THIS is a movie. And this is a movie. And this
isn’t just a movie – it was a catastrophic revolution in home entertainment that brought down
one of the 20th century’s biggest tech empires. It weighs nearly a pound and a half, and
it’s even larger than a LaserDisc – it’s actually a 12 ⅝” x 13 ⅞” plastic housing
containing a Capacitance Electronic Disc that pushed the basic concept of the
phonograph to its audio-visual limits, all to turn your shag mustard-colored
living room into a movie theater. It took some filthy milk crates, the patience of
a Tibetan lama, and a serendipitous technology connection to understand what this thing
was – and how to actually get it to work. It was a fascinating and ambitious idea
so good that the only possible outcome was… a total disaster that splattered
the blood and fur of a cute terrier mix named Nipper on the semi-truck
grill of technological progress. I was flipping through the February 1984 issue
of Popular Science when I found an article on “Video Teachers” – and that one article took
me to a 1977 cover story, RCA R&D in 1964, and then, weirdly, back to the future. William
J. Hawkins was reporting on new RCA interactive videodisc players that could do more than
just let you own and watch movies at home. It could be an on-demand video teacher, but
you could also play Full Motion Video games. It was called the “Selectavision 400.” I’d never even heard of the Selectavision
100, and I was an 80’s kid whose dad co-owned a video rental store. My adolescent brain
was baptized by VHS tapes and molded like clay in the hands of hundreds of viewings
of The Goonies, The Neverending Story, and Adventures in Babysitting – and it was
permanently scarred by the cover for The Blob. I usually only get a piece of
tech when I know exactly what it is – but I grabbed a refurbished RCA
SJT-400 off eBay kind of on a whim. All I had were those Popular Science articles.
Hawkins described the device's ability to provide quizzes at the end of a videodisc lesson
to test your knowledge. “A Walk Through the Universe” is an interactive exploration of
astronomy and the cosmos, which… seems awesome. And that was my first problem
with the Selectavision. I searched the depths of eBay for a copy that
could arrive at the same time as my player – and I got nothing, not even past auctions in
the sold listings. Why? Because the title featured in the article, “A Walk Through the
Universe,” was never released to the public. CED Magic is an exhaustive and comprehensive
website detailing all-things-Selectavision, including a breakdown of all the interactive
releases. The page dedicated to “A Walk Through the Universe” explains how it was only
distributed to libraries and educational institutions – it was never available for retail
sale. So Popular Science was evangelizing the dawn of interactive educational videodiscs
and highlighting the promise of strolling through the universe from your couch –
just as RCA was breaking its promises. What’s going on here? Hawkins did mention three other interactive discs,
a horse-betting game and two murder mysteries. So, I got all three to play at the
dinner parties I don’t have. There are lots of goofy relics of antiquated
technology – but that 1977 cover story made it clear that the Selectavision was a
revolutionary piece of Star Trek futurism. “Here At Last: Video-Disc Players.” Now we
have an endless supply of cheap, on-demand content in our pockets and living rooms – but in
the 1970s, the only real mass media you could own was music. It had been nearly 100 years since
the first phonograph put audio in your hands, and the proliferation of vinyl records
established real ownership of sound. You could buy any song or album you wanted,
and you could play it at home whenever you wanted. 8-tracks came along and cassette tapes
and walkmans were about to make it all portable. But video? The only way to see
a movie was at the theater, or chopped up into commercially-separated
segments on whatever television stations were playing fixed-time-slotted
programming on a handful of channels. Did ya miss the latest episode of The Incredible
Hulk with Lou Ferrigno? Too bad! Did you eat Grandma Gertrude’s dodgy oyster dip to be polite?
