The video store, as it is nostalgically remembered, looks like a record shop, or a hookah parlor. Staffed by scruffy burners or neo-hippies who “really know their stuff,” splayed with shelves at all angles, plastered in posters, encrusted with knick-knacks.
Some such stores might have existed, but the earliest video stores were nothing like them. They were modernist celebrations of minimalism and order. Light grey walls and dark grey carpets, austere racks displaying evenly-spaced, singular copies of video boxes. They were quiet and circumspect. Some were tacked on to television equipment repair facilities; others freely stood behind nondescript façades. Indulgences to style were limited: a neon accent, or an OCR-inspired logotype. Before video was culture, it was technology.
What kind of technology? One that cut wormholes through space-time. Called “time shifting,” the videocassette and the VCR made it possible to record a program broadcast at a particular time and to watch it later. Or, to rent or buy a videocassette copy of a film and to watch it from the comfort of home after it had left the theater. It did this for two decades, from 1975 to 1995, and then the DVD continued its legacy, in part, for a decade more.
But last week, news broke that the last remaining global manufacturer of VHS-format VCRs would cease production of the devices at the end of this month. Funai Electric, which marketed their products in North America under the name Sanyo, cited difficulty acquiring parts as a rationale. After reaching peak sales of 15 million in the VHS VCR’s heyday, Funai reportedly sold 750,000 last year. Sony, creator of the competing Betamax-format VCR, stopped making players in 2002 and ceased to manufacture new cassettes for that machine this spring.
There’s no doubt about it: The VCR is dead. And now that it’s gone, the machine’s true purpose can reveal itself.