It's the end of an era--the major film studios have announced that they will no longer be releasing films on VHS. The San Diego Union-Tribune's VHS post-mortem has some funny anecdotes from the time when videocassetes were still the hot new thing:
Watch what you want, when you want it, chirped the jingle for Video Library, a pioneering rental chain that launched in 1979 and grew to 43 stores in San Diego County before Blockbuster bought it out in 1988.
The slogan promised something so novel that figuring out how to follow the advice proved confounding for some first users.
"When I started, that whole first year we could not advertise 'VCR,' because nobody knew what that was," recalls Barry Rosenblatt, Video Library's founder. "We had to call them 'videocassette recorders.'
"And there was rarely a day that somebody didn't rent a cassette, call us up later and ask where to put (the tape) in their TV. It happened time after time."
The VHS era was good while it lasted, especially for movie studios, who leveraged the new medium to increase their revenues to unheard-of proportions. This revenue boom is the subject of David Waterman's Hollywood's Road to Riches, which shows how, beginning in the 1950s, a largely predictable business has been transformed into a volatile and complex multimedia enterprise now commanding over 80 percent of the world's film business. David Ondaatje, writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, called the book "a thorough economic account of how American film studios and their predecessors have exploited our appetite for movies over the past 60-plus years."
