The Power Of VHS | SCANLINE

you know it's been pretty great over the last couple of years developing something of an audience you know following and YouTube subscribers and fans and people on Twitter who want to know what I have to say about stuff but to be honest it's getting kind of annoying I'm car sick of having them so I thought the best way to get rid of them would be to start a new YouTube video series exploring the theory and philosophy and politics of various aspects of film that I feel aren't explored enough that should do the trick and along the way I might remind people of some of my more contrarian opinions like the fact I think the Star Wars prequels are actually pretty good stuff like that I just did it then didn't I welcome to scanline [Music] you if you're older than the age of 20 or have parents that don't throw things out then you probably have at least a couple of these things in an attic or a shed somewhere these are video home system cassette tapes commonly known as VHS tapes they entered use in the late 1970s and were a very popular way of watching films and TV shows in your own home anytime you wanted which for the time was a really novel and new concept with select division you can go to the movies at your house I know this because I looked it up on the Wikipedia page when I was writing this script but let's get into what the world's largest ends like lippy deer doesn't want you to know if you weren't in front of the TV when a show aired or hadn't gone to the cinema when a film was out your primary interaction with most pieces of modern entertainment and culture would have been through the medium of VHS almost every piece of audio visual art you consumed no matter what it was made with shot on or how advanced the budget and special effects you saw it via the signal produced from the magnetic reels in these plastic boxes if you fell in love with a story it was probably thanks to these tapes it's a pity then that they look like [ __ ] a standard pal VHS recording consisted of roughly 320 horizontal lines and 576 vertical lines of visual information worse you wouldn't actually be getting your films at that resolution since most films were produced in wide or super wide screen but VHS was for the 4x3 resolution of contemporary televisions you had a problem even showing a film you could crop out the sides of a film and move the screen around what's called pan and scan which could totally ruin the story of films where multiple things were happening on different sides of the frame or you could scale the whole thing down and add black bars to the top and bottom creating what was called the letterbox effect on the pan and scan version of a new hope the opening text crawl doesn't fit the screens you have to wait until it gets here before you can even possibly read it in the widescreen version you can see the entire line of text as soon as it enters the frame but it's scaled down so it's just as hard to read I always really liked the scene from aliens where Burke is trying to be friendly with in hospital so he brings Jonesy in and sits backwards in his chair and spins playfully in it while the camera pulls in and gets more intimate so he can then tell her that she's been frozen for 57 years there's lots of good moments of subtle acting and characterization and I like the cinematography of this cool sci-fi Room and his acute cat in the frame to the pan and scan version of this scene just barely manages to get both characters in the frame at once it completely removes a lot of Burke's body language as he tries to be nice while preparing to break the news to her and poor Jonesy's head is cut off Jonesy isn't in this film after the beginning does Jonesy over here look happy with pan and scan I don't think he does but I can't actually tell even worse because of the vile machinations of capitalism the first preferred solution by movie studios was parents can so they sold all the films like that and then once they figured out the directors hated having their films recut to fit the new frame and widescreen was basically objectively superior because it displayed the entire film they got to sell you the films all over again with the promise that this time it was better now for the first time on video you can savor the true experience of these blockbusters in their original format widescreen in my copy of the aliens special edition sorry the aliens special edition apparently I bought this tape from a xenomorph opens with a commercial for the widescreen versions of alien and die hard [ __ ] and guess what this version of aliens is in pan and scan this is already the special edition of aliens and now you're telling me I've got to buy it again when the widescreen special edition comes out 20th Century Fox more like 22nd century weyland-yutani I'm sorry and that was it that was how people watched films they picked their poison between a tiny version of the original film or a recut reframed gutted despicable catty raising version of the original and whichever one you picked you got it in this flickery format you got this facsimile of the film that you wanted to see and that was how we consumed media for decades some versions of the above-average fantasy film series Star Wars only ever widely existed on this format many fans of Star Wars all over message boards and forums and my mentions fell in love with the films because of tapes they rented or bought because of this but wait a minute we can talk about specs and make fun of the video quality all day people still watch them people still use them to record shows off the TV and people still shared and circulated those recordings thanks to people wanting to see things and needing tape to do so homemade tapes are still the only way to find copies of shows that weren't available in any official format many episodes of Mystery Science Theater didn't get a proper release four years after their initial air date and many still don't prior to high-speed Internet the only way of accessing these old episodes was through home recordings people happened to have made at the time the