Speculation on VHS

Batman Moonwalker

Loyal readers will recall the summer of 2021, when we delved into the seedy world of video game speculation. For newcomers, what was alleged to have happened was unscrupulous grading services were colluding with auction houses to drive up prices on vintage video games. So you had carts with millions of copies in circulation going for millions of dollars. The resulting price bubble distorted the video game collectors’ market beyond all reason.

Now, speculators are once again preying on the same Gen Y nostalgia that drove the vidya bubble.

And this time, the questionable collectibles whose prices are being inflated to the moon are vintage VHS tapes.

One auction site was asking over $7,000 for a copy of John Carpenter’s The Thing. Steven Spielberg’s Jaws commanded more than $10,000, and a copy of Back to the Future sold for $75,000.

Keep in mind that these are factory-sealed, professionally graded tapes encased in plexiglass. So no one is going to watch and enjoy them. They’re sought as conspicuous display items at best, and more often as gambling chips.

And the speculators’ hype machine wouldn’t work if not for Gen Y’s crisis of meaning driving irrational waves of nostalgia.

The guys over at Red Letter Media put out a video that gives an overview of the VHS speculation phenomenon. They even ran their own experiments by getting tapes from their massive VHS collection graded.

It’s worth a watch.

In case you were wondering, the bidding on RLM’s copy of Nukie now stands at over $80,000.

Nukie

 

Now,  this auction itself feeds on nostalgia. So normally I wouldn’t play into the hype. But to RLM’s credit, they’re donating the proceeds to charity.

Maybe those of you who’ve asked me why you can’t talk your Pop Cult friends out of consooming the latest Hollywood slop understand a little better now. Like ancient heathens willing to sacrifice their prize bulls to the gods, Pop Cultists will offer up 80 grand to their new pantheon of Michael Myers, Darth Vader, and Thor.

So the more things change …

Anyway, understanding how they met their pitiable fate helps you avoid it.

For more help, read my #1 best seller:

 

14 Comments

  1. I guess this is the part where I mention that I never liked tapes, whether VHS or cassette. Discs were much better replacements for both. They were a pain to use, and when they failed, and they ALWAYS failed, they had the potential to hurt your player at the same time. I really wish we’d stop idolizing everything from the past. Some things just sucked.

    • RLM made the same point, culminating in Rich Evans mentioning that a tape somebody paid tens of thousands for may have been shelved next to a magnet for 30 years and is now blank.

      Home video media attained perfection with DVDs. There are good reasons why people dumped tapes for them, but even Blu Rays never fully supplanted them.

      • Rudolph Harrier

        The following site tracks the market share of DVD, Blu-Ray and 4K discs:

        https://www.mediaplaynews.com/research/top-20-blu-ray-market-share-for-week-ended-12-24-22/

        If you go back over time you’ll usually see DVDs outsell Blu-Ray and 4K combined. Occasionally DVD will drop to less than half the market, but I’ve never seen Blu-Ray go over 50%. I’ve also never seen 4K get above 25% (sometimes it gets to 24.3% of something, but not more than a quarter.)

        DVDs really do everything the average consumer wants, unlike VHS. (This is like if VHS still had the majority of the market in 2014.) Sure they’ll go with the Blu-Ray if it’s handy and not much more expensive, but they don’t really care. 4K struggles because only the hardcore tech geeks bought 4K players to begin with (in contrast with Blu-ray, which largely phased out DVD players due to their streaming capabilities.)

    • Rudolph Harrier

      I’ve recently started going back to both VHS and cassette tapes, partially due to being given a lot through inheritance (since no one else wanted them) and partially due to finding a surprising number in used media stores/thrift stores. (You’re screwed if you want a VCR though; cassette tape players are no problem but working VCRs are rare.)

      My verdict:

      -The tapes last a lot longer than you’d think as long as they aren’t overplayed. I watched a tape of Gone with the Wind printed in 1985 which played fine, as far as VHS goes. Cassette tapes tend to have their pressure pads fall off over time, but that’s easy to fix.
      -The quality of VHS is pretty bad. It probably looked better on CRT screens than it does on my TV, but the resolution is never great even in the best of situations. Minor color fluctuations are near unavoidable.
      -Audio cassettes are surprisingly good in quality. CDs are definitely better, but I have several tapes from the 80s that play without any noticeable issues. If their pressure pads fall off they sound horrible, but like I said that’s an easy fix.
      -The fact that audio cassettes are smaller than a CD makes them much nicer for carrying one or two back and forth from home, the car or the office. VHS on the other hand is bulky and really annoying to store.
      -Tape players are cheap and they surprisingly still make them. I bought a new Tape/CD/Radio combo this year from a big box store. I haven’t had one break, but it seems like it would be relatively simple to fox (since there’s really just the motors and the head to worry about) and if you couldn’t they are easy to replace. (The only thing which is rare is the portable walkman style players, which I would love to have.) VCRs on the other hand can fail in a million different ways and when they do you’re pretty much screwed, with a replacement very hard to find.

