#VHS nostalgia

[faithfullightning]

💐 𝗠𝗼𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗿'𝘀 𝗗𝗮𝘆 (マザーズデー)

'Twas a day late sharing this, so here is a Mother's Day-themed fanart of the Heelers. Making more Bluey fan-art, now and continually in the style of retro anime for a good sense of nostalgia!

Catching up on episodes, Bluey is such an extraordinary series 😭😭😭. I plan on doing more fan-art of this show, and other cartoons as well. Enjoy :)

And we love you mothers everywhere!

[punster-2319]

30th Anniversary of The Lion King

On June 24th 1994, Walt Disney Animation Studios released a film that many people often consider the pinnacle of Disney animation: The Lion King.

What else is there to say about it? It’s The Lion King. That opening shot and Rafiki holding up Simba are some of the most iconic images in pop culture.

It was released during the peak of the Disney Renaissance, fresh off the success of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin (with poor Rescuers Down Under wedged in between). It went on to be WDAS’s highest-grossing animated film until Frozen surpassed it nearly 20 years later (and the highest-grossing animated film overall until it was surpassed by Finding Nemo 9 years later).

Everyone has already talked about how great the songs, the animation, the themes, etc are so I’m just going to talk about a few personal memories of it:

The Lion King is tied with Aladdin as being my all-time favorite movie. I know it sounds cliche coming from someone that was born in the 90s, but that’s how it is. My earliest memory of it was the sneak peek teaser that was on the Aladdin VHS. I had it on VHS growing up and watched it so much that I could quote most of it verbatim (on a side note, I still have that VHS and honestly surprised that it still works).

Being a toddler at the time, I didn’t get to see it in theaters during its initial release, but I eventually got to see the movie on the big screen during its 2011 re-release which was one of my favorite movie-going experiences. I vividly remember people in the audience applauding right after Circle of Life and singing along to I Just Can’t Wait to be King and Hakuna Matata. If the upcoming 30th anniversary screenings are showing in the city I live in, I’m definitely dragging my friends to a few of them. 😂

I have a lot more memories associated with this movie that I want to share, but this post is long enough already. With all that said: HAPPY 30th ANNIVERSARY OF THE LION KING!

WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR FAVORITE MEMORIES ASSOCIATED WITH THIS MOVIE?

[cyanide-latte]

Got to thinking again today about pirating media and how many people make it about a moral quandary and how we here on Tumblr tend to be very gung-ho about pirating and this time in particular it boiled down to what I think the root is of why I'm largely okay with it.*

(*please take note, this post is about pirating platform-exclusive movies and shows. I do not support or condone piracy of books, comics/graphic novels or manga unless literally no other option is available to you. I've been a teen who had no choice but to read awful scanlations for manga growing up because I wasn't able to or allowed to purchase physical copies or even borrow them from the library. So I know that struggle, and I'm sympathetic to a degree. But please support your libraries, ask the librarians to teach you how to use the system, and use it to help support authors and artists before it is a legal and free way that actually helps. If you are in a situation where you have literally no choice for now, I recommend being responsible and trying to either buy the physical books when you can to help make things up or use a library when you are finally able to and borrow the materials, in order to still show support.)

This is probably my age showing but when I was a kid, we recorded shit on the VCR all the time. Buying actual movies was still something we did when we could, but in the 90s, stuff on VHS could get as high as $40 [USD] sometimes. Not all of them were, but the prices tended to be high enough we couldn't really afford to buy them ourselves; those had to be asked for as Christmas or birthday gifts, and even that wasn't a guarantee we'd open a rectangular gift to find a brand-new clamshell of the newest Disney movie.

But you know what we could afford to get? Blank video tapes. Depending on the brand and the length of the tape strip, they could cost as little as $3.99, and you could often get multiple blank tapes for a decent price. (I vaguely recall a half-dozen pack of tapes for maybe $25? We got a few of those when I was around 7 or 8 y.o.) And we would use that "Record" function on the VCR. We caught movies on the TV way less often than we would have liked because without a TVGuide or knowing someone who kept up with movie showtimes on various channels, you were kind of at the mercy of fate and fortune. Plus, we rarely tried to record a TV run of a movie if it was one we knew we REALLY wanted to buy on VHS.

Ah but shows! Shows we could generally depend on. You learned what channel(s) it played on and when, and you'd time it so you could record your episode(s), commercials included, and stop recording at the end of it. Presto! I could watch my episodes of Batman the Animated Series or Wishbone whenever I wanted. I'd have it forever (well, for as long as the tape can last anyway) even if the show went off the air and it didn't get any real VHS release. Lots of shows did get VHS releases, but they were limited to maybe three random episodes per tape, and were not usually for regular sale at most retailers; they were on the shelves of rental video stores and we couldn't keep them.

