I Confess To Having Two VCR's

"Joshua Phillips writes that something was lost when videos went from magnetic tape and plastic, to plastic discs, and now to digital streams as browsing isles is no more and the once-great video shops slowly board up their windows across the country. Future generations may know little of the days when buying a movie meant you owned it even if the Internet went down and when getting a movie meant you had to scour aisles of boxes in search of one whose cover art called back a story that echoed your interests. Josh Johnson, one of the filmmakers behind the upcoming documentary 'Rewind This!' hopes to tell the story of how and why home video came about, and how it changed our culture giving B movies and films that didn't make the silver screen their own chance to shine. 'Essentially, the rental market expanded, because of voracious consumer demand, into non-blockbuster, off-Hollywood video content which would never have had a theatrical life otherwise,' says Palmer. While researching the documentary Palmer found something interesting: there is a resurgence taking place of people going back to VHS because a massive number of films are 'trapped on VHS' with 30 and 40 percent of films released on VHS never to be seen again on any other format. 'Most of the true VHS fanatics are children of the 1980s,' says Palmer. 'Whether they are motivated by a sense of nostalgia or prefer the format for the grainy aesthetic qualities of magnetic tape or some other reason entirely unknown, each tapehead is unique like a snowflake.'"A great resource for very cheap movies is VCR tapes from the Goodwill. I buy them for a buck and convert them to digital and they look good. The cost is way below any other legal source for movies to own. Who needs bittorrent when you have VCR!`Michael McDonald showed me my first VCR in 1972. It was his father's new Betamax. It was the size of a small suitcase and could record from the TV and play back instantly. I was so blown away. And then he says, "You think that is something, check this out" and then he puts a coffee cup of water into this small box and pushes a button, a minute or so later he opens the box and takes out a steaming hot cup of water, once again I was blown away! Michael changed my world right then and there by giving me a look into the future...now here I am typing away at you from my leather chair in my own living room on a device that is not connected by any wires. If you had told me this way going to happen that day in 1972 I would have been triple blown away!So what's next?