Very Horrible System

I’m not a pathological hoarder, but I do have trouble chucking out stuff, that’s in good order, even if I have absolutely no use for it. My collection of old VHS tapes is a prime example. They are just the sort of thing I have trouble ditching even though they are pretty much useless.

I mean, I don’t think I’ve watched a movie on VHS for over 10 years. Even if I wanted to watch a VHS tape (which I don’t) there is no VHS recorder currently set up anywhere in my house, so a big box of VHS tapes is truly a waste of space.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I have really fond memories of watching movies on VHS in the 80’s and 90’s (and of the old video libraries). But, it’s important to separate one’s fondness of the movies from any misplaced nostalgic fondness of that crappy old format.

The fact is, VHS kinda sucked: low resolution, panned & scanned, images that deteriorated with each subsequent view. You could pretty much be guaranteed that when you hired an old horror movie from the cheap section of the video library it would have some sort of picture quality problem. (BTW - Did the “tracking” button on VHS recorders ever really do anything?)

So… where was I? Oh yeah… I had a heap of old VHS tapes that really needed to go but I couldn’t bring myself to chuck ‘em, until… I had the brilliant idea (actually, I think I read about someone else doing it) of chucking the tapes and hard plastic cases but keeping all the cover artwork. Somehow, the part of my brain that makes me save stuff was OK with jettisoning the tapes and plastic cases as long I kept cover art. So that’s exactly what I did.

That was a few months ago.

More recently, I discovered the too-cool-for-school website VHS Wasteland; a blog dedicated to preserving VHS cover art. This inspired me to scan and submit my covers. But after reading the fine print, it turns out that they’re a bit picky when it comes to the submission format. Combine that with the fact that I'm a lazy ass and it was all a bit too hard. So I've decided to scan ‘em and post ‘em here at BIQ instead.

After all, everyone loves pretty pictures and it’ll be a cool way to keep the blog “alive” over the next few weeks when I’ll invariably be too busy over-eating and over-drinking to sit down and articulate, in any detail, what a moral minefield Deadgirl is, for example.

Here's a taste of things to come:

Click on the image for enlargification