Your first VHS video recording.

I do remember it quite exactly..

When daddy stopped carrying the huge box and two cassettes home.

Ooh, we've got our own now.

And the first thing we recorded was called "Heart To Heart".

My parents had a supper engagement with another German couple.

I just recall thinking, boy, these muscles are over-salted.

I hope it's recording.

Forty years ago, and I remember it well. There was a weird rental place in an industrial section of town. I went in to browse around. They had a section with a display of Curtis Matthes TVs and VCRs. There was a top-loader VHS that the owner sold me for $200. It worked great! It probably had 20000 hours of use on it. I got a blank tape and recorded a movie called "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum" that night.

Ignore the public broadcaster - we can pick and choose.

Just be kind, rewind.

Rewind - it's going like a Boeing.

Whoops and drag formula one, drag and formula one.

Oh hurry, I've got to have Poltergeist II back at the store before 11.

When movies were like hotel rooms.

You snooze, gonna cost you extra.

Indiana Jones?

You had to book it.

The beguiling cover is always present, but where's the tape?

And such was going to the video store, a mixture of exhilaration and disappointment.

However .... then you got really grimy corner-store supermarkets.

They had the best horror movies.

But beware if it's five minutes late: "Hello this is Gino, bring the tapes back now or I'll break your face".

I got paid on a Friday back in 1984, so that night, I went and picked up my first VHS video recorder, a Zenith. The first thing I taped with it was an episode of "Mannix" the very next afternoon.

a reply to: halfoldman
I don't remember the first TV prog I recorded,but "Airplane" was the first movie my Dad rented.
That movie,according to some 80's trivia I was reading contained the "most worn out bit of VHS tape" due to a certain fleeting scene being rewound and played over and over..

You may remember the one.

I received my first two at Christmas once upon a time.
E.T.
Haunted honeymoon

a reply to: halfoldman

The "dodgy" Video Shop had the nasties under the counter.
Oddly including ET.

I never had one. So I never made one.

a reply to: Cymru
They had the video nasties on a high shelf in my shop-movies like Scanners and Driller Killer.

Interestingly,Scanners was on Uk channel 5 last year around 7pm.
So todays UK film censors deemed a video nasty of the 80's to be fine for todays youngsters..and by todays "standards" Scanners was pretty tame.

Remember that woman who kicked up a fuss about these evil movies polluting young minds?
Mary Whitehouse I think she was called.

I am thinking she would have to be sedated if she was stll around to witness the moral decay of society in 2023.
And of course she would have been cancelled by the cult,

a reply to: halfoldman

Wow.. I don’t have a clue. That must have been 83-84 maybe and I was 12ish.
Good bet it was something off of HBO.

We also had a Betamax instead of a VHS. Remember those?
Beta actually had better quality and at that time video stores had both styles to rent and having beta meant that the movie you wanted was in stock more often than the VHS version.

A few years later beta was fading out so we switched over.

Although it didn't happen often ... you've heard about a "word salad", now imagine it with tape.

Sticky-tape, my savior.

There, Trick and treated.

My first recording was on Betamax, The Who's 'farewell concert' broadcast live from Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto back in 1982.

Next thing recorded - MASH.

Ostensibly about the Korean War, but really about the Vietnam War, and we could relate, because we were in the Angolan War.

Flip, you can't miss MASH; not treasuring an episode might be fatal.

I was a kid using my grandmas camcorder and made a video of me burning ants with a magnifying glass. True story no sarcasm. I was not allowed to play with her camcorder without permission ever again.

I should actually compose a song: The Internet Killed The Video Star.

a reply to: halfoldman

Almost but not quite!
If you do a youtube search for 80s movies/TV you can find many hours of old B movies and TV shows,recorded by folks on their VHS back in the day,converted to digital for youtube-You still get that comforting 80s snowy slightly distorted/color bleed and sound warpy viewing pleasure we all used to put up with.Some even include the original advert breaks,which looking back had a kind of innocent charm.

Its kind of nostalgic-and obviously even the trash from those days is pretty decent when compared to a lot of the nonsence of todays media output.

Old adverts are strange.

Breakfast where the news is read ...

Watching old horror movies; next thing there's this lady all purdy in an apron.

"Watch your smoking and eat margarine".

The first tape we bought was Sound of Music for my Mom's birthday.

I can't remember the first one we rented.