Great, well that one time Star Wars actually came on, you spent the Mos Eisley cantina scene
and the Death Star explosion in the bathroom. John Free’s article about RCA and Phillips/MCA
videodisc players described a future where viewers could control what they watched
and when. He’d seen RCA’s Selectavision – which was physically massive – with discs
that could hold 30 minutes of video on each side. They didn’t have a caddy yet, so they
required extremely delicate handling. He wrote, “Pictures I’ve seen at several
demonstrations were excellent.” The keys to entertainment were about to
be handed over to consumers. He said, “Both the RCA and Philips/MCA players
will appear in stores just when new home video-cassette recorders, video games,
and pay-cable programming are teaching viewers that their TV receivers can easily display
something other than fixed-time broadcast fare.” He was absolutely right, and so
was RCA – about 40 years too soon. Anyone reading this cover story
would’ve expected the units to be on shelves. The article actually
indicates availability later that year. It was… not available later that year. Or
the next year, when the LaserDisc launched with Jaws. Or for the rest of Jimmy Carter’s
presidency. Even in 1980, the three things on ice were the Cold War, a hockey miracle,
and the rollout of the Selectavision. The Selectavision took four more years
to hit shelves. And that was a problem. But the idea was fantastic. Everyone
loved collecting vinyl records and curating realtime audio expressions of their
identities. Why wouldn’t they want to do the same thing with movies they loved
that were basically vinyl records? If you’re RCA, there’s no reason NOT to think
this wouldn’t be a billion dollar industry. And they actually projected that by 1990 their annual
videodisc-related revenue would be $7.5 billion. That… did not happen. Let’s get back to my
Selectavision, BECAUSE IT’S BROKEN. When I unboxed it, it had a warning label
that said “REMOVE BOTH RED SCREWS BEFORE USE” that was stuck on with painter’s tape.
Okay. I asked the guy who sold it to me what was up with the screws – and he explained that,
“They were there to lock the pickup sled in the home position so it couldn't move, and possibly
break some fragile plastic gears. Originally, there would have been a pair
of plastic "shipping tabs." Extreme fragility and delicate
technology go together like the chicken and jell-o in a silhouette
salad, so we’re off to a good start! I turned it on and popped the plastic
cassette in, and… it spit it right back out at me. That seemed really weird to me – I
figured I’d just put it in like a VHS tape and it would stay in there. I pulled it back out and
instantly heard this horrendous banging sound. These discs are not like VHS tapes – they
called the cartridge a “caddy,” and it's just a protective housing for the disc
inside. It’s not integrated into the unit the way a floppy disk is. And this makes perfect
sense, because the disc can’t be totally covered by a plastic shell when it needs to be read
with a physical stylus like a record player. But mine was about to explode
and I had to defuse this bomb. I went to hit the eject button, and… there
is no eject button. There is a REJECT button, which is strangely poetic. Now it’s telling
me to put the shell BACK into the machine so it can suck the disc back into it. And
with that I can finally shut it off. Okay, so I messaged the seller to let him
know that, uhhh, this thing sounds broken. He said it’s happened to him before when
shipping Selectavisions, and that I need a one sixteenth inch allen wrench to adjust
the player height – that’s what’s causing the knocking. He even linked me to a video
showing me how to fix it, which was awesome. The video is literally a guy with a
Selectavision propped up on Powerade bottles… because the adjustment hole
is ON THE BOTTOM OF THE UNIT. It’s inaccessible if it’s on a table, and you
really need to be playing a disc while you make the platter height adjustment
so you know how much to turn the bolt. So this is kind of a pain, but whatever –
I’ve got a folding hex key set. And… the smallest is five sixty-fourths. This set stops one
sixty-fourth of an inch short of the size I need. OF COURSE. My dad saved me an Amazon order by
having a kit with a one sixteenth, and he had a couple dirty old milk crates
I could use to balance the Selectavision on while I adjusted it. After a few
quarter turns the knocking sound was gone and I was successfully spinning “48
Hours” with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte. But that’s a movie – not an interactive
game. One of the things that fascinated the Popular Science writer was the 400’s
revolutionary way to control viewing and interactivity with the Digital Command
Center Remote – so I needed to fire this up. RCA spent nearly a quarter of its entire history
getting to its complex series of buttons – and what’s inside the videodisc caddy itself is
so complex that I had to call in YouTube’s leading expert on the Selectavision to
explain to me how it actually works. But before that we need to
know who we’re dealing with. The Radio Corporation of America
was founded in 1919 – it dominated radio communications. They created the
National Broadcasting Company NBC in 1926, and purchased the Victor Talking Machine Company
3 years later – that’s how Nipper got to be the most recognizable dog of the 20th century.
