Not-so-secret: as a youngster, I was a huge VHS bootlegger.
My family life revolved around television and movies. As soon as something from the big screens hit Best Buy and Circuit City, we had a copy of it on that nice hunk of black plastic in a clam shell. Alas, as much as we loved splurging on movies and creating cinematic memories, we were also not well to do. As ticket prices rose and the turn around from theater to cable grew shorter, we got into recording movies we wanted to see off of HBO and Showtime onto blank tapes.
Yes, my small family was the death of the movie industry. Whoops.
As I approached middle school and got into the anime community online, I learned that there was a pretty big market for anime trades. I saw people sharing files and tapes with their own subtitles (called fansubbing, which is a whole different world), uploading shows fresh from Japan online to seed… in other words, piracy! My morals were a little looser back then and I wanted anime desperately, so I would occasionally engage in downloads of shows and movies that hadn’t hit US shores just yet.
Then, it occurred to me. Maybe I didn’t have the sophisticated equipment to transfer my tapes and DVDs online, but among my circle of anime and wrestling hungry friends… we could do that.
And so it began. Recording anime off sketchy cable channels with no subtitles. Scribbling episode summaries from websites so we could follow the action. Staying up all night to catch hardcore wrestling or anime with swearing. But as with all childish things, I grew up and grew out of bootlegging. Blank tapes are increasingly hard to come by now and I just don’t have the time or the friends circle to do that anymore.
But as Michael Corleone in The Godfather famously said: just when I thought out, they pulled me back in. In the past couple of years, I’ve been called to get back to my old ways. Tape collecting, trading, and even bootlegs have resurfaced in a big way – it’s still underground, but no longer limited to my fellow weirdos looking for obscure French cinema. What has changed? I’d like to posit a few reasons:
For one, tape collecting and trading is still a pretty cheap hobby. We’ve all heard stories of ultra rare tapes going for thousands of dollars on eBay. Those stories are true, but you can get just as good of a bounty at your local thrift store for ten bucks if you enjoy the thrill of the hunt. If you were foolish enough not to keep your VCR player, buying the equipment to play your treasures can be a little pricey. But when has that ever stopped a hobbyist?
When cliquey groups and subcultures (looking at you, gamers) are determined to kick out marginalized groups, the tape scene is still pretty inclusive. Why? Because nostalgia! Good ol’ nostalgia doesn’t belong to anyone. We’re all looking for memories, be they childhood, angsty teenagerdom, or college viewing parties. Or maybe you’re one of the unlucky souls that didn’t get to experience VHS (gasp) and want to see what it’s all about. The default image of a tape collector is still a shifty white male in a hoodie, but it seems that owes more to its techno piratey nature.
I’ve never had a problem connecting with my fellow black and brown folk or fellow queers, and it looks like after all this time not much has changed. In fact, I feel with the onset of social media it’s gotten a lot more diverse. Or at least people like me are easier to find. A lot of us also just miss the community aspect of being able to enjoy something small, and sharing it. There’s a lot more to enjoy now, too, including themed T-shirts, enamel pins, posters, and homemade box cover art!
There’s also one last practical, maybe even boring reason we’re diving back into VHS now. A lot of this stuff isn’t available on DVD or Blu-Ray and probably never will be. This isn’t limited to obscure low budget productions, either. There’s a lot of mundane films with big name actors that just don’t make the jump to DVD or Netflix. A lot of this comes down to money. It takes cash to restore things, buy music licenses, convert files, and so on. There are movies where the rewards are obvious; other films, not so much. Things fall through the cracks. If you want a glimpse at something weird or a childhood cartoon you can’t quite place, it’s hanging around in someone’s closet waiting to be listed on eBay. One day!
Do I just want to feel like a pirate pillaging the internet seas again, as I did in my youth? Maybe. But I’m glad the tape scene is still thriving in its own way; I’m glad it’s still small, but I wouldn’t mind seeing it grow, either. The more tapes circulating out there, the more memories we have. It’s working for vinyl so far, right?
Photo: Rob Pearce/Creative Commons