All that's left is on video

There are still about 30 video tapes in my house, even though I've currently got nothing to play them on. There are a couple of ex-rental tapes - the Romero Dawn of the Dead video that I'm never, ever getting rid of, and the copy of Jean Rollins' Fascination that I'm holding onto for scientific reasons. But most of them are just blank tapes with random shit put on them decades ago.

I long ago traded up to much sexier DVD packages, so I don't need that copy of The Third Man anymore. The problem is, I'm pretty sure there is all sorts of crazy stuff on the end of these tapes, after those movies. There are almost all three-hour long tapes, and that meant you could fit most movies on there, (or even two short ones, if you snipped off the credits), but that often left you with an hour or so, and I used to fill that shit with all sorts of things.

And in a pre-YouTube age - where if you missed this stuff the one time it was broadcast on TV, that's it, pal - so I would fill those spaces with music videos weird old documentaries and episodes of TV shows that never get repeated. 

I also used to tape a lot of entertainment news - I have to hold on to that copy of David Lynch's Dune, because I still want to see the late night news items that I know are still on the end of it: pieces about the new upcoming movies like Pulp Fiction, Shawshank Redemption and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Most importantly, there are tiny bits of videos of me and my mates fucking around and making our own movies with video cameras, back when we had too many ideas, too much energy and absolutely zero resources.

I've already converted one tape to digital form to save some of these efforts, and even put them through a basic edit and put it on YouTube for all of us to laugh at (and fuck no I'm not going to link to it here), but I'm sure there's more, especially on the one labelled 'Zombie Epic Part Two'. This might be the only video footage I have of me and my mates at a very particular time in our lives, and as tempting as it is to let it fade away forever, I have to try and save as much as I can.

 So I have to hold onto those 30 tapes for a while longer, until I can get another player and sort out what is actually on these things. AT least the tapes themselves are sturdy and robust - some of them have survived more than 30 years. They can last a little longer.