I absolutely remember the selection of home video in the 80s being way different in the 90s. In the 80s the VHS market was just starting to really get going. The rental places had lots of customers but the now standard of getting movies on home video within a year wasn't in place yet and many many classics still hadn't been release on any video format ever. So there was a bit of market for "anything, just put out anything" which is why so much weird crap came out then. Lots of zero budget stuff, anything foreign that could be dubbed without too many issues (Kung fu, anime, Italian garbage cinema).

This era didn't actually seem that special to me until the 90s when I realized it was gone. By the 90s the smaller shops were giving way to Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, etc and the focus moved to new release Hollywood almost exclusively...all buying 128 copies of Forrest Gump. The "yeah we only got one of those" titles by that time were mostly "erotic thriller" stuff, terrible made for Showtime movies trying to milk the Basic Instinct and Showgirls gravy train for as long as possible. No more Warriors of Xu or A Doonsbury Special, just endless corporate mainstream stuff.

New super 8 film is still available.

Didn't know that.

This reminds me, with VHS you never had to worry about scratches on tape that made the movie skip. Quality was usually stable. WIth DVD rentals it was horrible. The discs looks like they have been used as a hockey puck.

Also, now that I think about, if each VHS for rental had a price close to $100 and rental was $3 for 3 days then it would take each tape almost 33 rentals and 3 months before it makes any money.

Well, VHS rentals didn't get that good until into the 90s. Most shops were like $2-$3 just for one night!!

Even when Blockbuster first hit my neck of the woods, the prices were 2 nights for $5 for new releases and 2 nights for $4 for catalog titles.

yep, as i've said time and again to my family, DVD is no rental medium. no optical videodisc format ever devised
seems able to withstand abuse from Joe Everyman like the supposedly fragile, delicate videocassette formats did.

that in mind, had LD, in it's day, actually made some inroads deep enough into the mainstream to have developed any real rental market presence,
it probably wouldn't have lasted long at all, and quite possibly, might have even ended up earning the format a far worse rep than it already had...

Blu-Rays certainly work great for rental. The discs are nowhere near as sensitive to scratches as CDs or DVDs and seem to last much longer.

One of my jobs at Hollywood Video was attempting to restore broken VHS. They absolutely break. The Mad Max in me is happy that with a tape you can cut out the damaged portion and still see the rest of the movie but...seriously, I'm just going to get another copy if that happens. Unless you need it for court evidence I can't see that being a real advantage.

Ever put a tape in your VCR that was so nasty that it not only wouldn't play, but also screwed up the head so bad it had to be sent in for repair or at least have a head cleaner run through it? Yeah, that's one more thing that doesn't happen with LD.

Yeop . . . one of my S-VHS VCRs bit the bullet because of a bad tape. Luckily I bought it 2nd hand so it only cost me $50, but still pissed me off a bit.

And as far as LD rentals go, there were three stores near me that rented LDs. Never was really an issue as far as I could tell. Especially since I bought a few of their ex-rentals after they were liquidating their LD stock. None of them were riddled with cracks or scratches.

You have to remember that LD player owners back then pretty much knew that these things were expensive would end up having to pony up the price of the disc if they returned it with any blemishes.

Yeah, I rented a few LDs back in the day. Never had an issue. LD owners knew how much the stuff cost and how to take care of it, to a man even.

Netflix DVDs though...it's so depressing to think of how many DVDs were destroyed that way.

LDs were probably didn't suffer the same fate because:

1) A lot less people had LD players = so a lot less rental = a lot less damage
2) People had LD's probably had better manners treating discs than your average joe/joe's kids
3) I heard LDs are extremely scratch resistant . I am not sure how they did it but why CDs and DVDs didn't apply same technology against scratches.

BD rental never picked up, did it?
sounds like a logical thing. BD quality is extremely large to download especially, people better off renting.

LDs are HUGE and therefore they have to be very scratch resistant. I have also noticed that there is a big difference
between checking a disc in daylight or holding it against a strong artificial light. I bought many discs in "mint condition" and
they look fine to the naked eye but when you hold them against a bulb at night you see scratches you do not see in daylight.
However that does not bother me at all. I bought a lot of scratched LDs over the years incl. numerous HK rental LDs and
they were very scratched but still worked fine without ANY problems. As long as a disc looks OK in daylight I am fine with it
and I am not worried. The worst thing that can happen are rot or your disc getting warped. But scratches should not affect
playback unless they are very deep. That's my experience at least.
With DVDs, VCDs, Blu Rays, HD DVDs or CDs, I usually copy them to my NAS and never use the disc again. That is something
you cannot do with LDs, of course.

I've thousands of VHS tapes. They date all the way back to 1982 when my dad bought his first VHS recorder. I used the best tapes available at the time and tended not to re-record over the rarer material so have a lot footage that has never been shown on TV again.

I'm talking about really small venue concerts, obscure videos that didn't chart, candid interview footage and music documentaries. Realistically I can't see much of this ever been re-issued on any format as it was never commercially available to begin with. So the only way of owning it was to record it when it was shown once (and only once) on TV. Some of the footage is by some of my all time favourite artists. I've also done some sample checks on youtube and very little of this footage is currently available online. It seems I was one of the few people on the planet who actually bothered recording it, kept the recordings (for over 30 years) and didn't wear them out - a rare feat indeed. I've also checked playback recently on some of the really old tapes and they are fine so ideal to archive still.

I also bought many pre-recorded music VHS tapes including many promotional items - you'd be amazed how many titles never made it to laserdisc or DVD. Many can be picked up very cheaply in charity shops or online. Whilst I never liked VHS as a format -it was the dominant format for almost 20 years so it's unavoidable that if you are serious music collector you will own some VHS.

I don't own any VHS tapes, but my parents still have hundreds, mostly those aforementioned Disney softcovers. A few are worn out indeed-I wore out The Rescuers Down Under in like two years when I was a kid.

They've been usually grabbing replacements for the non-Disney ones when they hit the $5 DVD bin at Walmart.

Funnily enough, their DVD/VHS combo started breaking down in early 2010, and since Amazon was clearing out the Panasonic DMP-BD70V for $150 (hah, try paying that today), I had them order one of those. It doesn't record tapes, of course, and it was before Netflix streaming became big so it can't do all those fancy features, but VHS honestly doesn't look too bad on it. I mainly used it to watch Rocketman (that reminds me-I need to order the LD).

They do get odd looks for having a Blu-ray/VHS combo deck in the entertainment center though.

My favorite (from when I worked in a video rental store way back when) was when someone would return a laserdisc that looked like an inner circle of 5" had been sanded down on one side. The early cd/ld players would start up if a cd was left in it and a laser was also put in. It would make a horrendous noise and by the time you shut it off you had a rather bizarre looking ld. (When we first saw one of these we took a defective ld and a worthless cd to see if that was the cause of the problem.) The dumb thing is that the ld would still play fine - just looked like crap.

One of my favorite lds is a Japanese music sampler called "Private Music" . My copy of it came from one of the old laserland chain that went under and they had been using it as a demo. Poor thing looks like several dogs have been waltzing on it but plays flawlessly.

I have that laserdisc too. On the future of Aviation, Memories of Viena, Beauty in Darkness, Dragon Dance and Water Garden. These videos were shown regularly on the Landscape Channel for about 15 years.

When you say you have a VHS collection of music, you mean recorded concerts?

probably not half as funny a looks as the ones i'd probably get from a random average joe glancing upon mine;

Dust.

What's the unit down and to the right of the shelf full of discs? It looks like a Genesis/SegaCD.