Warner Home Video kicks in the door to the VCR revolution in January 1980


The snow had started falling again in late January 1980, the kind of wet, clinging snow that sticks to everything like bad memories you can't quite shake. In living rooms across America, people were still arguing over whether the picture on their new television sets looked better with the lights on or off, and the machines—those big, clunky VCRs and Betamax players—sat like squat, patient animals in the corners of dens and family rooms, waiting for something to feed them.

Up until then, if you wanted to see a flick like Deliverance, you had to wait for it to show up at the local cinema or pray the network censors didn’t chop it into confetti for the Saturday Night Movie. But around January 30, 1980, the world shifted on its axis just a hair. Warner Home Video dumped a whole bucket of titles onto the market—VHS and Betamax—and suddenly, the cinema wasn't a place you went; it was a thing you owned.

Imagine it. You’re sitting there in your wood-paneled den, the smell of stale Pall Malls and microwave popcorn hanging in the air. You slide a chunky plastic brick into a machine that sounds like a dying Buick. Clunk-whirrr. And there they are. The Wild Bunch gunslinging right there in your living room. No ushers. No sticky floors. Just you and the glow of the Zenith.

You could walk into an electronics store or one of those newfangled video clubs (the ones that smelled like burnt popcorn and plastic clamshell cases) and there they were, lined up like tombstones in a Hollywood cemetery: Blazing Saddles, The In-Laws, Hooper, Oh, God!, Superman: The Movie still riding high from its theatrical run. Prices were obscene by today's standards—fifty, sixty, seventy bucks for a tape you might watch twice—but people paid.

There was something almost unholy about it, if you stopped to think. Before this push, movies lived in theaters or in the dim memory of a late-night broadcast. Now they could follow you home. You could watch Caddyshack at three in the morning with the sound low so the kids wouldn't wake up screaming about gophers. The living room became a private screening room, a little kingdom where the studio's monsters and heroes answered only to you.

By the end of that week in 1980, the home video market wasn't just a curiosity for the rich folks up on the hill. It was a hungry beast, waking up and realizing it liked the taste of our living rooms. It was the start of a long, strange trip that would eventually lead us to the "rentals" and "rewinds" of our youth.

The age of the VCR had arrived, and believe me, it was boss.

Outside, the snow kept falling, burying cars and mailboxes and the old ways of doing things. Inside, the glow from the television painted our faces blue, and for a couple of hours we were gods of our own small domain. That was the push in late January 1980. Not just tapes on shelves, but a door creaking open. Something old and familiar stepping into the light of a stranger's living room. Something that would never quite leave. It was the hum of the VCR, my friends, a sound that, for a certain generation, is as haunting and nostalgic as any ghost story.

Location: Hollywood, Los Angeles, CA, USA

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