Analog video has made an unexpected but not unprecedented return from the grave. The technology, for those who don’t know, was once the only viable form of recording and watching video, Betamax and LaserDisc never cutting it. VHS tapes — a plastic box with about 1000 feet of magnetic brown film, as any curious 90s kid with a hammer will attest to — had as many quirks as features.

Among Millennials, the grainy, boxy image full of tracking issues has inexplicably grown in some weird misguided attempt to connect with a sense of nostalgia for a time that they never lived in (per Tom Scott). Anyone who grew up with it probably hates it with a passion, for reasons that will become crystal clear. In simple terms, the format sucked. After barely a decade of supremacy, a far superior technology arrived. VHS's glory days were laughably brief and plagued with design flaws. The most traumatic moment of any Gen-Xer’s life was watching their video of choice being devoured by the videocassette recorder (VCR) on family night, losing whatever film or home movie was on that particular copy.

Part of the reason The Ring was scary was the fact that every VCR owner knew it was only a matter of time until something catastrophic happened.

A Pernicious Stereotype

Top Gun - Maverick-1
Paramount Pictures

Perceptions of the 80s seem to imply that everyone had a copy of E.T. and Star Wars lying around. If you believe that, you also probably thought it was completely plausible for Monica and Rachel to afford their Manhattan loft featured in Friends. The heyday of the VHS (Video Home System) was not the 80s, but rather the 90s. Truth is, most people probably had only a recorded copy of those movies they ripped off TV if they were lucky. A trip to the local retail outlet could result in a choice between a few hours of fun or eating dinner for a week, $50 considered a steal for a copy of Rocky III in 1985, that’s $140 today.

In 1975, the onset of the VHS’s entry into the home market didn’t mean anything for average consumers, nor did it for a decade after either. Only rich people with money to burn had them, not just because of the price of tapes ($14 and upwards), but simply as a result of the costs of owning a tape player. Prices fell by the mid-80s, but (adjusted for inflation) the price was still over a grand from your local K-mart. That's reasonable compared to the videos themselves.

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Until Top Gun revolutionized home entertainment in 1987, a real, licensed "high-quality" copy of a Hollywood movie retailed as much as $90 brand new in America, working out to about $250 in modern inflation rates. “On the sell-through side, VHS had been purely about family content,” the President of Fox Home Entertainment said in 2007, in a post-mortem (via Variety). This shift from family-oriented rentals to more diverse selection of films revolutionized how films were packaged, now mandatory to include commentary tracks, deleted scenes, and other bonuses that we take for granted today. The value of releases vastly increased due to DVD's storage advantage. DVDs were priced more competitively, and by 2003, the DVD rendered the VHS a dying, obsolete form of media.

“Unsurpassed Color”

Alf VHS copy
Alien Productions

Betamax was notoriously expensive, which led to it losing the format war despite having the edge in visual fidelity. LaserDisc was objectively better in terms of extras, sound and picture, but lasers were too scary for most people to risk and expensive to boot. VHS was cheap, right?

Not really, at least not in the long term. By the time of DVDs and digital media they were all junked for a reason. Tapes had rapidly degrading visual quality, among many other issues. That $14 price for “unsurpassed color” ($4.99 circa 1986) doesn’t sound bad until you realized the 20th time you recorded Punky Brewster the quality would eventually look like this (and that epilepsy warning is no joke). Aside from the awful resolution, tracking problems, washed out-colors, and physical drawbacks, a lot of videotapes were effectively a ticking clock. The more you watched, rewound or fast-forwarded, the crappier the picture devolved, effectively the shelf life directly tied to your level of enjoyment. And that’s if your copy of The Little Mermaid wasn’t “eaten” by the machine.

Adding to the constant nightmare was the player itself, which could malfunction due to all the moving parts. VHS aficionados will insist this shouldn't happen, but anyone who owned one for a decade or two in real-world settings can tell you stories to the contrary. In the same way a hard disk drive is inferior to a solid state drive, a VHS tape with moving parts is fundamentally susceptible to far more complications than a DVD. The flexible, magnetic tape is the culprit. According to a VHS-transfer company, "as the lubricant layer erodes, the binder becomes more prone to wear and tear, which directly affects the magnetic particles and causes loss of information."

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Dust is also a mortal enemy. Luckily, electrocution was but a very slight risk, because at some point you would need to rip the machine apart. Bumping the capacitor with a screwdriver would probably only gently shock you at worst. Heads got dirty, interference with the magnetic charge occurred, and uncontrolled humidity could lead to mold inside the tapes or machine (AC was not universal in the 90s, especially not in the poorly-insulated suburban garages where all the modern hipsters' VHS tapes provenance can be traced to). Your granddad was as acquainted with the belts on his Mitsubishi VCR as he was with the belts on the Mitsubishi in the driveway. A number of errors popped up, making VCR repairman a legit career for a while. Though most of us settled with a DIY job, smacking it with our fists and jabbing at the innards with a pocketknife in a fit of rage. Costly, perishable, clunky, and fragile, VHS was an extremely poor long-term storage device. The only thing worse was wax cylinders.

The VHS-Grading Rabbit Hole

The Haunted VHS Tape Returns in First Sadako Vs Kayako Clip
Universal Pictures

Miraculously, VHS isn’t dead. With a growing interest in weird, old, abandoned tech, comes with it a desire to scrounge flea markets, yard sales, eBay and Amazon for lost treasure, among many other sites. The quest for the rarest, most intact copies generating a ludicrously unchecked second-hand market. Like coins, these VHS copies are lucrative for the sake of being rare, the Disney “black diamond” boxes sold at exorbitant value for this reason.

But, while it shares qualities with other forms of collecting, because this community is relatively new and full of people who have no clue what they are doing or whom to trust, it tends to lead to price gouging. WDW Magazine, an unaffiliated blog site who focuses exclusively on Disney merch both new and vintage, is quick to remind collectors, "Even those royal-looking Black Diamond seals can’t save the magnetic tape from deteriorating over the years." The risk of a bubble is at this point guaranteed. There might be one or two fans willing to shell out $75,000 for a vintage shrink-wrapped copy of Back to the Future, but not many.

The curse of VHS continues under a new guise. Remembering old media with happiness is one thing, but to romanticize it is another. For anyone offended, just imagine when a new generation in 2035 looks back with wide-eyed jubilation at bit-compressed sound and 480p YouTube videos. Don't say we didn't warn you.