Rewind renaissance ‘Tapeheads’ revel in revival of their beloved VHS movie format By: David Sanderson Posted: 3:00 AM CDT Saturday, Apr. 6, 2024

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This article was published 06/04/2024 (738 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Back to the Future movie franchise correctly predicted a number of technological developments, including personal drones, tablet computers and hands-free gaming consoles, but even Marty McFly didn’t see this one coming.

Eighteen years after A History of Violence became the last major Hollywood movie to be released on Video Home System (VHS) cassette tape, the oft-maligned format is currently enjoying a renaissance of sorts, so much so that a still-sealed VHS copy of Back to the Future recently fetched US$75,000 at auction. Not only that, fuelled by a pandemic-driven fondness for all-things-nostalgic (Jigsaw puzzles! Needlework!!), independent shops such as Be Kind Video in Burbank, Calif., are sprouting up south of the border, stocked with hundreds of used VHS tapes for sale or rent.

“It’s more fun to go somewhere physical and look around, versus sitting at home and one person is clicking and another is like ‘No, no’ and it just becomes annoying,” said a video-store customer in a December 2023 Washington Post article about VHS’s improbable resurgence.

“I think there’s a warm and cosy feeling from popping in one of those tapes,” a second so-called “tapehead” was quoted as saying. “They’re slices of history, and they’re more personal and tangible than any other format.”

None of that comes as a newsflash to Winnipegger Derk Biondi, the “D” behind Big D’s Video Rental, an everything-old-is-new enterprise that is wholly dedicated to VHS cassettes, the go-to home-viewing choice from the late 1970s through to the early 2000s.

While Biondi, whose biz concentrates almost exclusively on cult favourites and hard-to-find horror titles, readily admits there is no clear advantage to watching a movie on VHS versus DVD or Blu-ray, a sense of comfort washes over him, he says, each time he loads a tape into his Sansui VCR and presses “play.”

“I kind of compare tapes to old vinyl records, which often have scratches or pops,” he goes on, seated in a Fort Rouge café, down the street from where he and his partner live. “To me, it adds character if the picture is fuzzy, or if the sound is hit-and-miss. That shows it’s been loved.”

Biondi grew up in Oshawa, Ont., where he and his family would hit their neighbourhood video outlet every Friday night, to fetch a few movies to enjoy over the weekend. He laughs, recalling a flick he and his younger brother were particularly fond of, which they hid from their mother and father when the time came to return it.

“Let’s just say our parents weren’t too pleased when we went back the following Friday, and they were told they owed X amount in late fees,” he says with a wink.

The same as everybody else, Biondi fully embraced digital discs when they began to supplant VHS tapes as the preferred video platform, around 25 years ago. Except when a combination bowling alley/video store in nearby Bowmanville, Ont., held a blowout sale of its VHS catalogue in 2006 or thereabouts, he and a couple of high school buddies pooled their resources, and dropped $20 on 20 tapes, for old times’ sake.

“This is one of the movies we picked up that day,” he says, holding out a copy of War Bus Commando, a 1989 action flick so obscure it doesn’t even have an audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. “It’s by no means a good movie — the director seemingly blew the budget in the first 10 minutes, so the rest is mostly talking — but for whatever reason, I held on to it through the years.”

The seed for Big D’s Video Rental was planted in 2022, shortly after Biondi moved to Winnipeg, where his partner is from originally. One of his first purchases for their new place was a ’90s-era, Sony Trinitron TV. The set would pair perfectly with a VCR, he decided, and he found what he was looking for at Value Village for “a lousy five bucks.” Of course, they’d need something to watch, so he began scooping up VHS tapes for as little as a quarter each, at garage sales and secondhand outlets.

Within a couple of months, he had built up a sizable collection of his preferred genre, which he tabs as “sci-fi, post-apocalyptic, Road Warrior knock-offs.” (Playing show-and-tell again, he whips out a copy of Aftershock, an “absolutely hilarious” 1990 thriller set in the aftermath of an unexplained third world war.)

Late last year, he was introduced to the person who operates Rae’s Rummage, a retro-flavoured vendor space at Thirsty’s Flea Market, at the corner of Erin Street and Ellice Avenue. The two share a mutual affection for VHS tapes, and in mid-January, Biondi began renting space at Rae’s, to peddle titles he didn’t have room for at home, the majority of which were never released on DVD or Blu-ray.

“I call myself Big D’s Video Rental, but it’s strictly sales,” says Biondi, a software salesperson in his “real” life. “The ‘rental’ part is just a take on the old mom-and-pop shops we all went to, back in the day.”

About that: one of the things Biondi keeps an eye out for when he’s tape hunting are stamps and stickers associated with the golden age of VHS. Many is the time he brought home a movie he had zero interest in watching — here’s looking at you, Jerry Maguire — only because it sported a colourful tag from a bygone video outlet such as Osborne Village’s Movie Village, Portage Avenue’s Star Time Fotovideo or Henderson Highway’s Video Stop.

He also gets a kick out of bright, flashy stickers marked “comedy,” “action” or “new release,” which he removes carefully, to attach to tapes he’s selling, whether they fit the bill or not.

“It’s all about having fun and putting a smile on people’s faces,” he says, noting he’s even gone so far as to design tongue-in-cheek stickers of his own that read, “Big D’s Video/Warning: if tape is tampered with, customer must pay for cost of tape.”

On April 7, Big D’s Video Rental will be a registered vendor at the Winnipeg Punk Rock Flea Market, which runs from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Victoria Inn Hotel & Convention Centre at 1808 Wellington Ave. Organizer Em Curry is “stoked” that Biondi is among the 100-plus sellers that will be on hand for the third iteration of the popular event.

“I didn’t have cable growing up and VHS tapes were watched and re-watched,” Curry says. “As an ’80s kid, discovering Movie Village was a revelation… and seeing movies like The Decline of Western Civilization, Repo Man and Suburbia was a big part of early exposure to punk culture.”

Curry feels there’s a good reason why ventures such as Biondi’s are striking a chord with movie buffs in 2024. As streaming services become more and more expensive, and as they continue to remove movies from their rosters, there will be a stronger need for physical media, Curry contends.

“I read a tweet a while ago saying that the cult movie will no longer exist, because if a movie doesn’t do well, it’s immediately deleted from Netflix or whatever. I thought that was such a sad observation. Personally, I was always attracted to something different, and would go to the older sections of the movie-rental place, to check out what everybody else wasn’t watching.”

At the market, Biondi expects to cater primarily to people around his age, as well as Zoomers, the name given to people born between 1995 and the early 2010s. What’s been interesting during his first three months in operation is how often he has sold a tape to a person who informs him they don’t even own a VCR.

“A lot of the younger kids are drawn to the cover art, which, admittedly, can look pretty sharp when you have a bunch grouped together on a shelf,” he says. “For instance, my 17-year-old nephew has really gotten into VHS, and is watching ones I’ve given him like crazy.”

Million-dollar question: is Biondi’s nephew familiar with VHS tapes’ cardinal rule: be kind, rewind?

“I hope so, cuz it sure bugs the hell out of me when I buy a used tape, only to discover it hasn’t been rewound.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca