Video Rental Chat

My earliest memories are of my uncle bringing a vcr to my grandads and he’d copied E.T from another vhs copy of E.T that someone else has recorded from the bbc at some point over Christmas. It started with the queens christmas speech. Another vcr memory is going to my uncles house and watching a cam copy of Saving Private Ryan but the first ten minutes were all over exposed and white/green.

My town had a small video rental place and my village had videos at spar. Would generally rent tonnes of good and bad horror films. Must have watched The Craft like ten times.

Nearer the end of video rental places we got a big non blockbuster chain and we’d spend ages in there walking about and chatting which was fun.

I got one of those TVs with a video recorder at one point and I’d watch loads of James Bond videos and I’d set record on whatever channel 4 would show At like 1am but I’d always be woken up by the tape clicking around as it started to record. Sitcom by Francois Ozon always stuck in my head.

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But didn’t it know if the programme was starting late, and would adjust for that? I might be misremembering.

Remembering now first ever trip to the video rental shop, my brother was insisting he wanted ‘Flesh Gordon’ because he was confusing it with Flash Gordon, embarrassing incident narrowly averted there I think.

For the record our first rentals were ‘Q The Winged Serpent’ (a cracking monster b-movie) and Jabberwocky with Michael Palin, in a way kind of similar. This was in about 1984.

This was on Betamax, in the very early days that there was a Betamax rental place. It shut down so we were reliant on films recorded off the TV for a while - fortunately though, Alien, The Thing and American Werewolf In London were all shown around this time.

Finally got a VHS in about 1986, first rental for that was a worn-out but great copy of Gremlins.

Video memories

We were fairly early adopters and took the plunge on a VHS rather than (at the time) the more popular Betamax. Great choice there dad! Ferguson VCR

First videos we ever rented were The Long Good Friday and Assault On Precinct 13 which were a pretty decent start.

I recall that all of the videos smelt of stale fag smoke because the store owner used to chain smoke in the shop

I remember watching pirates of The Thing and An Officer And A Gentlemen, both of which were shocking quality

Editing out of ads was not always possible. I recall taping Damien: Omen II off the tv when it was first on and just after the scene where the doctor gets sliced in half at the waist there was a Super Noodles advert on

Always rewound

Tended to favour TDK 180s and 240s and Scotch

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Also remember renting the matrix with my friend who was gave it his seal of approval.

Used to borrow videos from the local library a lot too.

Didn’t get a VCR for an age after everyone else, I think we may have actually rented the first one along with the TV before actually buying one.

Watched an Indiana Jones film at the grandparents which had to be turned off as it was too gruesome for my youngest cousin. They had a VCR before anyone and it had a wired remote so you could rewind etc standing around 1 metre away from the actual player, remember them? peter kay jpeg.

There was a rental van that came around one a week but the local video library had a small arcade out the back which was a massive draw.

Picked up a few bootleg videos (Fugazi live, Dead Kennedys at record fairs) and have the Minor Threat and Big Black videos kicking about somewhere. Can’t imagine getting the VCR out again, no sure I could find a scart lead and after DVD and Blu Ray the quality must be so shite to be almost unwatchable.

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I remember my town had 2 shops - one that did VHS, another that did Betamax

felt bad for the Betamax shop when it inevitably closed down - but then a smallish blockbuster arrived with their multiple copies of new release and multi day rentals and the VHS shop was toast too - which was a shame as they had an arcarde/ poolhall upstairs. It was called “Apex” . You had to buy a membership card to go in and they were much stricter about their 14+ entry rules then they were about renting 15 and 18 videos. If I did manage to get in I could play Outrun and Paperboy to my hearts content (or more accurately until I ran out of money)

Ah. Videoplus didn’t. But there was another bit of technology that could built on top of it and could do that called PDC. That sent a signal hidden in the teletext part of the TV signal that flagged when a particular programme started and finished. I would assume that signal included the Videoplus code so the VCR would be able to look for it.

Early 80’s was about average, I think they were around from the early 70’s but the first I had ever heard of video was probably about 1982. We got a Betamax in 1984, we were late but not last. Got a VHS in 1986 and were definitely one of the last people I knew to get one.

There were definitely a lot of dodgy copies going around in the early 80’s, I was convinced for a long time that what school friends were telling me about was illegal and the video shop was a dodgy back room somewhere (it did start in the back room of a newsagent but I’m sure it was legal guvnor).

Hope this helps.

ooo yes I remeber watching Omens 1 and 2 at my friends house

The scenes in Omen 2 of the boy getting stuck under the ice and the woman getting her eyes plucked by crows then run over by a truck shat me right up

Exactly what I said, mysterious!

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Yes it definitely did :slight_smile:

Many video rentals started off snowy and jittery but could be cleared up by adjusting the tracking. The older the tape, the worse the picture was so there was lots of fiddling with tracking with some films.

Why couldn’t Anthony Kiedis hook up his VCR to his TV?

[spoiler]Because he had a SCART issue.

Ok bye…[/spoiler]

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I remember my parents getting our first VCR and renting Ghostbusters and Back to the Future. I was fascinated by the BTTF cover with the flaming tyre tracks. Later on we used to go to the local video rental shop and get a video most weekends. Remember renting Back to the Future 2 and 3 on consecutive weekends and being absolutely blown away by them

The film scene that made me shit myself (and is still frightening today) was the final scene from Carrie…

That said, the opening couple of minutes (in the locker room) was watched very regularly…

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I remember getting a DVD seemed like such a giant leap in quality - which is funny as I still have all my DVDs and they don’t all look so great now

I had the Thing on one of those cheaper Videos with a gold border - always cost like 6.99 (forefront?)

The picture quality was so bad it was like watching a different film when I finally saw it in the cinema / on DVD - you couldn’t make out what was going on during the final confrontation with the Thing at all it was so dark

The difficulties of programming VCRs used to be a staple of ‘observational comedians’ in the 90s.

yes - I watched that at the same friends house. So many feelings

Those cases you could buy to store your videos in that were faux-leather (usually red, blue or green) with gold trimming to make them look like books on a book shelf

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