The Ghost of VHS Past




Thinking back on the good old days of VHS it still cracks me up that the video cassettes were close to $80.00 or more when they first came out!

The very first movie I had ever seen on VHS was "The Terminator". The machine was one of those thousand pound all metal Panisonic's and it just blew me away that you could watch just about any movie any time you felt like. 

Then a couple years later I had seen "THE EVIL DEAD" on VHS on a double date at a friends girlfriends house. I had asked her how much the machine was and when she told me about $600.00 I almost fell off the chair! And that wasn't even counting the $85.00 copy of The Evil Dead. 
So then I knew right then there wasn't one of those bad boys in my future...

Little did I know VHS became wildly popular in Japan and that caused manufactures there to bring the price down to a little over a hundred dollars. Sure there was cutbacks here and there on picture quality like the original difference between Beta and VHS, but you could talk your parents into buying a $100.00 movie machine when they were cinema lovers themselves. 

And there it was our first Panisonic front loader that was much loved and cared for. I made sure to find out everything there was to keep it happy because if it crapped out I knew we wouldn't get another. But since I did such great upkeep on it my parents had no problem buying a four head replacement when our first finally wore out. 

And when my parents had given me my own membership card to the local Mom and Pop Video Store and my Mom made sure to get a sticker on mine so I could rent any horror movie I wanted I was set!

And when by the time I was old enough to drive I had twelve different video store memberships, so yeah I spent allot of time watching horror movies on VHS. And when I was lucky enough to meet girls that were into horror movies as much as me it was perfect! Every weekend was grab a Pizza or Chinese Takeout and a couple boxes from the horror section that had cool box art. And some of the best times were getting ones that were a total mess and just completely ranking on it the whole way through.