We're rapidly approaching the 40th anniversary of a revolutionary device in the annals of home entertainment. If you're under the age of 20, the bulky contraption pictured above is a VCR(Video Cassette Recorder) and it was a fixture in every American home in the 1980s and '90s. I know I'm aging myself here, but I fondly remember many trips to the local mom-and-pop video store to check out the new releases or grab an old favorite. You had to get there early, because there was a limited amount of copies and usually a six-month wait between the conclusion of a film's theatrical run and it's arrival in your living room, and another six months before it premiered on HBO. There was more incentive to go to the theater and you didn't mind waiting till Christmastime to bring a summer blockbuster home. We don't like to wait for anything now, and a 2010s teenager playing on the internet with his/her cell phone can't fathom having to do so to obtain a physical copy of a movie released three months ago that they already forgot about. At the risk of sounding embarrassingly old-fashioned, not every change is for the better.
To fully understand the impact and legacy of the VCR, we must go further back to a time when watching movies whenever you want at home simply wasn't an option(mind-blowing, I know). Japan was working on recording devices in the late '50s and '60s to be used exclusively by television professionals. However, the mass market potential was slowly realized as updates and modifications were continually made, and if you had a VCR in the early '70s, you were super-rich. JVC engineers Yuma Shiraishi and Shizuo Takano then decided that everyone should have one, and more affordable units were developed that were compatible with any TV set. VCRs started turning up on United States retail shelves in 1977. Prices were still steep, but they weren't completely out of the reach of the average consumer. A war with rival format Betamax raged on for the next few years to determine which machine would record the shows you missed last night. The VCR was victorious, and radically altered the way we consumed entertainment as Ronald Reagan took the Oval Office. Movies like "First Blood" and "The Terminator" didn't have to be massive performers at the multiplex to earn their way into our hearts. We all got our hands on copies of these classics and wore them out before the sequels could even be produced. "Blade Runner" is beloved because of this brave, new world. Home video libraries could now be found in every family den, and what to watch always sparked a fierce debate.
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| "Who recorded over your sister's chorus concert"? |
Blockbuster Video would put most small-scale suppliers out of business in the 1990s to cap off the VCR's decade of dominance. But nothing lasts forever and a sleek upstart was ready to usurp VHS in 1997. I didn't enjoy tossing out all of my tapes in the 2000s, but DVDs had superior picture and sound and that's exactly what happened. VHS ceased production a full thirty years after changing the game despite the fact that 94.5 million Americans still owned VCRs. Blu-Ray WAS in the process of putting digital video discs down for the count, and now Netflix and streaming networks threaten to render them both obsolete. Future generations probably won't even have to watch anything, all content will be beamed directly into their brains. Don't let all this rapid progress make you forget where it all began, though. VHS opened the floodgates and we'll never want for another show/movie ever again. I know my VCR had a helluva run, even though I never could figure out the timer.