show aired you'd be amazed at what hoops folks would jump through to see a show they liked even on a low-res home tape recording and what if you were a fan of anime in the era prior to major home video releases of foreign animation why you would have to hope you knew a store with crazy import stuff with really poor fan translations or hope someone had taped the shows that did make it over at the crazy times they turned up in retrospect the format wasn't great but it was certainly good enough for audiences who wanted to watch something in the comfort of their own homes whenever they wanted to and it was basically the first format that allowed people to do this it led to widespread consumption of material that would otherwise be forgotten or go unseen in the 70s and 80s for the first time ever a regular person could have an archive of shows or films they enjoyed without having to get a projector and go in search of film reels on eBay which would be really hard to do considering that eBay didn't exist until 1995 a person could learn about and consume elements of their culture and develop an understanding of film so much more easily than the decades prior in fact Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith worked in local video stores before becoming directors giving them an opportunity to further incubate their own passion for film as well as share it directly with others before going on to make some of the most influential films for better or worse of the 1990s the advent of VHS our should in a new era of accessibility for film fans tastes in film and appetites for film could be developed much more rapidly than ever before it marked the beginning in a radical and permanent shift in media consumption you were no longer reliant on what was playing in your local multiplex or what old French films that weird art schools were projecting that month and you no longer had to ADEA rigidly two TV schedules or catch films or TV shows deigned worthy of being shown the shift was so radical that film companies panicked then MPAA head Jack Valenti in an act of comical hyperbole said in a congressional hearing that the VC is - the American film producer and the American public as the Boston Strangler is - the woman home alone Universal Studios even sued Sony on the grounds of copyright infringement over their Betamax video recording format luckily it was ruled that home recording devices operate under fair use and of course wants film companies realized how profitable home video could be they backed off many films started being made with their sales on the burgeoning and seemingly never-ending ly hungry VHS market in mind or even without the intent of ever being screened in a theater some were barely even films there were instructional videos or Christmas themed cat nightmares or musical propaganda for a Christian cult that lived in the woods lots of popular films did well on tape but still others did hugely well on tape more so than you could expect from their cinematic release or critical reception the question here is why what is it about being available on VHS that made people suddenly become connoisseurs of horror or independent film well those reasons tend to get overlooked let's look at some of them right now when making the film jaws which would come to be regarded as the first ever summer blockbuster Spielberg & Co discovered some problems with the shark prop a prop many would regard as quite important in a film about a shark that eats people the animatronics kept breaking down bits kept falling off of it and most importantly it kept sinking the fake shark had trouble floating in water spielberg instead had to rely on using shots of almost everything but the shark to demonstrate the horror of its presence show the aftermath show explosions of blood in the distance show the actors reactions the result was a film where you barely ever get to see the animatronic shark but its presence is felt regardless the shark is rendered even scarier by not being shown in all its glory and its glory wasn't really all that much to see anyway it was a broken mechanical show tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre is an incredibly startling and foundational film in the horror genre when James Furman a British censor and Secretary of the BBFC at the time tried to cut the film to reduce its violent and nightmarishly oppressive atmosphere he found to his own personal shock that he couldn't there isn't all that much actual violence or blood in the film there are no single pieces or shots you could remove to diminish its effects instead it's a cumulative effect of all the properties of the entire film in setting a tone and creating a mood without needing to show you anything in particular in the end the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was refused a certification by the BBFC effectively banning it in the United Kingdom what these stories tell us is that even in visual mediums supposedly all about showing people things for achieving some effects often less is more the human mind is incredibly good at scaring itself and sometimes not being shown what you're supposed to be scared of is the worst thing confusion settles in fear of what could be there what could happen fills your head and your imagination with its own particular fears gets to substitute those over whatever's actually there Texas Chainsaw Massacre did fantastically well when it was released in 1981 allowing many Brits access to the film for the first time but many horror films did well on tape even if they relied much more on gore or a poorly cut and this is because of a particular form of this principle let's think about VHS again that awful tiny resolution flickery screen even pure blackness is off-kilter if you walked into a room with this playing you might even think you're watching a scene of something hiding in darkness I bet you can almost make out a figure hidden there in all the noise you see where I'm going with this now don't you here's alien one of the best most emotionally intense and scary films ever on VHS and through these tapes