Goodbye, VCR

Statistic of the day:
Percentage of Americans who can’t remember the year that 9/11 happened: 30.
--Harper’s Index

Quote of the day:
"My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too."
--Peter DeVries

It’s official. Although more than 300,000 VCRs were sold in the U.S. last year, the major Hollywood studios will no longer release movies on videocassette.

We’ve always called the tapes “VHS,” even though we don’t know what that stands for (Vertical Helical Scan--I had to look it up). Now we call our discs “DVDs,” even though we don’t know what that stands for, either (Digital Versatile Disc--I looked that up, too).

The VCR changed our lives. (See my entry Trend, We Hardly Knew Ye.) We developed the habit of visiting our neighborhood video store two or three times a week. And for movie fans like Merrie and me, it opened a bottomless treasure chest.

We now could see just about any movie we wanted, any time we wanted to watch it. We didn’t have to bear with chopped-up TV versions, or the selections on HBO or at our local revival house. We could watch hundreds of films that would or could never be shown on TV. And we did.

Our local Wherehouse had a promotion where they awarded us points each time we rented a video. One year we rented 165 videos and got a boombox out of the deal.

I suppose my recollection of the early days of the VCR echoes my parents’ stories about the early days of television. Just as their recollection echoed their parents’ stories about the early days of radio.

As my mother used to say, “Time marches on.”