For the last year or three, I've been in the process of transferring my videotapes to DVD. In my lifetime, I've moved from 3/4" U-Matic tapes to Beta and then to VHS. Then for a time, I bought movies on Laserdisc and taped off the TV to VHS. Now, the 500+ Laserdiscs sit on shelves, as untouched as the 1000+ record albums in the other room. I buy movies on DVD and when there's something on TV that I want, it goes onto the TiVo…and if it's something I want to keep, I burn it to a DVD.
I know not what new formats await me in the future…but a lot of my tapes are rotting and many contain material that will never be available commercially. So I decided I'd better copy them over to DVD and every now and then, I run a few. I started with the 3/4" tapes, most of which contained shows I'd written. This went faster than I thought it would due to some fortuitous timing. I'd transferred every show I'd worked on except Garfield and Friends, which I saved for the end. The day I was going to start transferring the 121 half hours of that program, I got the call that the producers had closed a deal to put the series out on DVD. I should have been happiest that I was going to get some money out of that. Instead, the only thing I could think was, "Great…now I don't have to do those shows."
Once the 3/4" tapes were done, I went on to Beta. I'm almost finished with them and am about to get started on the VHS cassettes. There are so many of them that by the time I'm done, it'll be time to start converting all my DVDs to some other new format.
Most of the tapes are labelled but some aren't and that's where the fun begins. I shove an unlabelled tape into a machine, punch "play" and then I sit there, trying to figure out why I recorded whatever I see on it. Once in a while, I decide there was no reason; that the tape is unlabelled because I (or some friend) recorded the wrong channel or the right one at the wrong time, and there's absolutely nothing on the cassette that I could possibly care about. But often, it's something I want…and sometimes, it's something I really want. I just found some old Tony Awards broadcasts from the early nineties, some tapes of panels from comic book conventions and old episodes of Late Night from the Letterman era and from Conan's first year. I have Leno's first few Tonight Shows (which he reportedly doesn't have and doesn't want) and a lot of odd news specials from the eighties.
Some I'll transfer, some I won't. But the big decision is what to do with the tapes themselves. Throw them out? Put them in storage? I made a decision that if the tape held something that was out on DVD, I'd toss the tape. If it held something that wasn't out on DVD and it was something I really wanted, I'd transfer the program and put the tape in storage. If it wasn't out on DVD and was something I might want to watch one more time, I'd keep it around until I could do that, then dump the tape.
That made sense in theory but it's rough in practice. I'm throwing away hundreds of tapes. I'm getting rid of tapes I never watched and that doesn't feel good. One time shortly after I got my satellite dish, a station I received ran a holiday weekend marathon — every episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, in sequence. I taped all 158 of them — twelve to a cassette, even though it meant fourteen tape changes and timing my life and sleeping all weekend so I could be at the machine at the precise station break to make the swap. Monday morning, I was so proud: I had every episode of my favorite situation comedy!
Little did I know I'd never get around to watching those tapes because the shows would always be running on some channel I received. Or at least they were, up until the time I could purchase them all on DVD. I can't think of a single reason to keep the VHS tapes around but I put so much effort into recording them that it's hard to just dump them in the garbage.
The tapes could, of course, be used as blanks…and I have about fifty VHS cassettes that have always been blank. I also have no need for blank VHS cassettes. I don't think I've recorded anything on VHS for more than three years. For that matter, I wonder if I even need the four VHS machines I have stashed in the garage, right next to the three Betamaxes and my extra Laserdisc player. (I also have a camcorder that takes full-size VHS cassettes.)
Eventually, of course, everything will get tossed out or moved forever to the world of Public Storage. That includes DVDs I'm buying today because home video is not a permanent thing. As I've written elsewhere, it's all a slimy plot to see how many times they can get me to buy Goldfinger. You'd think I'd be used to it by now but I'm not. In fact, I still have the 4 minute 8mm silent Castle Films edition of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein that I owned when I was ten. I don't have a projector to play it on and I can always run my DVD of the whole movie with sound. The 8mm version is of minimal value and I can't think of a single reason to keep it around.
Still, I keep it and all my other old 8mm treasures there in my front hall closet. Because you never know when you might need something like that.