Ode to VHS and my favorite tape of all time…

The other day I got to thinking about the small collection of VHS tapes that I have sitting on my shelves and I wondered, if I had to chose a single tape to display, what would it be. If you know me at all, I’m fairly certain that you’d know the film I would pick. It’s no secret that I’m an unabashed fan of the film The Monster Squad, and though I can’t confirm it, I think I may have one of the most varied collections dedicated to the movie. I know for a fact that there are a plenty of other people with more impressive items in their collections (like the gentleman in Baltimore that has the screen-worn cape Duncan Regehr worse as Dracula, or the badass Grace Marian who shares custody of Rudy’s compound bow with her partner Ciro Nieli), but ephemera and dead media-wise I have more pieces in my collection that I’ve seen anywhere else. But I’m not writing to brag about my collection; I’m writing because if I had to pick only one VHS tape to represent my love for both the format and my collection it would be a Monster Squad tape. But not the one you might think. Before I get to what the tape is I want to dig a bit into my love for the format.

Like many folks my age I have a certain fondness for the era of VHS and the home video boom of the 80s and 90s. I spent most weekends during my youth browsing the aisles of video rental stores, the racks of tapes in the VHS rental nook of my grocery store, heck even flipping through the cases in a small section of the 7-Eleven that sat at the edge of our subdivision in central Florida. Looking back, I cherished my time combing the sections of a couple of Mom & Pop stores, as a kid and a teen I didn’t discriminate. I was just as happy in the two-story, stand-alone Mom & Pop shop with the ubiquitous store name of Home Video, as I was flicking through tapes at Blockbuster or Hollywood Video.

My love for VHS started with browsing rental stores, but it was kicked into hyper-drive after the release of Batman and Robocop on sell-through tapes, directly to the consumer. At roughly the same time, in the winter of 1987, my folks decided to take the plunge and instead of renting tapes and a VCR at the video store, they decided to get a family Christmas gift and bought an Emerson Front-Loading VCR (model number 873 for those keeping track.) Not only did owning our own VCR make trips to the video store more frequent, but the freedom it gave me to tape things off of TV was mind-blowing to me as an eleven-year-old. This shifted my perspective on movies as being something I could collect, something I could build a library of. I spent the next decade doing just that and between picking up official releases and jamming as many movies as I could on a blank tape with the VCR set to EP mode, I managed to cobble together a library of 300 movies on VHS.

I’d spend entire Saturday afternoons manning the VCR during the post-cartoon movie double and triple features on the local Fox affiliate station recording all of my favorite comedy, action, and science fiction flicks. Then, during periods when my folks would pay for HBO, or we got one of the coveted “Free Preview Weekend” windows for pay channels like Cinemax, The Movie Channel, or the Disney Channel, I’d load up on all of the more recent or horror movies that I could. I distinctly remember snagging my copy of the Goonies off of a Disney Channel Free Preview Weekend and being the only kid I knew who had a version of the film with the rare convenience store and octopus scenes intact. I got so good at recording movies that I even figured out that you could press pause when the commercials came on and then hit it again as the movie came back on, effectively eliminating any commercials on the tapes. At the time I saw this as a practicality, it saved space on the tape and I didn’t have to be interrupted while re-watching my movies. Decades later I’d be disappointed when I found taped-off-tv tapes at thrift stores that had the commercials omitted because those bits were 90% of why I was seeking out the tapes.

As my interest bled from my middle school years to high school, my attention began to focus more clearly on acquiring the ultimate versions of the films I adore, which at the time in the mid-90s meant finding the coveted widescreen versions of films. This meant stalking stores like Suncoast or the home video section of my local Media Play. They were the only places guaranteed to stock stuff like the alternate director’s cut of Sam Rami’s Army of Darkness (in the gold clamshell case) or the 1992 Letterbox edition box set of the Star Wars Trilogy, the one in the giant black box with the rad hologram on the cover. When I wasn’t trying to find an upgraded version of Highlander, I could be found picking through the small “Japanimation” sections in those stores. I was slowly trying to acquire all of the tapes in the Robotech saga as well as series like Guyver, Bubblegum Crisis, and Record of Lodoss War.