alien was flippin terrifying I remember being out of my mind scared by this low-res monstrosity and it wasn't just because of the great acting directing editing creature design or music it was because in all the tensest and darkest moments you could never really quite be sure what you were looking at abstract shapes in the background could almost look like something else the flickers and noise in the darkness were easily confused for glimpses of the monster even when you were sure nothing was there you could never really be sure when the monster actually turned up it was almost a relief like at least now you knew where the creature actually was in other words a lower resolution format can increase the emotional impact of a scene horror and suspense have the chance to strike people like it never had before no wonder films like this did well in some ways modern high resolution versions of these films can't quite capture that particular magic here's a scene from the blu-ray version it looks great but it's not as scary because you can quite definitely see that nothing's there you know the character is alone in ways that you couldn't be certain of before really good films actually put this principle into practice within the medium itself for example alien and aliens both have sequences that prominently feature the use of cameras and video feeds with a very poor signal even if the higher resolution version of the film does diminish some of the horror elements these segments still hold up exactly like they always did because the effects of viewing low resolution video are worked into the aesthetic of the film as a kid David Cronenberg rotated his TV antenna to pick up signals he wasn't supposed to access late at night when there wasn't supposed to be anything on the air well what if the images that you pulled up or really quite extreme disturbing possibly illegal and what would you think then would you keep seeking out those channels or would you call the police or what would you do how would you respond to that the fear and excitement he felt in anticipation of what he might see that fear of what was out there hidden in the static inspired him to make Videodrome so at least one great horror film was conceived entirely because of this effect horror and slasher films did really well on tape for this reason and many films became long-running series that probably wouldn't ever have done so without such successful post cinema releases on a format that arguably made them scarier even boring or flat shots in mediocre films can be made more tense by telling the audience a killer is out to get the protagonists and making it just a little bit tougher to see where they could be hiding this also solves another problem those of you who watched my in retrospect woefully unfocused and unresearched from 2016 about what makes action films work we'll remember I made a comment about how the CGI in Terminator 2 used to look better well here we are Thank You Shannon for helping me edit this video and stop it taking another year computer graphics animation were largely lacking in the 80's 90's and even the early 2000s nothing really quite looked right things didn't feel like they were really there texture and displacement mapping wasn't up to snuff and you had smooth looking weird stuff in your frame it wasn't great but even mediocre CGI can blend right in on tape this checkerboard man rising out of the floor to murder a guy made me scared of my kitchen floor going to the fridge at night as a hyperactive child it was vivid like in my mind's eye Robert Patrick was gonna come out at any moment and cut my entire body off seeing the now easily available high-definition version of the scene made me feel like an idiot my mind had done most of the work with the bad fidelity I think people who saw the scene in a theatre kind of had the scariest bits of the film ruined for them because in the film friends shown in theaters this would have stuck out just as much but it wasn't just the relative badness of the image that popularized certain things over others in the medium of the video home system another important facet was the fact that well it was in your home like I said before Texas Chainsaw Massacre was effectively not allowed into cinemas when it was first released in the UK while some local councils allowed it to be shown in their theaters the viewing experience would have been quite weird you'd be openly going out and paying to sit and see something you knew was banned in other areas for being violent and horrific it was like you were committing a crime or were openly telling people you wanted to see that stuff since you'd actively gone and sorted out but the uncensored 1981 video released it amazingly and it's quite clear why instead of going out and sitting in a public space for 90 minutes and then awkwardly shuffling help trying not to make eye contact with the other people who'd come to see this widely banned film you saw it with an audience of your choosing in the privacy of your own home at a time that suited you there was a sense of being free of judgement the eyes of the outside world were no longer a factor in your viewing experience this encouraged people to seek out films they'd never go to see in public which of course includes pornography it's really not hard to see why home video almost immediately killed porn theaters Smith has happily recounted his time renting porn to customers saying once you're comfortable with someone renting porn you can have conversations with them and that having a frank conversation with someone about their sex life informed his work a great deal home viewing also allowed for a less adult form of privacy a kind of comfortable intimacy with friends or family that you can't get in a theater getting together on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and the glow of a television to watch a scary movie is an oft-repeated familial ritual in much the same way that gathering around a campfire bathed in orange light to tell ghost stories has been for generations there are also other factors you might