I still have a VCR, and it works great, except for one important component: It no longer rewinds. Which means that I can watch all my VHS tapes just one last time. And then, RIP. No going back. It’s kind of poetic.
Lindy West was born an unremarkable female baby in Seattle, Washington. The former Stranger writer covered movies, movie stars, exclamation points, lady stuff, large frightening fish, and much, much more.... More by Lindy West
Obviously you need to buy one of those snazzy VHS tape rewinders that they tried to sell us through the 80s and 90s. Here’s one that looks like a sports car and costs more than a goddamned DVD player.
http://www.easyelectronicdepot.com/index…
every thrift store in the city has a tape rewinder. get real.
yes, get a tape rewinder for a few bucks. or get a used vcr for a few bucks more and use it just for rewinding. or toss everything out and get a blu-ray recorder.
WHAT IS THIS TAPE REWINDER OF WHICH YOU SPEAK. JESUS CHRIST. LIKE I NEED MORE DATED GARBAGE TECHNOLOGY ON THE FLOOR OF MY HOUSE.
What is a “VCR”?
Sorry. Christmas fit.
Don’t listen to them Lindy. Watch your tapes one last time, and throw parties for the cool ones. Then let them go.
I never understood the tape rewinders. They were supposedly faster, right? Why couldn’t they just put the faster rewinding technology in the VCR?
I believe the tape rewinders were to reduce wear and tear on the VCR.
WIKIPEDIA HAS A VHS TAPE REWINDER PAGE, …
w7ngman, 1) sometimes you want to watch a new vcr tape while re-winding others or 2) you don’t want to wear out the rewinding gears of your vcr.
Now that I think about it, rewinders were big in video rental stores, where they would want a few machines to rewind returned tapes and didn’t really have a need for the entire VCR.
(Full disclosure: I own a VCR, but not VHS tapes. Weird huh?)
I own both a VCR and tapes. I intend to continue owning them for the foreseeable future. Just in case.
When DVDs came out, I threw away all my VCR tapes and replaced them all with DVDs. Then when blu-ray came out, I threw away all my DVDs and replaced them with blu-ray discs.
I’m sure that’ll be the end though. Nothing will ever replace blu-ray.
Those tape rewinder things were good for ripping the tape off the reel when they got to the end. Or so people said. Back then.
Yeah. With a name like blu-ray, why would you ever replace it?
we just had the rewind go kaput on our VCR. We found out that if you fast-forward to the end of the tape, it’ll stop on it’s own and automagically rewind for you. YMMV.
vum, sounds like the rewind *button* of your vcr or remote went kaput, not the rewind mechanism itself.
the nice thing about audio cassettes was that if the rewind broke you could just flip over the tape and fast forward instead.
They have these amazing things called combination DVD/VHS players.
Unlike Beta, which never caught on in a serious way, there are about 23 gazillion VHS tapes out there, and they’re practically giving them away at this point (and I’m sure you’ll be finding good used VHS players at garage sales for the next 10 years).
DVD is certainly a better format, but it’s not a big deal to keep both kinds of players on hand if you don’t want to spend hundreds (or in my case thousands) of dollars replacing your VHS collection.
How will you ever parse your parents’ divorce later, without access to the original weekend visit VHS tapes?
We have a VCR/DVD combo. Actually, we have two. One is a piece of shit that very often doesn’t read a DVD for the first six to 20 times we open the player and close the player and have the laser try to read the damn thing again.
Our main one, in the living room, works far better in terms of DVDs.
And the funny thing? We never use our VHS.
We’re looking to upgrade to Blu-ray in the next year.
I haven’t used my VCR in years, but I keep it ’cause the clock is easy to read.