Home Video
by Mark Evanier
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED 5/19/00
Comics Buyer's Guide
In the last dozen years, we've seen amazing advances in the world of home entertainment, particularly video. All around the globe, men and women of great genius have invented, developed, improved and otherwise brought forth new means by which an image may be recorded, disseminated and ultimately viewed in your very own living room.
It seems like every time we turn around, there's a new and better format available to us, as well as fresh, innovative hardware on which to play that format. Just in the last quarter-century, we have seen the narrowly-distributed 3/4" videotape recorder give way to the popular Betamax format, which was outdone by the more popular VHS format, which was improved upon by S-VHS and 8mm video, as well as Laserdisc and now DVD.
Many people believe that this technological surge is motivated by a primal, human longing to better that which already exists. This is not so.
No, the reason for all this progress is that someone wants to see how many times they can get me to buy Goldfinger.
My interest in home video began early. I was around 11 when my Uncle Aaron died and I inherited his 8mm movie projector and the home movies he had taken of our family. I still have them — an extremely extensive collection of films of Jews waving at the camera.
I have film of my Aunt Dot waving in front of the Eiffel Tower. I have film of my Aunt Dot waving in front of Buckingham Palace. I have film of my Aunt Dot waving in front of the Grand Canyon. Once in a while — if she was in England or just so things didn't get repetitious — she'd use the other hand.
Uncle Aaron's cinematography would scarcely cause Gordon Willis to sweat the competition. He would visit, for example, the Sphinx and he'd do a pan of the scene. Then he'd do another pan of the same scene, but with Aunt Dot in the foreground, waving. Then, to be daring, he would trade places with her. Aunt Dot would operate the camera, panning the exact same scene, and Uncle Aaron would be the Jew waving in the foreground.
You can always spot the scenes where Aunt Dot was behind the lens. She never did learn how to use the viewfinder, so they consist mostly of sky. Every so often, you can see Uncle Aaron's hand, waving at the bottom of the frame.
Sometimes — to be even more avant-garde — Uncle Aaron would find someone else to run the Bell-and-Howell, and both he and Aunt Dot would get in the shot and wave.
Finally, having exhausted all possible combinations of Jews waving, Uncle Aaron would check the film gauge and discover that he'd shot a whopping twenty-two seconds of The Sphinx. So he'd put Aunt Dot back in front of it, tell her to start waving and then he'd shoot the whole thing over again.
Hey, you can laugh if you want. But it cost a lot less than that Wild, Wild West movie with Will Smith. And it's at least as entertaining.
I also had some movies that didn't have relatives in them. A company called Castle Films used to sell 8mm abridgements of feature films. For instance, I owned (and still have somewhere) a silent, one-reel condensation of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. It ran about eleven minutes and, amazingly, they got most of the plot in. They also had a 50-foot version which chopped things down to under four minutes.
In the same crate, I have reels of Laurel and Hardy, Buster Keaton, W.C. Fields, Woody Woodpecker and about a dozen others. Some came from Castle. Others were the output of a wonderful firm called Blackhawk Films, which operated out of Davenport, Iowa. Blackhawk did more for the preservation of silent movies than almost any entity in the sixties.
Home video didn't advance much past 8mm until the seventies when a few companies began selling — primarily for usage within the TV industry — video cassette recorders. The first employed reel-to-reel tapes. Then they went to these large cassettes containing 3/4" videotape.
I had — and still own — one of them. They were amazing at the time, though one could not walk down to the corner and rent a movie to play on them. The movie studios not only did not release their wares on tape, they swore this would never happen.
And I mean swore, as in "hand on the Bible, so help me God." When the Betamax first appeared, a gaggle of film companies sued the company which manufactured it, Sony, charging that it was the instrument by which their copyrights would be violated (people taping off TV) and their products rendered worthless.
In an actual court of law, top executives of Universal, Disney and other studios testified that they would never, under any circumstances, sell copies of their old movies and TV shows on tape. Never, never, never. It would be financial suicide, they said, which would irrevocably destroy the movie industry by triggering the closure of theaters, the bootlegging of their product and the end of mankind as we know it.
Of course today, darn near everything anyone would pay to view — and much that they would not — is available for rental or purchase on cassette. The nation's movie theaters have not all closed, the bootlegging biz is nowhere near the problem anticipated…and Sony owns one of those movie studios.
It just goes to show you…what, I have no idea. But it just goes to show you.
I actually had Goldfinger on 3/4" videotape, along with maybe thirty other films. They were obtained by buying from or trading with acquaintances who skulked about like vendors of heroin or worse. They'd only deal with folks they knew and were incessantly checking over their shoulders, telling you, "Remember, you didn't get this from me…"
Eventually, inevitably, movies started coming out on Beta tape — lousy, Z-grade independents and hoary public domain stuff at first, but real films close behind. One of the first I purchased was Goldfinger — a particularly-poor video transfer, as I recall. So much of it looked like it was underwater, I thought I'd gotten a copy of Thunderball. A better copy soon came out on Beta and I bought it.
At the time, I thought it was my permanent copy for my permanent library — the copy of Goldfinger I'd watch every year or so until I was about the age Sean Connery is now. My naïve cockiness was on par with that of Auric Goldfinger himself, boasting of how he had concocted an infallible plan to penetrate Fort Knox, detonate a nuclear device and, of course, kill 007.
In hindsight, I think ol' Auric was more in touch with reality than I was.
For a time, we Beta people felt secure building up our collections. True, there was this other format — this clunky VHS thing — catching on. But from a tech standpoint, Beta was better. It was the Sony format, after all, and in the field of home electronics, the name Sony was greatly revered.