They helped pioneer the television industry, and in 1954 they launched the
first consumer color television. So yeah. RCA was huge. They’d always been at the
forefront of media technology, and after the color TV they
were looking to develop the next big thing. Why wouldn’t they go from
democratizing audio to democratizing video? The problem was… well, there
were a lot of problems. When RCA got the idea for a videodisc
in 1964, the physical format of it made a lot of sense. Yeah, what they developed
is extremely sensitive to dust, humidity, scratches, and fingerprints in a way that
incredibly sturdy vinyl records aren’t, but that’s ok – you can imprison it in a
protective caddy. But it turned out even with that layer of insulation, the discs still
deteriorated – and that led to permanent skipping that could never be cleaned. Never. Because
trying to clean it would just make it worse. Why? How did any of this even work? Hi, Kevin. The plastic caddies held what they
called Capacitance Electronic Discs. The concept isn’t much different from vinyl records but it
took years to figure out how to store 200 times as much information as a long-playing record on
a similar disc. The players spun an 11.8-inch disc at 450 revolutions per minute, 13 times
faster than a record player. The conductive carbon-loaded PVC discs held high-density
spiral grooves measuring 1/10,000th of an inch on each side read by a keel-shaped
diamond stylus. As it’s reading the discs, an electronic circuit is formed that contains
four frames of video with each rotation of the disc. Which is why when you hit pause the screen
just goes black. It can’t freeze-frame on four frames at once. Each side of the disc held 60
minutes of information so any movies over 120 minutes required a second video disc. Uhh, hope
this helps! Good luck and happy VideoDisc-ing. Okay. It’s ironic that by pushing
the technology of vinyl records to their absolute limit, they turned
one of the most reliable chunks of media in tech history into one of
the most fragile things ever created. RCA put 17 years of development into the
Selectavision between its conception and release. Everyone increasingly wanted
everything at home. A kitchen with the same appliances restaurants had, a swimming
pool in the backyard – what wouldn’t you want at home? And why not your own movie theater
where you decided what would be on the screen? RCA Chairman Edgar Griffiths said that
RCA was committed to VideoDisc not just for this generation, but for the
next and the next. Audio media hadn’t changed substantially in 50 years – why
wouldn’t video follow the same trajectory? RCA launched the videodisc with $20
million of marketing in its first year, including an hour-long presentation hosted by
legendary NBC news journalist Tom Brokaw. It even had its own song, “We’re Stayin’ In
Tonight!” performed by people who marched out of a giant RCA television to dance on top
of a humongous Selectavision – look at this! “We’re all through sayin’
Hey, what else is playin? Or what time’s the game or fight?
We can stay right home and see it all Night after night! We won’t have to stand in line
We’re stayin’ in tonight! You play your disc
I’ll play mine We’re stayin’ in tonight!” Yeah nothing could hype me up more
to play an interactive who-dun-it style full motion video murder mystery
game scratched off a piece of plastic and magically projected into my TV. It
looks like, mama, I’m stayin’ in tonight! VidMax claimed that “Murder, Anyone?”
was the first interactive game of its kind. And being able to show you
that was its own tech labyrinth. To both play the game and record the footage, I
needed to use the Selectavision’s bizarre remote while also getting the footage to my laptop.
I got an analog to digital video capture card, then a USB 2.0 to USB-C adapter for the laptop.
I connected everything to a video/audio splitter that I use to hook up retro video game consoles
and it didn’t work. The splitter had 5 inputs, but only 1 output, and I needed to
output both the TV and the laptop. I found a 1-input, 4-output splitter on Amazon
and now for the first time in YouTube history we can see “Murder, Anyone?”, “A Week at
the Races” and "Many Roads to Murder.” I threw in Murder, Anyone? and
got the CRT surprise of my life. Three years before she went Back to the Future, and four years before she rocked out with
Howard the Duck, Lea Thompson made her acting debut as distant cousin Sissy Loper in
this forgotten videodisc murder mystery game. And private investigator Stew Cavanaugh was
played by Paul Gleason, who three years later would be immortalized in 1980s cinematic lore
as Bender’s nemesis in The Breakfast Club. There are 16 murder mysteries you can choose
to play at any time in any order. Here’s how you do that – which is so intricate that it
should be in the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons handbook you should’ve been
playing instead of this. On your Digital Command Center Remote, press
“Program” and then “Band” to bring up a 10-slot numerical program band. The instructions include
a menu of all 16 stories and their respective Program Band codes. So if you want to play
“Death Strikes at Nine,” you input 03, 06, 10, 17, and 22, and then press the “SEEK” button.
