I Miss VHS

I was talking to my friend Amy last night about this situation and I realized that it would make a decent article on here so... here it is.

Ever since I've owned a DVD player, I have had problems with it. Well, to be honest, ever since I've owned anything technology based (computers, video game systems, etc.) I've had problems. My family and I just have horrible, horrible luck when it comes to technology. Nothing ever seems to work right or does what it is supposed to. Anyways...

My DVD player sucks. It always has. Well, maybe not at first. When we first got thing, it worked pretty well. But, as time has slowly ticked by, the thing has just turned to crap. It will barely play anything anymore. I can buy brand new DVDs and it will refuse to play them. Brand new. It doesn't make any sense. It particularly has trouble with Warner Bros. DVDs, though I'm not sure why (it now refuses to play my Batman Begins DVD, which is driving me crazy). It also refuses to play my copies of Jackie Brown, Monster Squad, Planet Terror, Nixon, 2001: A Space Odyssey, King Kong: Extended Cut and many others despite the fact that they are in perfect condition. I just don't know what the deal is. It also will not play pretty much anything that I rent from a video store or Netflix.

Despite this problem, I've always had a solution: my brother's X-Box 360. Despite the thing over heating and scratching up X-Box games, it has always been able to read any DVD that my other player could not read and play it just fine with the surround sound system that came with the other player. 

That is until this past summer. 

My brother decided to take the X-Box 360 with us on our trip to Florida and, when we returned home, the surround sound would no longer work with it. Why, you may ask? I have no freaking idea. Absolutely nothing happened to the X-Box 360 when we took it to Florida- nothing. Now, for some reason, the sound will only play on the left side of the room. Now, if it won't play on my other DVD player, I can't enjoy the movie the same way in the X-Box 360. We'll probably have to send the stupid thing back to Microsoft again (this will be the fourth time- damn them for putting those systems out early when they weren't ready yet) as it is also starting to lag when we play games again. 

Anyways, it looks like I'm going to have to look into a new DVD player and, since it looks inevitable, I've started looking into Blu-ray players, but that brings in a whole new problem. We do not have an HD-TV in our main room of the house. The biggest reason for this is because of our set up in that room, we do not really have any room for a decent HD-TV to fit (the TV sits in between two cabinets that hold most of my DVDs- the two cabinets are connected on the bottom by a lower cabinet on which the TV sits upon- there's really no way to get around this). However, we might end up putting my college TV in place of the old non-HD TV in there because it is a smaller HD-TV but that would mean I would have to go out and spend more money on a new TV for college and....

This is ridiculous.

Why is it this complicated to just watch a movie? I know VHS didn't have the greatest quality in the world and all but... man... I'm seriously starting to miss the simplicity of it all. It used to be so easy to watch a movie at home. All this other stuff didn't matter- no high definition, no surround sound, no 1080 psi, and all that other complicated stuff. Sure, we're not getting the home theater experience with VHS but its just easier, less expensive and, honestly, kind of wonderful in its own way.

I know I'm counter-acting everything I've ever said on here with this stance but, honestly, I'm just frustrated and tired of caring about getting the best possible viewing experience for a film. It's a lot of work and, I gotta admit, it can be exhausting and take a lot of fun out of the film viewing experience at times. Yes, I'm still going to prefer to try to obtain the best possible viewing experience in the future but, for right now, let's explore what made VHS great. After all, I am a nostalgic fool.

Like I said before, VHS was just easy. You get a clunky player, put a tape in and play. Yeah you have to rewind it and stuff, but for some reason, there's almost a kind of charm to that process. It is almost as if having to wait for the tape to reach it's starting point makes the viewing process even more special and important. Unlike the discs that are DVDs, a tape will almost always play in a VHS player unless it was just worn out to a ridiculous degree. Yeah, you have to put up with tracking sometimes but, hey, it's not that bad.

Okay, VHS is definitely a step down from DVD. But, there's still just something special about it. Watching a VHS just has a certain feel about it that you cannot get while watching a DVD. It's altogether nostalgic and wonderful at the same time. Considering I grew up watching countless VHSs as a child, I have to admit that I miss watching movies on them. We don't get to watch those awesome old VHS studio logos (I'm going to post these in a separate post quite soon) and don't have to sit through those old trailers for upcoming films. Much like waiting for the tape to rewind, there was just something about this that made watching the movie that more special. 

What's weird about growing up watching VHS is that we were all actually watching movies the wrong way. Since most VHS were in full screen, we were never really seeing movies in their proper composition. How strange is that? Since DVD has come along, I've basically had to re-learn what a movie looks like and what the right composition is for a film since full screen essentially destroys the filmmaker's original composition and vision. Because of this, watching a movie on VHS is a completely different experience. It's watching a film the wrong way but, because we did it for so long, it feels like there is something special about it. So technically, this is another strike against VHS but, due to nostalgic reasons, it is something that I slightly miss about it.

Another thing that I liked about VHS was the fact that, despite an occasion widescreen version released and multiple box covers, there wasn't this double / triple dip craze that we get with DVD due to the special features phenomena. Never did I think that I would own multiple versions of the same movie before but here I am with at least two different DVDs for movies like Halloween, Donnie Darko, Spider-man, King Kong, Sin City, and countless others. I've gotten better at just letting double dipping go but, at one time, I couldn't help but buy multiple copies of these movies that I loved so much.

In the end, VHS failed for a reason. The quality wasn't great, there were no special features or scene selections, and the majority of the tapes were formatted to full screen only. DVDs are better in many different ways. Still, despite this, I miss them for their simplicity and nostalgic charm. Things just seemed much easier and less complicated when we only had VHSs to pop into VCRs. They weren't great but I grew up with them and, because of that, I'll always love them in my own way.

After all, there's a reason why I still refer to DVDs as "tapes."