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I have about 150 VHS tapes still.
The last one I watched was the Beatles in Yellow Submarine, which I love. Great music and very unusual animation. While I switched over to DVD over 10 years ago, I very occasionally pull out VHS tapes to watch. In some ways I liked VHS better than than DVD. I used to timer- record the PBS News Hour every day while I was at work, so I could watch it when I got home, and then recorded over it after. DVD you can only record once. VHS was a simpler technology that I found easier to work with. A few I unwittingly saved and was glad I did. One had a Jim Lehrer interview of Pat Buchanan during his run in the 1992 presidential primaries.
And I go through another DVD recorder about every 4 years. A DVD recorder seems to average about 100 six-hour discs of recording before it breaks.
Whereas VHS recorders I had seemed to last about 10 years of constant use.
DVDs also do weird stuff, and at points unpredictably freeze up or don't play.
I have a complete series DVD of the original OUTER LIMITS tv series, and when I watched it about two years ago again, several of the episodes would freeze up. Some I could with effort manipulate to watch the episode, others are unwatchable, I think 3 or 4 episodes out of 49 were that way. I only watched about 10 of the episodes when I bought the collection back in 2009, so I don't know if it was that way 11 years ago, or if it deteriorated to the point it doesn't fully work now. This was the only time I watched all 49 episodes.
A little over a year ago, I also got the (at that time) complete CHICAGO P.D. series and while that series was new when I bought it, a few episodes of seasons 3 and 4 (of 5 seasons) also froze up in a few spots. I would stop the DVD, and then push play, and it usually would work on the second try, there were none I could not watch in their entirety with a little effort.
But those are some of the issues I never had with VHS, that made me like it and find it in some ways easier to work with.
Another odd thing, back in the 1990-2000 period, I had 2 VHS player/recorders, and when I really liked a movie I rented from Blockbuster, I would play it in one and dub it over onto a blank VHS tape in the other, and watched many of those movies again on VHS. But when I tried years later to dub them onto a DVD, there was copyright protection that blocked me from dubbing them from VHS to DVD ! But fortunately, it somehow allowed me to dub and enjoy them for many years on VHS.
In addition to many movies and TV series I have on VHS that I never got around to dubbing over to DVD, I have about 15 or 20 ...ahem... private gentlemen's video tapes.
I don't know if it's possible to get another VHS/DVD combination unit that would allow me to transfer over the remaining VHS tapes I have to DVD. Of if I did, whether I would ever watch them again. It's a tough call whether it's worth the effort. In addition to store-bought movies and series DVD collections, maybe 75 or 100, I probably have about 300 to 400 DVDs I've recorded. I don't know if I'll watch them all again either, but they're nice to have, if I want to.
I especially loved a Samsung VHS unit I bought around 1995, that I liked so much I bought the newer version of the same unit again, around 2002. It had a very clear picture, even on most stuff I recorded previously on other VHS units. And it had a very fast motor, that with a very visible tape counter I could easily wind to the exact minute of a tape I wanted to watch. Another great feature of VHS is it would stay at the exact point you turned it off. So even if you turned off the unit, you could come back exactly where you left off. With some DVD players they do this, others it goes back to the beginning if you turn it off. Although skip/advance is usually much more navigable on DVD than VHS, and I'm so much more used to DVD now that I'm not as nostalgic for VHS as I used to be.
I didn't buy my first DVD/VHS combo unit till 2007, and even then my transition to DVD was far from immediate.
Since 1984 when I bought my first VHS player/recorder, we've seen the evolution to DVD, Blu-Ray, DVR which I never bothered with yet, and now so many movies and series online and in other electronic forms, as clear as DVD. It was around 2000 that I noticed video rental stores begin to phase out VHS and go completely over to DVD.
Some of the VHS movies I've nostalgically watched again somewhat frequently, such as Night of the Comet, Doin' Time On Planet Earth, Mischief, Alien, and Aliens, and other 1980's movies I recorded in that era from HBO, the picture on HBO was a little bit snowy, because cable television was an actual cable to your TV back then, whereas now it's by satellite. And while the picture is far more clear now, the downside is when there is a heavy rain it blocks the satellite signal for a few minutes. In the days of coaxial cable it didn't.
It's fun to watch again not only the movies, but the HBO intros, and the slightly blurred picture image, exactly as it was back then on cable, sometimes letting you remember things you'd forgotten like that. Or like the commercials for "new" cars that are now 35 years old and silly looking, not modern or futuristic as they seemed back then. Or "Pepsi, the choice of a new generation", commercials. Or Burger King's "a nationwide search for Herb, the only person who never ate a Burger King hamburger" commercials. Back when recording, I used to try and pause to edit out the commercials of movies and shows, but now I value the commercials I left in on some tapes, as capturing that part of popular culture that they inadvertantly preserved.
One of the best and most frequently re-watched things I've recorded were the original Star Trek episodes, that they annoyingly changed with new computer graphics when released on DVD about 20 years ago. I finally got around to buying the complete TOS series on DVD about 7 years ago, and it annoyed me that they changed the episodes. But unlike most people, I still have the original episodes, with the original special effects, unaltered. Those I had the good sense 10 years ago to transfer to DVD !
So... that's a sampling of my VHS collection, and the ones I've recently chosen to watch again.