This tells the Selectavision to skip around the disc to those respective sections and present
the scenes required to watch that specific story. So, you watch the story, and that’s the end of
Side 1. When you’re ready to solve the case, you have to eject the disc and flip it over to
Side 2, which is the Investigation File. Then you enter the Band number not the Program Band
number to get to your story and then call up clues by searching Pages on the disc. Here, the
directory gives you PAGE number information for the location of everything you need to solve
the murder. This includes interviews with all the suspects, which are NOT VIDEO INTERVIEWS
– they’re text with a single question and answer. And there’s no background music or
sound of any kind. Just dead silence. Then, you just pull up a list of clues like
a blackmail note from the butler, or a telephone record with the times a
call was made. And after you view each clue you have to go back to the proper BAND
number and start that process all over again. If you’re stuck, you can access DESPERATION
slides that reveal the most pertinent clues. To solve the case you run through the Murderer,
Motive, and Method lists, which each have number values. The murder is two numbers, the motive
and method are one number each. To input the accusation you hit the Page button and enter your
Accusation Index, which is the two numbers of the Murderer, the number for the Motive and the Method
combined into a two number pair, and then 00. If your accusation is wrong, the screen says, “Incorrect! Lose a turn!” and if it’s
right it says, “Correct! You win!” If you’re hosting a party and everyone’s playing
this game, you literally have to choose someone to NOT have fun. The inputs are so frequent and
complex that someone has to be designated to pay close attention all the time so they can respond
with the right input, or else your Uncle Frankie guzzles his 4th martini as he’s waiting and
your boss who you never should’ve invited in the first place is so bored he’s thinking
about your replacement. It’s like deciding on a designated driver, but it’s a designated
remote jockey. Why wouldn’t you just play Clue? Because this is the cutting edge interactive
movie game technology of 1982. Was it fun then? I have no idea. I wasn’t born. But it’s
ambitious and totally different from the best of electronic entertainment in the era – you were
interacting, sort of, with legit Hollywood actors in a sophisticated way compared to trying to
get Q*Bert down a pyramid. The market at the time disagreed – it decided that blasting Space
Invaders on an Atari 2600 was a lot more fun. “Many Roads to Murder” is the thrilling
sequel to “Murder, Anyone?” in which Paul Gleason returns as Stew Cavanaugh – but Lea
Thompson had already moved on to Jaws 3-D, a youth guerilla war against the Soviets, and
a misguided attempt to seduce her own son. And if you loved how RCA bet
it all on the Selectavision, you could wager your entire fake retirement
account on a horse named Whippersnap. “A Week at the Races” was a horse gambling
game hosted by Willie Shoemaker – he won 11 triple crown races in his career and is one of
the greatest jockeys of all time. You had the play money and numbered plastic pieces to place
your bets. You pick a horse, watch the race, and see who wins and who places – and, strangely,
not who shows. The back of the caddy claims it offers unlimited fun, but with 48 pre-recorded
races it seems like it offered 48… fun. Can you imagine the fights that would break out
from someone accusing another person of already having seen the race? The hosts could never
play, they already knew the result. And how many times could you invite the same guest
over to play fake interactive horse racing? The instructions even mention that you need
to keep a log of the races you’ve already watched and the murders you’ve already solved
to avoid repeats… which you’d better not lose. The thing is… the Selectavision revolution was dead before those horses even
broke out of the starting gate. Margaret B. W. Graham spent nearly 10
years writing the definitive account of the Selectavision for her book “Business
of Research: RCA and the VideoDisc.” It actually started as an applied history
project at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1976 – 5 years
before the Selectavision was even out. She explains that RCA was coming off a generation
of trying to find the successor to the color TV, including 1971’s $250 million failed attempt at