have noticed that prior to the 90s television was shot very straightforwardly and blankly with actors even in close-ups framed very differently from films shot at the same time this is because televisual language has to serve a different purpose from film language movies are giant projected way up and away from you staring down at you and occupying your entire view you are consumed by a film and encouraged to think about it in its composition you don't do anything else in the cinema but watch the film a television is a smaller screen often a good distance from you even in a kitchen where other noises and events are distracting you you might even be reading a book or talking to someone else while the TV is playing the early TV production style knew that you weren't always going to be paying attention only pulling you in for the more dramatic or important moments of a given episode usually using something like having music start to play the smaller screen also changes the way we relate to the image and the people in it television can be more human friendlier those little people on the screen are having a nice chat about current events and I feel somewhat included or informed a talk-show blown up to 70 feet staring down at you a darkened room with surround sound blasting in your ears would be overpowering to say the least and it turns out the aesthetic and design of some films are predisposed to mesh beautifully with the qualities of the television nothing exemplifies this in practice quite like Mallrats more routes was Kevin Smith's second film produced after the success of his first picture the small self-funded India two clerks when more rats came out no one really got it people who loved the low-budget avant-garde doing it ourselves grainy aesthetic of clerks hated the well produced overly slick feel people who cared about editing or cinematography or good-looking shots got a kinda flat looking film with a bunch of boring wide shots of multiple people just sort of talking about stuff serious critics into the pointed pop culturally slanted insights of clerks and the honest thoughts of a stray Gen Xers were treated to a bunch of wacky characters farting about in a mall tricking people they didn't like into making their hands smell like [ __ ] the film did terribly critically and at the box office it looked like Kevin Smith the indie darling behind clerks had basically torched his career with only his second film luckily a film would then come out which would miraculously untoward his career that film was called mall rats on tape in 2001 on the subject of criticism of his films Smith said we should be able to make any movie we want stupid or not so long as it doesn't cost too much and is reasonably guaranteed to make its money back for our distributor that for the curious is why we're allowed to keep making movies some cats are Heike how it talks some cats particularly the denizens of internet movie chat boards can't figure out why we're allowed to continue lensing the flicks when we never seem to grow as visual storytellers or keep making what's to them the same movie the answer is that we've never lost anybody money I'll say that again we've never lost anybody money granted we came close with rats but even that made a killing on video and more recently DVD despite box office troubles the same film no one went to see in critics snubbed was suddenly doing gangbusters making it an even more interesting sort of cult hit than its predecessor and it's because of the aesthetic differences of playing a film on a TV all of a sudden the short composition isn't as important because it's kind of far away from you and you're doing something else in the room while it plays and the low quality of the format means that even if the shots were particularly good you wouldn't really have noticed anyway you aren't having the aimless banter about nothing blasted are you from speakers all around you like it's the most important thing in the world you have to listen to every second it's playing nearby and you just kind of listening in on these people talking free associatively about their film opinions with this change in the viewing experience all of a sudden more ATS makes sense it becomes a funny little film where the big scenes and funnier jokes grab your attention and the stuff that falls flat or isn't so well directed doesn't matter so much because it's easier to ignore here's an IMDB review from 2003 Brad C - - from Auckland New Zealand jokingly says the film is best watched with your eyes closed they criticized the look and feel of the film and the happiness of the overall plot but they loved the dialogue and they found it sharpened effervescent and they say it's their favorite film of Kevin Smith's I would say so far but honestly considering the films are made after 2003 more atz's probably still their favorite Kevin Smith film screened in a theater on a big screen are arguably missing the point the joy of these films is in crowding around a small TV at your friend's house and watching little people on it with no pretensions of grandiosity being shitty to customers and talking about their lives if you've sat down and watched a mall rat screened in a high resolution and a cool retro revival screening at your local college unsubscribe from my channel immediately Kurt we talked about this I don't want to be your friend anymore imagine all the films from across history that were doomed to be misunderstood by the theater going audience whose real destiny was to be truly appreciated on the small screen where the viewers relationship with the work was completely different VHS was the first second chance for those films and it created an appreciation for these kinds of story for televisual filmmaking you can see this trend happening in Reverse as televisions get bigger and their picture becomes clearer and their aspect ratio more film like TV shows with a cinematic approach like Breaking Bad Mad Men The Sopranos or Hannibal are becoming more prominent and popular HBO calls itself home box office because the home viewing experience is finally