I can’t exactly recall when I watched my last movie on VHS, but the cassette tape once defined my childhood. For kids of the 1980s and 1990s, videotapes were currency—expensive objects that you treasured, rewound, and wore out. When Disney released a movie “from the vault,” it wasn’t just marketing—it was an event. Owning a copy of The Little Mermaid or Aladdin meant you weren’t at the mercy of broadcast schedules or the local rental store. For me, I may not recall the date, but I know the tape I played last was Star Wars. A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back remain masterpieces; Return of the Jedi is a well-deserved fantastic victory lap, but together the trilogy was a kind of scripture, experienced before the internet dissected every frame which would undo the Sequel Trilogy.
But George Lucas could not resist revising his own gospel. In the late 1990s, the Special Editions re-released the films with shiny new CGI. Lucasfilm marketed the Special Editions as celebrations, but they felt like revisions. Seeing them on the big screen was what my fanboy heart wanted, yet the soul of the movies—the scrappy charm of models, matte paintings, harried pacing and practical effects—disappeared under digital gloss and the ego of adding scenes that there was not technology for and left on the cutting room floor. We got Jabba the Hutt in A New Hope, but the movie was not better for it. Steven Spielberg, too, tinkered with E.T.: The Extra Terrestrial for an anniversary release, digitally replacing agents’ guns with walkie-talkies. Audiences balked. These changes remind us how fragile cultural memory is: once a director overwrites the past, the originals risk disappearing.
Ironically, VHS was itself a bulwark against forgetting. In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc.—the famous “Betamax case”—that consumers could legally record television broadcasts for later viewing (“time-shifting”).¹ Families took full advantage. We filled shelves with Christmas specials, cartoons, and primetime events, often preserving not just the shows but the commercials in between. Those ads, frozen in amber, now say more about their era than the programs themselves. These were part of the dialogue, as much as Mystery Science Theater 3000’s urgent plea to “keep circulating the tapes.”
The cultural and economic impact was massive. By 1980, VHS had already captured roughly 60 percent of the U.S. VCR market, outpacing Sony’s technically superior Betamax.² A VCR still cost between $700 and $1,400 in the early 1980s³—no small investment—but the installed base ballooned from under 10 million units in 1980 to more than 200 million worldwide by the end of the decade.⁴ Home recording had become a fact of life. Paving the way for TiVo, digital on-demand, and a world of copycats.
Disney understood this power. Its “Vault” strategy withheld animated classics from sale for years, then reissued them in limited runs before locking them away again. The scarcity generated hype and guaranteed sales: Cinderella’s 1988 VHS release, for instance, sold millions before being pulled from shelves the very next year.⁶ Beauty and the Beast (1991) was released on video in October 1992 and placed in the Vault just six months later.⁷
But VHS was more than an economic juggernaut. It was tactile culture. The ritual of sliding a cassette from its sleeve, blowing dust from the plastic window, and pressing rewind was part of the viewing experience. “Be kind, rewind” wasn’t just a sticker—it was etiquette, a reminder that media was physical and shared. Tapes warped if left in the sun, got fuzzy after dozens of plays, and sometimes snapped outright, leaving a ribbon of magnetic tape to be spliced with Scotch tape in an act of home surgery. The imperfections themselves became memories: the static burst during your favorite cartoon, the crooked tracking lines that signaled a tape’s overuse, the handwriting on a label fading with time.
The format also reshaped our habits of consumption. Rental stores like Blockbuster exploded in the 1980s and 1990s, democratizing access but also policing taste; controversially removing scenes, selling off old movies, walls of new releases, lenticular horror movie covers, and borrowed video games and consoles. Late fees became family legends, and the video store became a social hub where aisles doubled as cultural battlegrounds—Schwarzenegger or Stallone? Horror aisle or Comedy shelf? Owning tapes meant prestige; renting them meant discovery. Both cultivated the sense that media was finite, that you had to choose carefully because you could not scroll endlessly; you held an object.
And VHS altered the relationship between consumers and corporations in ways that echo today. The Betamax ruling did not just protect time-shifting; it laid groundwork for the legal battles over Napster in the 2000s, MGM vs Grokster in 2005, YouTube in the 2010s, and even TikTok today. Each fight boils down to the same tension: do individuals control their media, or do corporations? VHS taught a generation that we could tape, copy, and archive for ourselves. Streaming reverses that logic, restoring control to the distributors. The Millenium copyright act allowed us to make digital copies of music, but not our movies.