Experts have since penned long monographs on how it happened but slowly 'n' surely — through treachery and deception, no doubt — VHS crept to an equal footing. Video shops were divided into two sections, equal in size at one point. It was such a toss-up that, maybe once a day, I'd be queried by some friend…
"We're thinking of buying a VCR. Which is the way to go? Beta or VHS?"
At first, I told them Beta. Beta was what I had, Beta was what all serious video enthusiasts had, VHS was the choice of the hoi polloi. Before long though, my convictions waned and I fell back on a less committed response: "Buy whichever most of your friends have."
There was a year there — today, it feels like back around the Coolidge administration — where we could all sense Beta slipping away from us. We'd go to stores and notice the shelves had been rearranged once again: Always more VHS, less Beta. Press releases would tout that manufacturers were duping VHS and Beta copies in ever-widening ratios.
For Beta collectors, the penultimate sign of the Apocalypse came when companies stopped making separate boxes for their Beta tapes. Once, they had printed one box for the VHS release and another, smaller box for the Beta copies. Suddenly, we all noted, they were just manufacturing the one, larger VHS-sized package. The Beta version would come in the same box but with a little cardboard space-filler, and a Beta sticker over the VHS logo on the outside. It wasn't just ominous. It was humiliating.
That was when I slowed my purchase of Beta tapes. I was still in denial that I would soon switch my allegiance to VHS. Deep in my wallet though, I knew it. It was only a matter of time.
Every die-hard Beta buyer can tell you the moment they knew it was all over.
I used to buy most of my tapes at Tower Video up on Sunset Boulevard. One morning, a Beta-soulmate called and breathlessly told me, "If you haven't been up to Tower, get up there right away! The ad hasn't hit the papers yet but they're selling Beta tapes — only Beta — dirt-cheap!" Half an hour later, I was in the Tower Video parking lot where their "Beta Blow-Out" was in full swing.
They were selling thousands of tapes — new and rental copies — for four bucks each, six for $20. And they were all, every last one of them, Beta. Joining about two dozen of my fellow Betamax owners, I plunged in, grabbing up any tape that even vaguely interested me, aiming for some multiple of six.
It was, at first, a heady experience. For months now, we had all shared the suffering of being Beta in an increasingly-VHS world. We all knew the utter feeling of non-belonging that came with rushing to the shelves to purchase a coveted film and finding ten VHS copies and zero that played in our machines. What a thrill to see so many Beta tapes before us!
But as I was putting my thirtieth tape in the shopping basket and wondering if I might go for 36, a chilling thought hit me. Looking around, I could see that it was simultaneously occurring to my Beta-brethren…
Oh, my God. Tower Video is giving up on Beta.
Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
I hurried up to the cash register, as did others. Standing there was a manager and he was telling one of our kind, "No, no…we're just clearing overstock out of our warehouses. We will always carry a full line of movies and tapes in Beta."
To prove this, he pointed to a badly-lettered sign. It said, "We are just clearing overstock out of our warehouses. We will always carry a full line of movies and tapes in Beta."
I knew then that it was over. I put 18 of the tapes back, paid half-heartedly for the rest and then on my way home, stopped off and bought my first VHS videocassette recorder. A day or two later, I purchased my first movie on VHS. It was — you guessed it — Goldfinger.
Six months later, the "full line of movies and tapes in Beta" at Tower Video fit on one shelf, about two feet long. It was over in the corner next to the cassettes in PAL and other foreign formats.
Since then, I have been a multi-formatted person. I have VHS, plus I have a Betamax for those odd occasions when I wish to play an old tape. (A friend of mine claims that the best way to insult a porno movie actress is to tell her that you have all her films…on Beta.)
I also have that 3/4" VCR for when I wish to play a really old tape. Come to think of it, I also still have my uncle's old 8mm movie projector in the hall closet.
A few years after I succumbed to VHS, movies-on-disc came along. I might have purchased the RCA SelectaVision but I'd learned something from the debacle of Beta. I waited and soon after, the Laserdisc format came along and, before long, SelectaVision was on the ropes. One of the first movies I purchased on Laserdisc was Goldfinger.
A year or so later, the Criterion company brought out a deluxe Laserdisc of Goldfinger. I, of course, purchased it.
Then a few years later, MGM Home Video brought out the super-deluxe boxed edition of Goldfinger in CAV format along with a "Making of" documentary, an audio commentary track by the director and other special features. I, being a brain-dead zombie with no will of my own, purchased one of these, too.
Not only that but I was stupid enough to think that this was the last copy of Goldfinger I would ever purchase. I think it was the third or fourth "last copy of Goldfinger I would ever purchase" that I purchased.
Recently, I purchased a DVD player and, of course, the obligatory copy of Goldfinger on DVD. This is the last copy of Goldfinger I will ever purchase…until the next one.
Boy, I wish I liked that movie.
Oh, it's not that bad. It just feels like it's missing something. Like, you know the scene where Mr. Goldfinger is about to blow up Fort Knox?
He starts the timer going on a nuclear device that looks like a big laundry hamper, and it takes around nine minutes of fight scenes to count down the last sixty seconds. Before that, Goldfinger runs out, switches into a U.S. military uniform and uses a machine gun to shoot a few of his own men before he flees in a helicopter.
All this is intercut with shots of Sean Connery, handcuffed to the laundry hamper, trying desperately to get free, kill Odd Job and stop the bomb from going off. It's one of the great, gripping moments in motion picture history but, like I said, something is missing — and I can just envision how it ought to go.
The bomb is ticking away, counting down. Bond is sweating, trying to trace the jumble of wires…desperate to find a means of disarming the nuclear device. He is just about to break a wire that he thinks may do it when a hand reaches in, stops him and switches the bomb off.
Bond exhales, then looks over to see who has rescued him. And there they are…
Aunt Dot and Uncle Aaron. Waving at the camera.