akin enough to a theater that these aesthetic changes can really be appreciated people didn't just not care about having television that wasn't very nice looking for 60 years our relationship with the screen simply changed in accordance with its change in format and size in our living rooms in the age of HD and TV on-demand soap operas are waning in popularity as the increased fidelity and the typical viewers filmic awareness exposed the show's production failings and straightforwardness more than the older ways could and the idea that you could be watching Game of Thrones or of cards at any time suddenly makes neighbors a bit less of a thing that you might want to watch although people still watch it all the time over here and it's a little bit scary they're making in Australia but they make it for us because we're the only people are watching why I'm a little bit worried this might once again make it harder for some films to be appreciated because you even watch them like a film at home but it's not like we're going to just stop making television shows so we're probably fine for now [Music] people will always want higher fidelity versions of their favorite films some people want a high-res version of the original cuts of Star Wars so badly that they've resorted to making that version themselves with different restorations pulling from 35 millimeter prints 70 millimeter prints a TV broadcast DVD special features and more all in the service of recreating the films they remember from way back when you can also see this battle happening on the filmmaking end a filmmaker will always find newer and better cameras on the market more bit-depth better codecs 1080p 4 k 6 k 8k sensors or for footage that will often end up getting seen on youtube at whatever resolution their audiences computer monitors or phone screens happen to be with YouTube's compression algorithm eradicating most of the specs of their footage looking good doesn't necessarily mean having the best definition telling a good story is the goal and if you get that wrong not even doing it on an Arri Alexa can save you obviously shoot on the best equipment you can get your hands on and aim for a form of distribution that best suits your work but I think the real challenge is to make something that people would fall in love with even if they were watching it on a crappy old tape in the 90s and in its own way whether we like it or not those tapes and the impact they had will never leave us the format is in our history now and we remember it nostalgia is real and it affects how we view old films or perceive new films that use it as a purposeful style many films made in the vein of 80s or 90s horror get limited little VHS releases because that's the style they were courting in the first place then there are the immensely popular retro camcorder phone apps you can get and the web skits that use the aesthetic is part of a deeper throwback to kitschy nineties children's programming many new films exist only in the form of tapes or what a design to look like low res rips of tapes like the truly fascinating funny and smart wnuf halloween special in order to channel the style and further create a sense of seeing a documented record of a time period one film that combines all of this with tapes ability to make cheap special effects look better is the found footage film VHS an anthology of a bunch of short films from various diegetic video tapes and its relative low-budget effects are done real justice by the aesthetic the final segment 1031 98 has a truly fascinating climactic sequence where everything goes completely crazy nuts and it's the most frightening Lee reel horror segment with what are actually fairly rudimentary effects has ever felt because the poor quality of the footage makes it so much more believable if you filmed a window actually sliding out of existence and hands coming out of the walls on a camera from this time period it would literally look exactly the same as this footage and knowing that makes this sequence infinitely punchier and more real feeling than the same effect would in any modern horror film growing up I think the first favorite film I ever had was Terry Gilliam's as Time Bandits I think it was the first film I ever saw we're seeing it I felt like it was made for me it took my sense of alienation from adult life and channeled it into telling a story about a vividly imaginative world where the outsiders were the ones who were truly free escaping from their parents invading armies and even the will of God and getting what they wanted out of life it made me feel good to not be like everyone else like I was getting one over on the world somehow this film helped make me who I am and shape how I see everything and it did it on my dad's tiny television in letterbox widescreen obviously for the sake of preservation and film history a high res official version of hand shooting first would be nice to have we can chase higher and higher resolutions as much as we want and we should I think they look great but the funny and kind of amazing thing is millions of people only needed a fifth of those lines of resolution on a tiny screen to fall in love with these films and have them shape how they see the world for me Time Bandits is the objectively crappy version I saw as a kid over and over on a tiny widescreen tape in the night when no one else was around feeling inspired by the sense of adventure and briefly pausing to go to the kitchen for a snack and get scared by the floor all the k's in the world won't replicate the experience I had as a kid it might even ruin it by revealing all the obvious models and matte paintings and all the wood screws on the sets for what they really were VHS was always a kind of bad format but in spite and because of all its problems it caused a dramatic shift in pop culture and in the taste and approaches to cinema by viewing audiences which is still felt to this very day in the form of the cinema literacy and particular feel and taste it cultivated even by accident with its style oh no look what happened by accident [Music]

