I was looking at my combination VCR/DVD player the other day and thought I probably should disconnect it and retire it to the corner of the basement where all of my other old has-been stuff goes to die.
Currently stacked in that corner are two boom-boxes, three word-processors, a black-and-white portable TV with a pull-up antenna, two AM radios, an old video camera that weighs about 25 lbs., a manual treadmill and an 8mm movie projector, among other things. Most of them should have been given their last rites and a decent burial ages ago.
Anyway, as I stared at my trusty old VCR/DVD player, my thoughts drifted back to the time when VCRs first were widely introduced to the public for home use, and how excited I'd been.
"You mean to tell me," I asked my husband, "if we had a VCR, I could record my favorite singers or movie stars and watch them any time I want?"
"Sure," he said. "You could even run the recordings in slow motion or freeze the tape whenever there's a good close-up."
When he saw my eyes widen at the thought of all of the TV hunks I could freeze, he quickly added, "Forget it. VCRs are way too expensive."
I would have tried to tempt him by telling him he could record the Super Bowl or the World Series and replay every exciting moment, but my late husband probably was one of the few men on earth who would have preferred to be doused with a bucket of syrup and staked naked to an anthill than watch sports.
So I had to try a different approach.
"You know how some TV shows feature all of those scantily clad models running around on the beach or even playing volleyball?” I asked him. “Can you imagine how funny they'd look in slow motion bouncing up and down, up and down...over and over again?"
The next day, we were at Montgomery Ward, buying a VCR. It cost $799. We also bought a blank tape for $15.98.
I soon became convinced that learning how to program a VCR was one of the major causes of divorce back in those days. I still can remember reading the instructions out loud to my husband as he tried to hook up that first VCR to our TV, and how, when nothing worked, he accused me of skipping over some important major paragraphs during my reading. As it turned out, he'd forgotten to plug it in.
But even as time went on and VCRs improved, it still took about three weeks to learn how to set up one correctly – especially if you wanted it to record a program. I think they actually held night-school courses to teach people how to program the machine to record their favorite shows.
Back then it required manually entering the recording time, day, date, station number and length of the recording. But the most important thing you had to learn how to do back in those days to make sure your recording would be successful was...pray.
Most of the time, I ended up accidentally programming the hour as AM instead of PM, and then would wonder why the VCR had taped an infomercial for vacuum cleaners instead of the Doobie Brothers in concert. And heaven forbid if there was a brief power outage or a blip in the flow of electricity, because that would set the clock on the VCR back to a constant, flashing 12:00, making any recording settings null and void.
But VCRs were a necessity if we wanted to watch all of the latest movie releases in the comfort of our own home and make good use of our memberships at the three local VCR-rental stores within a five-mile radius of our house.
Nothing was better than Wednesday Bargain Day when movies could be rented for only 99 cents each instead of the usual $2.50. That’s when I would come home with about five of them, each one with a “Be Kind, Rewind!” reminder printed on the label…because nothing was worse than sitting down with a bowl of popcorn and turning on the movie, only to see the closing credits.
Oh wait…I take that back. Nothing was worse than rewinding the movie on the high speed (which still took forever) and hearing a “snap” in the middle of it, then also hearing the tape making a “whap, whap” sound…especially after you’d been on the waiting list for the previous two months to rent one of the "new releases."
Anyway, Wednesday Bargain Day was what gave my husband the brilliant idea of buying a second VCR and a couple cables to hook it to the other machine, so we could make copies of the bargain videos. Then we could watch them at our leisure instead of sitting in front of the TV for 10 hours and struggling to stay awake to watch all of them in one shot before they were due back the next day.
Sure, there eventually were warnings about copying movies being a criminal offense and how you could rot in jail for it or be fined thousands of dollars just for recording something like “Howard the Duck.” But we weren’t going to try to sell the copies we made, we just were going to watch them and then erase them. And we used the same form of reasoning that little kids did...“But everyone else is doing it, Mom!”
I still have a big plastic tub of those videotapes in the basement, because we never got around to watching most of them. The actual tapes are so old and brittle now, they crumble when touched, and most of the movies on them have been shown on regular TV about 150 times each by now.
Eventually, when VCRs became less of a novelty and the prices dramatically dropped, we learned it was cheaper to keep buying new machines rather than repairing the old ones. But if an old one still was working, we’d retire it to the bedroom and hook up the new one in the living room.
That's when I found a unique use for one of the old VCRs in the bedroom. It was the type of machine that when you pushed the "eject" button, a platform popped up out of the top and you then were supposed to slide the videotape into it and lower it back into the machine.
Well, one time when my husband and I were trying this new fad-diet (zero carbs) and carefully were watching each other to make sure neither one of us would cave in and cheat, I discovered the VCR in the bedroom was the perfect place to hide Hershey bars…because they were flat and could neatly be stacked on that pop-up platform meant for the tape.
So every night after dinner, I'd sneak into the bedroom, push the eject button on the VCR, and voila! Up would pop my secret stash.
It worked fine until I forgot to shut off the machine one night and the heat melted the chocolate.
Eventually, VCRs became obsolete and DVD players became all the rage.
Sure, DVDs were worlds better and more convenient, especially since no hours of rewinding were involved. I mean, you could click back to a previous scene in only a second. And storing the DVDs was a breeze because they took up hardly any space. Also, the picture always was sharp, unlike on the VCR tapes where the tracking constantly had to be adjusted to get rid of fuzzy lines, ripples or static.
Still, I definitely wasn’t a big fan at first.
That’s because DVDs are round…and Hershey bars are rectangular.
Sally Breslin is a native New Englander and an award-winning syndicated humor columnist who has written regularly for newspapers and magazines all of her adult life. She is the author of several novels in a variety of genres, from humor and romance to science-fiction. Contact her at: sillysally@att.net
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