With the introduction of DVD around 1996 or so, I abandoned my VHS collecting in favor of the newest and shiniest digital format. There were still a few tapes I acquired around this time. The rare out-of-print copies of films like Buckaroo Banzai and The Monster Squad (where I managed to snag the specific copy that I always rented from my go-to store, Home Video.) But the majority of my collection of VHS was either sold off in lots  to make money for replacement DVDs (for the official releases), or sent unceremoniously to the dumpster in the case of all of the flicks I taped off of television. Now I dearly regret trowing away all of my recorded VHS tapes, even though most of them were sans commercials and station identification bumpers, because those were a record of all of the films that mattered to me in that window of my life. I was pretty happy with what I managed to tape off of TV for the collection, and this was way before nostalgia colored my opinions of movies from the era. When I hit my 20s and was in full DVD AND nostalgic buying mode, I ending up picking up way more movies that I probably ever would have recorded. It gives me pause to wonder what my top 30 films were back in 1993.

My re-acquaintance with VHS came about around 2014 or 2015. I still had a few stragglers in my movie collection, like my beloved Monster Squad ex-rental, and a couple of films that were never released on DVD (at the time it was Big Man on Campus and the scatological insanity that is Hot to Trot starring Bobcat Goldthwait and the voice of John Candy as Don the talking horse.) But on a whim I started seeking out international VHS and Beta copies of The Monster Squad and simultaneously got an urge to start picking up thrift store dollar bin copies of the films that my bud Paxton, my wife Jaime, and I were covering on the Cult Film Club podcast. My wife and I had just bought a house and we were refinishing a portion of our basement, converting it into a replica video rental store. I thought it would be great to have a small section devoted to our podcast and to have all of those films up on the shelves in a dead media format like VHS. These two collecting pastimes reignited my love for the format, so much so that Jaime sought out a refurbished VCR so that we could watch some of these gems in our home office while we worked on projects.

It was in pursuit of tapes for one of these collections that led me to discover my favorite VHS tape of all time. As any diehard collector would, I have alerts set up in eBay for any items related to The Monster Squad. And a few years ago I noticed an auction pop for a “Sold as Blank” VHS tape that included Monster Squad. The tape, a Scotch EG T 120 from 1988 (you can tell the date because it included a promo for Scotch’s sponsorship of the 1988 Olympic Games), included three additional recordings including Garbage Pail Kids the Movie, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and most impressively, the full broadcast of the one-hour, August 20th, 1988 MTV Freddy Krueger Special (AKA Kevin Seal’s Nightmare.)

One of my white whales for the Monster Squad collection is a VHS copy of the film taped off of television, but not one taped-off of the film’s premier on the HBO network. I actually have three separate copies of film recorded from the HBO broadcasts, and honestly there really isn’t anything all that special about these beyond the novelty of having them to fill out another variation of the film on dead media. The HBO version is almost exactly the same as the version on the official Vestron VHS (though the opening few minutes aren’t in widescreen like the VHS tapes). But there are a couple of other versions of the film that were broadcast on network and basic cable television in the early 90s that are spectacular. One is a copy of the film that was broadcast on Turner Network Television which added deleted footage to the film to lengthen the film’s runtime after edits were made to remove most of the cursing in the movie. Some of those deleted scenes are thought lost to time as they aren’t included on any of the special editions of the film on DVD or blu-ray. As far as I know there is only anecdotal evidence that this version exists as I never saw the original broadcast, haven’t seen a copy floating around the web, and only know about it because of a couple of ancient youtube videos that showcase these scenes and have the TNT logo on the screen.

There is, however, a copy of the film floating around the darker portions of the web that was taped off of Fox 54, the Fox affiliate in Augusta, GA on Sunday, April 9th, 1995. This version of the film not only has all of the legendary TNT deleted scenes, but the film itself was re-edited in parts to create sequences that suggest that Sean’s sister Phoebe is clairvoyant. I have a digital copy of this version of the film, but it’s my dream someday to get an actual original VHS version. My guess is that variations of this edit were broadcast on multiple Fox affiliates throughout the country in the early to mid-90s, and I hope that one day one surfaces on eBay. In the interim, I tend to buy every taped-off-TV copy that I can get my hands on until I come across one.