Channel: hbomberguy

Views: 739,280

Rating: 4.9376345 out of 5

Keywords: hbomb, hbomberguy, shannon strucci, struccimovies, scanline, vhs, tapes, vhs tapes

Id: xbZMqS-fW-8

Length: 29min 21sec (1761 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 30 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Munchka]

I think everyone who has interest in VHS should also check this out https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-z4iw8Ppo1o

[u/xX_1337n0sc0p3420_Xx]

Racecar VHS rewinder.

[u/BluSn0]

That video made me feel like I was in the 80s again. Good stuff.

[u/praiseafork]

I love this and rewatch it frequently. His doc on Dragon’s Lair called Halcyon Dreams is also worth watching. Hbomberguy is a treat all should indulge in.

[u/UGotSchlonged]

I understand the point that this guy is trying to make, but he is way, way overplaying the poor video quality of VHS.

Sure, when played side-by-side with current hi-def video (on a high def monitor) it looks horrible. Played on the CRT screens at the time, it looked fine.

[u/Snouties]

I first saw The Blair Witch Project on VHS, it had me extra spooked as I wasn't sure if figures were lurking in the background thanks to the analog noise. Watching it again a while later on DVD I noted how the spookiness was dramatically reduced with a cleaner picture. Neat!

[u/bucketman1986]

Bomber guy is fun and does good videos. Since everything is opinion based you can agree or disagree with his politics or game design ideas, but his stuff like this is also really good and fun

[u/[deleted]]

I absolutely love everything hbomberguy does.

[u/dbrez3107]

the popularity of VHS was only accelerated because of the massive fukup of Beta by Sony. Beta was and still is a far superior technology for taping. The old days.