      Verdict: VCRs are actually pretty bad. The only reason to have them is to watch tapes that you don’t have DVD versions of, especially for things never released on DVD.

      Cassette tapes are worse than CDs but not nearly as far below them as I would have thought. I don’t mind having a collection of music on cassettes, and if I could find a compact player (which could fit in a coat pocket) I’d be set. If you want something “retro” they aren’t a bad deal, especially since the speculation market hasn’t hit them (…..yet.)

    • Xavier Basora

      JD

      Yup. I can relate how a cassette broke in my player and trying to carefully remove the plastic spaghetti without bending the heads was a real chore.

      As much as hipsters adulate vinyl, I always appreciated the CD. Sure, the lyrics booklets are smaller, and the album cover is similarly small but do they need to be so large?
      xavier

  2. Andrew Phillips

    Ah. Rampant speculation on worthless commodities involving Heritage Auctions. Again.

    This is my shocked face: 😐

  3. I scour pawn shops for DVDs where piles of them can be had for a few bucks. Not to speculate, but to avoid giving money to the hate cult and as insurance in case they get censor happy with the oldies. I was wondering if there ever could be a nostalgia for DVDs. I doubt it. It was 2001 when DVD players outsold VHS, and I still agree with the theory that there is no nostalgia for the ’00s.

    • Correct on all counts. The DVD revolution was a formative experience of Millennials, who would rather destroy discs which violate the Death Cult pieties.

  4. Randel

    The bit that I find to be amusing, is that the same people who pulled the Video Game Speculation market, are backed by the same person who caused the Coin Collection Speculation Bubble of the 1980s, and that guy apparently had a hand to play in the Comic Book Speculation Bubble of the 1990s that almost tanked the entire Comic Book Market.

    In a way, I guess folks stick to what they know, and with inflation going through the roof, speculation on random assets is always gonna happen, if history is any indication.

  5. Rudolph Harrier

    One of the most obvious tells that this is a speculation market is that the large sales are always on very popular franchises, and thus franchises which have so much supply to make such prices impossible in a sane market. The rare games/movies never go for much, even if they are cult classics.

    Something else I thought about when reflecting on the video game speculation market is that sealed PC games never exploded. Apparently they do grading on PC games, and some guys are trying to sell graded copies of DOOM II and Heroes of Might and Magic for a couple thousand, but that’s the extent of it. Outside of that it’s almost impossible to find computer games that go for more than a couple hundred, and most games old games sell for maybe 20 bucks.

    The rarity should be comparable to console games, as should the nostalgia. If the objection is “it’s easier to play old console games than to build a retro rig to play old PC games” that’s irrelevant for graded sealed copies since no one is planning to play them in the first place.

    The real issue is that the big franchises of Nintendo, Sega, early PSX games, etc. were declared holy by the pop cult, as were things like Back to the Future and Star Wars. But old PC games were not.

  6. JohnC911

    Wow. I don’t get it . I like tapes back in the day and like that it was simple. You out the tape in the VCR and maybe have to rewind it. DVD had better audio and visual, it was no way VCRs could complete once the PS2 come out. It was the cheapest DVD player on the market at the time around $400 to $500 (AUS) or $299 (US). At the time (before the PS2) VCRs were $250 (maybe $200 AUS) or about $150 (US) and DVD player were $1500 (AUS) or $1000 (US).
    Once the average family could afford the DVD player, VHS went out the window. Blockbuster and other videos stores slowly shifted their Videos tapes to DVDs. By 2006 the people had spoken. I know many movies studios had a role in pushing it for copyright reasons but if the tech was not better and a reasonable price then it would not take off.

    Also I kept a DVD collection because you know it great having movies and shows that can not be edited.

  7. Adam Bruneau

    I grew up with tapes in the household, they were my way of capturing old media for replay. My family was cheap and when we got a VCR, we used it to bootleg movies constantly. We have VHS tapes that are 6 hours long and have a weird mix of stuff (this one opens with Magical Mystery Tour, then into Yellow Submarine, then into 2001: A Space Odyssey, then some late 80s basketball). I remember going through my parents record collection and making mixtapes of Queen and Aerosmith as a kid.

    As an adult who edited video for a living, I was very much aware of the limitations of the medium, and I embraced those for making DIY art. As early as 2000 I remember tapes being extremely cheap, like a dollar per in thrift stores. I actually bought a CRT for $1 around this time too. I had my family’s original VCR, which had audio inputs, and we would use those to master recordings made on 4-track. Lo-fi as heck, but I loved what the old warbly tape did with the sound and image. The day I realized that I could plug an audio source into the RCA input for video and get some feedback on screen that corresponded to the sound, that was a moment! Made a lot of noise “art” with TV feedback for years.

    But unless you are making DIY lo fi art, it’s not a good medium. A few years ago I bought a new VCR so I could enjoy my collection of tapes. A “Three Stooges” tape ended up getting eaten right away. It’s too risky. At least a CD player will never damage your media.

    Still, fun to play around with.

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