Getting back to my favorite VHS though, after winning the auction for this tape and finally getting it into my VCR, I was a little bummed to discover that the flick was taped off of HBO since I already had two others in my collection. But the beauty and wonder of this tape lies in the overall recordings. The first recording on the tape is of, as it’s labeled, Kevin Seal’s Nightmare, the one-hour A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 promo special from MTV that features the titular V-jay stalked by Freddy and interspersed with ANOES adjacent music videos, or at least some spooky selections. The special features eight music videos: Alice Cooper’s Welcome to My Nightmare, Dokken’s Dream Warriors, Owner of a Lonely Heart by Yes, Ozzy Osbourne’s Bark at the Moon, the Fat Boys rapping Are You Ready for Freddy, Love Kills by Vinnie Vincent Invasion (who also appears in the special), Superstition by Europe, and Shock the Monkey by Peter Gabriel, which not only closes out the videos, but also the special as there are no segments that follow (we assume Freddy has murdered Kevin Seals.) At each break in the special there are also lengthy promo spots with scenes from the Nightmare on Elm Street flicks, but also included on this copy are ALL of the commercials from that original August 20th, 1988 broadcast.

Now there are a few ways you can scope portions of the special online, mainly on youtube where it’s been edited to only include the segments with Kevin Seal, Downtown Julie Brown, Robert Englund, and Vinnie Vincent. But there’s also a file floating around that also features the music videos and ANOES promos. But as far as I know there isn’t one with all of the commercials intact as well, at least not ripped to digital. So it’s pretty amazing to have this fun special complete and unedited. There are some great commercials which aired with this special including ones for Caramello candy bars, Crush Soda, and a crazy 1-900 number for The Freak Phone with Freddie Freaker, a cheese-colored goblin puppet letting you in all all of the action happening from New York to LA. This special kicking off the tape just sets the mood for the triple feature that follows. Of course, I love the Monster Squad and can practically watch it every day, so between the two there’s almost two and a half hours worth of solid entertainment. It also helps to throw this tape on around 10:00 or 11:00pm at night, so by the time the credits roll on Monster Squad it’s midnight or 1:00am and I’m perfectly primed and punch-drunk for a viewing of the Garbage Pail Kids movie.

What makes this video tape even more amazing for me personally, is that when I originally saw The Monster Squad in the theater on August 22nd, 1987, is that I followed it up with a viewing of Garbage Pail Kids the Movie! Both of those flicks lived in died in theaters over the course of about 10 days total, and they only crossed over for a window of about three days that weekend of the 22nd. I went to see MS with my friend Bryan, and our plan was to either try and sneak into a screening of Garbage Pail Kids, or find some way to see it for free. I’m not sure which one of thought of this devious plan, but between the screenings of the two films we went out to the lobby and asked to use the telephone in the office because we didn’t have any money for a pay phone. We told the manager that we’d messed up and told our folks the wrong time to come and pick us up and we had no way to get home. We pretended to call home and acted like no one was there to answer our call and then while faking tears we convinced the manager to let us hang out and watch another movie while we waited for our parents to show up. It was such a stupid scam, but it worked and we got to watch two new movies for the price of one.

     

So having GPK follow up Monster Squad on this tape is kind of magical. Now I can take or leave Pink Floyd’s The Wall, but at the four hour mark of being entertained, it kind of doesn’t matter what is on this tape. I’ve only made 10 minutes into the Wall on this recording because it’s typically around 3:00 in the morning and the choice between pushing forward through the Wall, or falling face first in bed is won by a craving for sleep.

One last thing about this tape that I absolutely love is that you can almost trace the exact time-frame when it was made. Starting with the MTV Freddy Special, which aired on August 20th, 1988 (almost a year to the day after I saw Monster Squad and Garbage Pail Kids in the theater) that dictates when the recording of MS happened afterwards. One of the pieces of Monster Squad ephemera I have in my collection is HBO/Cinemax Program Guide form that August of 1988 when the film made it’s television debut on HBO. Now, that month the film played six times, only two of which were in the evening (on the 16th and the 26th) and all of the rest were in the early afternoon. My educated guess is that based on what’s on this tape, two horror programs and two weirdo, cult-y films, that the person who made it was probably a teenager, or maybe a metalhead in their early 20s at the time, and therefore would be more active at night and not up for recording movies on TV at 1:00 in the afternoon. Since the first night time screening of The Monster Squad was on the 16th and predates the MTV special, I’d be willing to bet good money that it was taped on Friday, August 26th, at 9:00pm. Unfortunately I’m not as certain about when the Garbage Pail Kids was taped as it didn’t air in August of 1988 according to my copy of the Guide. Still, it’s fun to be able to narrow down the first two to a one week period of that year.

All in all, this tape is my favorite VHS, and if my house was on fire, and the family was making a hasty escape for our lives, I’m pretty sure this is what we’d be watching in the hotel room that night. What, you think I’d leave my VCR to burn?