computer. Then wait to see if anything is interesting buried deep into hours of random recorded TV.

I always pause what I'm doing to watch commercials. The complete opposite of the days when it originally aired or even now. Part of the benefit of VHS tapes, when they came out, was recording a commercial-free version of your favorite thing.

Now, I get lost in what is playing on my TV sometimes. It's a time machine. It wraps me up at the moment, and suddenly the news they are discussing is occurring until I realize it’s a different day in 1998.

The commercials breaks are what ground it in time and place. The commercials, movie trailers, TV previews, and local news bumpers: all social and technological history lessons. Our needs and wants are reflected back at us; it's a dairy of our problems and a piece of cultural memory.

It's not easy to find these types of tapes anymore. They are being thrown out every day. I should know; it's our policy at work to do just that. But I'm there to bring them home to take up more space in my house for my ever-growing personal recorded VHS recovery project.

It’s the only way I can get Nelson Martinez and Diane Anderson to still give me the news. The tapes I collect were part of the glorious few decades in history where people pirated all sorts of content from TV everywhere. Anyone could capture something totally different than someone else.

It's ephemeral media. It was meant to serve a function for a brief moment in time and go away. Commercials and trailers change, and everything gets updated continuously. The content broadcast on networks or cable was not even archived by the networks themselves until the late 90s. (I learned this from Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project)

They neglected it partly because it was deemed to have no intrinsic value.

Now, I'm thrilled to find someone's recording of daytime soap operas and the last episode of Seinfeld 25 years (to the week!) after it aired. I'm reliving The Gap's infamous swing revival khakis ads which featured visual effects that were later used in The Matrix, the 007 Tomorrow Never Dies "Now available only on video" commercial, a preview for the television premiere of The Bridges of Madison County which was the 50 Shades of Gray of its time, and a news segment about what everyone around the country is doing for the Seinfeld finale.

I live for this.

My curiosity rises, and I start to research each thing and consider its relevance. Commercials that show what our wants and needs were, technology reflecting back what problems we were trying to solve, what problems we still have. I can see what other major and minor events were happening around the same time and put in a broader perspective.

I'm wasting way more energy on this than it deserves, but I can't help it. It’s my time machine and I love it. My physical media collection proves useful and important as time goes on.

In my current reality, things I want to watch are so scattered that it takes too much time and energy to figure out. All the money I spend monthly to access things to watch, only to be shown what the algorithm thinks I'm interested in. I'm constantly driven to third-party sites.

I'm tired. Take me back.