Today, the gatekeepers look different. Netflix, Disney+, and YouTube giveth and taketh away: altering lineups, pulling shows, demonetizing creators, and erasing digital footprints. We’ve already seen entire films disappear from streaming platforms because a studio calculated that a tax write-off was worth more than cultural availability.
But now, we own almost nothing. Spotify and its kin swallowed the music industry, taking the decline of 1995-2005 and extending it to another decade. After the collapse of physical album sales in the 2000s, it took a pandemic and several global billion-dollar tours to make the industry grow again. But this came at the expense of the live experience for many fans, as ticket prices spiraled out of control. Even then, we lose something—unless you’re a band like Phish that openly encourages fans to record and circulate shows. Most concerts are one-time moments, and without the ability to buy a physical album or affordable recording, it becomes almost impossible to “own” those memories. What we could once replay endlessly on a cassette, CD, or DVD has now become ephemeral, subject to the economics of exclusivity.
Collectors of physical media act as archivists now. Blockbuster closed its doors, Netflix ended disc rentals, and Target and Best Buy cut physical media sales. Without companies like Vinegar Syndrome, Arrow, and Criterion, many old films would vanish. Boutique Blu-ray labels restore lost movies; 4K enthusiasts buy pristine discs of films they already own; vinyl and cassette collectors expand their ranks. They chase not just quality but permanence. VHS, ironically clunky and fragile, carried that same assurance: once recorded, culture stayed recorded.
This shift pushes us beyond freedom of speech and into freedom of memory. Most people think of freedom of speech as shouting their opinions aloud—only to hear someone else shout back. But true freedom of speech depends on memory. My generation saw that most clearly in Jon Stewart’s Daily Show during the Bush years. Stewart replayed politicians contradicting themselves—serpentine hypocrisies revealed by simple footage. The joke landed because the memory stayed intact.
As YouTube turned from an open stage into a corporate platform, that archive slipped away. Freedom of speech became less about dialogue and more about erasure: trolling, astroturfing, distortion. Platforms demonetized people for jokes, sexuality, or opinions and pushed them to fragmented corners of the internet. Americans have always lived with short cultural memory, but we once had ballast—grainy VHS tapes, yellowed newspapers, shelves of DVDs. As a historian, I know when the record itself becomes malleable, freedom of speech collapses into freedom of memory.
We need cultural moments. We need permanence. A society that forgets too quickly invites easy rewriting. In an era of censorship, content removal, demonetization, and deletion, controversial works must exist in owned form. VHS may have been clunky and fragile, but no one could patch, delete, or erase it without leaving scars. It embodied permanence in a way digital platforms refuse. Streaming feels convenient but unstable; tapes remain inconvenient but reassuring.
That’s why I keep worn cassettes, buy discs of films I love, and collect old shows. They serve not just as nostalgia but as fragments of memory, preserved in plastic. When I think of the last time, I rewound a tape—likely Star Wars,—I don’t just remember the movie. I relive a childhood living room: the whirr of the VCR, the sticker that read “Be Kind, Rewind,” the sense that once I pressed play, the story belonged to me. Hard drives fail, but discs promise longevity. Memory fades, but the artifacts we hold matter more than ever when others work to erase them.
Dr. Nic Hoffmann is an Atlanta-based historian of nineteenth-century medicine and a longtime educator. After earning his PhD researching Civil War-era healthcare, he teaches AP U.S. History and American Studies at a Catholic high school in Georgia and US History at Georgia Gwinnett College. When he’s not in the classroom, he hosts two podcasts—Required Reading, which brings literature to a wide audience, and Myopia Movies, a comedic film review show—and performs improvisational comedy in the spirit of Mystery Science Theater 3000 with Cineprov. He is currently completing The Doctor Will See You Now, a humorous exploration of the rituals behind every day medical appointments.
References
- Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984).
- “The Format Wars: of Lasers and (Creative) Destruction,” ArsTechnica, https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2010/01/is-the-end-of-the-format-wars-upon-us/.
- “The Cost of VCRs in the 80s,” Capture.com, https://www.capture.com/blogs/video/the-cost-of-vcrs-in-the-80s.
- Luís Cabral, “The Economics of VHS vs. Betamax,” NYU Stern School of Business, https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/lcabral/teaching/betamax.pdf.
- “Cinderella (1950 film),” https://web.archive.org/web/20181128075752/http://www.jpbox-office.com/fichfilm.php?id=9635&view=31
- “Disney Uncorks A Monster Hit With `Aladdin’,” Billboard, https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Billboard/90s/1993/BB-1993-10-09.pdf.