Until we got a special VCR that allowed us to record a copy of a tape onto one of our blanks. Again, not an endeavor we really did with movies, but when the family decided we were going to move in the future and wouldn't be sure we'd have a Blockbuster or Hollywood Video or Family Video wherever we were moving to, there'd be a burst of going to the nearest rental chain and carefully picking the tapes we knew we loved and wanted to be able to watch again, renting them for a couple of days, and putting that copy/record VCR to work before returning the proper copy back to the video store. Or if some friends had a movie and we wouldn't see them again, there was often an offer to record copies of their tapes. Didn't happen often but it was a handy solution to the desire to have access to the media in the long-term, and it wasn't looked down on as far as I can ever remember, because everyone recorded stuff on blank tapes and none of those people had no major moral crises about making copies in order to have the movies/shows they loved.

Now, when DVDs came out, things got a little bit different. DVD players and DVDs were expensive at the start, so the cost of all VHS tapes gradually started dropping. As with pretty much anything, pirating DVDs took off before long and soon just about every DVD had that in-your-face message about piracy, reminding you that copying and selling bootleg DVDs was illegal and "piracy isn't a victimless crime". I only vaguely recall being annoyed with DVD piracy, because what bootlegs I tended to see were extremely bad quality, and it was more annoyance at the idea that you could be swindled out of your money for something of barely-watchable quality. (I was 10 at the time and had not ever yet had to face the idea I could one day fall victim to being swindled myself, cut me just a little bit of slack there.) But to me it didn't really seem any different than what everyone I knew or ever interacted with did with VHS tapes. Selling the bootlegs to make your own profit, that I did eventually get; a chunk of a movie or show's success soon came to depend on DVD sales, and for a while I was very anti-piracy in that regard. But I never saw an issue with like, making DVD copies to trade with friends if we were able to do that.

Now it's 2022 and we are so inundated with streaming platforms left-right-and-center, I don't have regular TV channels or cable or satellite. I use a streaming platform to find what I want to watch, or a pirating site if what I want to watch isn't available otherwise. I also have a very large DVD and Blu-ray collection, and I use them regularly. And, the more and more so many streaming platforms release "exclusive" movies or shows that you won't be able to watch anywhere else and that they have no intent of making physical releases of? The more and more I find myself reverting to the mindset I had as a kid, wanting to make a copy of that Swan Princess tape we could only find at Blockbuster but couldn't afford to constantly rent. It isn't that I don't want to support the movies or shows themselves, or the people who pour themselves into making something I love. I want to support them in any way I can, including watching it on the platform if I have access to said platform.

But sometimes those platforms just...quietly remove the titles they've carried. Sometimes they jack their prices too high and I can't afford to keep paying that fee month after month because it stacks over time. Most often, I want to collect the media physically so I have the opportunity to revisit it in the future whenever I want, especially if I have a friend who has never seen it or even had access to it before. Physical media is wonderful, and there's something special about owning it. It's the same kind of special magic that it's always been about when I was 10 and could hold a freshly recorded VHS tape with episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess on it and know it was mine now for keeps.

This has already been quite a lengthy ramble and it's very colored by a sense of nostalgia, but for once I think that nostalgia really has come in handy for explaining why my outlook on something like pirating shows and movies is the way it is. I don't like this platform-exclusive direction; it's more or less just another paywall that can prevent entire swathes of potential audiences from connecting with movies and shows, and at this point, it's becoming almost too much for me to keep up with. So no, I have no moral quandary about cancelling subscriptions at some point and pirating episodes and movies and burning them onto a physical copy for keeps, and any reservations I used to have about buying bootlegs? Gone. I've seen blu-ray bootleg releases of platform-exclusive media that are much higher and more accessible quality than some official stuff, especially the made-on-demand stuff. At this point, I gotta respect the hustle and I can't complain about someone who burns a DVD better than I could.

Yo ho ho, y'all.

[bermudianabroad]

Only true film buffs watch on vhs 🍿

[goobersplat]

An anon asked for more VHS stickers so here you go!

1 and 2

[enoki00]

[blacklyinsane]

[retrogamingblog2]

Zelda Disney VHS Boxes made by VipersIslandVideo

[warakami-vaporwave]

[rienafoutre]

[contac]

[deathtastegirl]

(x)

[punster-2319]

30th Anniversary of The Return of Jafar

The Return of Jafar was the first of MANY direct-to-video Disney sequels. Like with the original Aladdin, I watched RoJ a lot as a kid. While it doesn’t hold up as well anymore (the 3rd movie is significantly better), I still have a soft spot for it. Even though the film is not as ambitious as the original (the first Aladdin’s budget was $28 million vs. RoJ’s $5 million), it was nice to see Iago have his own redemption arc which for the most part was pretty well done. The Return of Jafar became one of the best selling VHS tapes of all time and paved the way for the direct-to-video market not only for Disney, but for other studios as well, because later that same year Universal Studios released The Land Before Time II: The Great Valley Adventure, which was the first of MANY Land Before Time sequels. The Return of Jafar was also a pilot for the upcoming Aladdin tv series which premiered on the Disney Afternoon block later that year, similar to how some of the previous Disney Afternoon shows had multi-episode pilots (except this time it was straight to video, but there are a few obvious moments that you could tell where the commercial breaks were supposed to be).

[talos-stims]

very damaged VHS tape | source

[p1xiemeat]

[goobersplat]

The Last Unicorn VHS Rental Tape