COMMENT: When I sat down with my Gen Z colleague, Lyric Waiwiri-Smith, to chat about all things before 2000, the concept of VHS had her completely lost.
How can a blank tape be recorded over multiple times? How do you rewind without seeing where you are in the film and how on earth can you protect a blank tape with a plastic tab (or use gaffa tape to break the protection)?
After a lot of back and forth, I figured the best way to explain the process was to let her loose with a VCR and a couple of old videotapes. So I trawled the garage storage for some old VHS recordings and gave Lyric the reigns.
Despite a little delay discovering VCRs do not open like DVD players, that rewinding is far quicker if you stop the tape first and her inability to grasp how blank tapes can be recorded over multiple times, she mastered the art of the VCR pretty well. It even included some time learning to put a camcorder cassette into a converter tape to play a home video of my 90s trip to Australia with Mum and Dad.
That did bring about a few mild-panic moments and I had to intervene to stop her forcing the cassette into the converter in a fashion that would for sure have rendered both useless.
We got together to reflect on the experience.
Abigail Dougherty/Stuff
Stuff entertainment and lifestyle reporters Lyric Waiwiri-Smith and Amberleigh Jack.
Lyric: I thought it was like a DVD player, so I kept pressing the eject button. I was like, whoa this doesn’t even work. You guys have stitched me up. I couldn’t imagine every day of my life having to squat on the floor and fast-forward and rewind.
Amberleigh: Be kind, rewind was vital. There was nothing worse than picking up a video from Video Ezy and finding the person beforehand had not bothered,
Would you press play halfway through a film and be like, I need to close my eyes I can’t spoil this for myself.
Quite often you’d pick up a Friday night flick, put it in and realise you’re the end of the film. So we’d have to sit and rewind it before we could watch.
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It cracked me up that you guys remembered the timestamps of things like ads and where shows ended.
The things we became experts at, I guess, were judging how long it would take to fast-forward through previews or ad breaks. You’d get pretty good at guessing the timing.
I thought the home video of your trip to Australia was really cute, but that camcorder quality was something else. It was cute in a vintage way. Camcorders are coming back in fashion.
I can’t imagine VHS ever coming back in fashion, because they’re a nightmare. When we started getting DVDs life was so much easier. Groundbreaking and high-tech. Have you grasped the concept of recording a blank tape yet?
No, well kind of. You just slot the bank tape in and press play, and it records it?
Well, you press record.
Oh, you press record … but what I don’t get is, you know how you shoot a photo on film, you get double exposure. Where’s that on the tape? Does it just run over?
Yeah, it just records over whatever was before it.
I still don’t get that. Would you have tapes of your favourite Full House episodes then someone would record rugby over it or something? Then you’d lose Full House?
Pretty much. The worst thing was if you recorded your favourite film and someone wanted to record the rugby, and they’d use your tape. Sometimes you wouldn’t notice until a month later, and you went to play your show, but there would be some random rugby game.
Guts. So how much would it cost to buy a blank tape?
From memory, a couple of bucks. But it wasn’t so much the cost, it was convenience. So if you ran out of blank tapes, you’d go through your collection of things you didn’t care about. But often you’d grab one of your brothers rather than record over something of yours. If it had been protected by pulling the tab out, you could just gaffa tape over that to make the tape blank again.
Abigail Dougherty/Stuff
Lyric Waiwiri-Smith tries her hand at figuring out a VHS.
If I said to 14-year-old Amberleigh: here’s a laptop, you can watch hundreds of movies on it – how would she feel?
Nope, it was completely foreign.
It would have blown your mind?
Absolutely. Movies were a big deal. Friday night at Civic Video was a blast. And we’d own a few that were favourites. Mine as a teen were Dazed and Confused and Empire Records. So I’ve seen those every weekend with my friends. I could quote the movies almost word for word.
If I was your friend going to your house and every weekend you were like, we’re going to watch Empire records, I’d be like, bro, you need to branch out. When I was in high school we watched Heavenly Creatures for English and I loved that film for a while.
I remember watching movies in school. A box tv was housed in a cage on wheels that the teacher would roll into the classroom, and she’d spend a good few minutes trying to figure out why the VHS wasn’t playing.
So, I can’t imagine going to someone’s house, and they’re like, I’ve got this 20-minute video of my holiday – sit and watch it with me. I’d be like, No, no, no. I’ve seen it on Instagram, I’ve seen you post photos, I do not need to sit and watch a 20-minute video of it. If someone did that to me, I’d be like, bro, you’re dreaming.
If you think of all the videos and pictures that you don’t post, that you take when you’re on holiday – that was all in a home movie. The video you saw of us in Australia, there would have been probably five minutes of a koala sitting in the tree. Stuff like that. That video would have easily been more than an hour long.
Even when people curate their instagram stories … I’ve got a friend who does really long instagram stories of photo after photo, and I’m like, bro…
That was us on our honeymoon last year – that’s when we first learned how to post Instagram stories.
Just last year? No way. Have you guys every done a boomerang? That’s your next step. I need to teach you a boomerang or a TikTok video.
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