getting into the mainframe computer business. They were desperately trying to return to
their former glory as a systems innovator. And they saw video discs as an affordable, mass
market way to bring movies into the world’s living rooms. The players cost $499, which is
$1,800 today, and each disc cost between $14.98 and $24.98 – which would be $54 to $90 now. VCRs
existed, but they were for rich people – they were twice as expensive and VHS tapes were almost four
times as much as video discs. VHS movies could be up to $90 – adjusted for inflation, it was nearly
$300 to own a copy of Bedknobs & Broomsticks. RCA was already selling VCRs for
high-end users… THAT WERE ALSO CALLED SELECTAVISION. So you’d go into
an RCA dealer to ask for a Selectavision, and they’d have a ridiculous conversation with
you about whether you wanted the disc thing or the tape thing and answer 42 questions
about each one. RCA dealers hated this. And that wasn’t even the major problem. They
misjudged whether consumers wanted to own movies at all. The real videophiles did, and
they actually bought way more movies than RCA expected them to. They launched with a massive
library of 100 titles and estimated that a home would average 8. The real number was upwards
of thirty – but they only sold 550,000 players, so they couldn’t justify continued investment
in the one aspect they were crushing it with. The question they didn’t seem to ask
is: how many movies do you want to own, versus how many do you just want to watch? The
VHS rental industry exploded because people wanted to pay a couple bucks to see a movie – it was a
low-cost grab bag, and if the movie was great then maybe you’ll rent it again in the future, and
if it wasn’t? Well, onto the next one. RCA was so intent on replicating the vinyl record
music ownership model that they didn’t realize what streaming services are now built upon: for
most people, movies just don’t work that way. So… why couldn’t people just rent
videodiscs? BECAUSE THEY COULDN’T. Their contracts with movie
distributors DID NOT ALLOW FOR RENTALS. RCA couldn’t have rented out
video discs even if they wanted to. A certain kind of media satisfied RCA’s
vision for how consumers would utilize home entertainment: because there are some
movies people only wanted to watch at home. WITH THE DOOR LOCKED AND THE CURTAINS DRAWN. By 1984 pornographic films accounted for a full
50% of the sales and rentals of pre-recorded VHS tapes – it was a significant reason the
VHS format took off. And RCA explicitly prohibited adult films from being released
on video disc because they thought it would tarnish RCA’s wholesome, family-friendly,
puppy-staring-at-a-gramophone image. The VCR defined the entertainment of a
generation. It built its legacy on movie rentals, recording live TV, and lust – 3 things the
Selectavision couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do. But ultimately… they were just too
late. RCA Chairman Thornton Bradshaw reflected on its failure by saying, “Five
years earlier it would have been a huge success. If we came out with it three years
earlier, it would have been a good success.” And he’s probably right – if it really had
come out shortly after that 1977 Popular Science article, it would have changed
everything. Instead, RCA lost $580 million on the project – billions today. They stopped
production on Selectavision players on April 4th, 1984. In December 1985, a damaged, devalued
RCA was acquired by General Electric, and 66 years of dominance in consumer
electronics and communications was effectively over. They gambled it all on the
Selectavision – and it cost them everything. Now we have access to every form of media we
can imagine, most of it free – a lot of it we make ourselves, from TikTokers making short
videos with their phones to YouTubers crafting video essays and documentaries. Every movie
and TV show you can think of is on some app, live and archived sporting
events are on demand worldwide, and every song you’ve ever heard is
out there – and we don’t own any of it. Margaret Graham’s postmortem on the Selectavision
concludes by saying that RCA “chose an approach that had only two possible outcomes –
complete success or complete failure.” RCA was right about everyone wanting a broad variety of immersive entertainment
accessible from their homes, and now even in their pockets. They were wrong about how
to do it. And the Selectavision’s “complete failure” took Nipper from staring into
a gramophone to staring into the abyss. Okay. 27, 06, 22. Seek. See… see you… see you in the f…fu…future.
