FISCHER: Be kind, rewind

By Travis Fischer, tkfischer@charlescitypress.com

My journey back in time continues as I’ve been spending my free moments exploring the small treasure trove of decades-old VHS tapes.

One such discovery was a video recording of the Meservey-Thornton Elementary Winter Concert from 1994, featuring not one, but two, musical plays performed by the children of southern Cerro Gordo County.

I watched the entire performance eager to see what I looked like 30 years ago before remembering that I wasn’t in school in December of 1994. Of course that would be the concert performance that would survive through the ages and not the one where I got to be a dinosaur that decides eating Christmas cookies was a better idea than eating Santa’s reindeer.

Still, it was nice seeing the once familiar faces of my classmates captured on what was, at the time, probably the highest quality video recording available to a tiny rural school.

Another cassette I found featured a couple of movies I had recorded off of ABC from an affiliate station that, judging from the occasional analog flurry, I don’t think we had a particularly good signal for.

The first was the 1997 direct-to-television premiere of Disney’s “The Love Bug,” a sequel/reboot of the 1968 classic starring the great Bruce Campbell and directed by Peyton Reed, who you may know today as the director of the three Ant-Man movies.

The movie is exactly what you would expect from a late ’90s made-for-TV feature, but I kinda wonder if I have some kind of rarity on my hands here. From what I can tell the movie isn’t available on any streaming service nor has it gotten a DVD or Blu-Ray release.

Between Amazon and eBay I managed to find exactly eight available copies of the VHS release. My fuzzy, static ridden recording makes nine.

Sure, those official releases may be of higher quality, but they probably don’t have the winning lotto numbers from Nov. 30, 1997 rolling across the screen.

In addition to “The Love Bug,” that particular VHS tape also features “the network television premiere” of 1994’s “Street Fighter.” And man, was it tricky figuring out where exactly on the six-hour VHS tape the movie started.

You know what I don’t miss from the days before digital? Rewinding and fast-forwarding.

It’s not something I’ve thought about in years, but figuring out what’s on these old VHS tapes has really made me appreciate the quality of life improvements that the digital age brought us. Being able to press a button to skip ahead to a predetermined point or click on a bar to go to the exact timestamp you want is immensely better than what I grew up with.

Anybody else remember having to develop a keen sense of how long it takes to fast-forward through a commercial break? I didn’t realize it was a skill I’d lost until I needed it again.

I didn’t think it would take overly long to go through all of these tapes, but I’d forgotten that the only way to really do that is to either blindly fast-forward or just watch them, the slow way.

It’s amazing what we put up with back in the day, isn’t it?

— Travis Fischer is a news writer for the Charles City Press and always rewound his rentals