Thursday, March 3, 2022

King Kong on tape



So after finding the exact same brand of shitty tape player that I had when I was 12, I dragged out the box of cassette tapes that I had held onto over the years. There's a lot  - three different Best of the Doors compilations, some unexpected Massive Attack and lots of mix tapes from the early 2000s, right when tapes stopped being a thing. 

I even found the Cure album my Mum bought for me in early 1990 because my school cert results were decent, and it still fucking shreds.

I don't know how I ended up with a lot of them, they were left behind in cars or borrowed from ancient flatmates. And there were two blank white cassettes that were a real mystery, and when I played them, they turned out to be an audio recording of the first King Kong film. It only took a couple of minutes to figure out what it was, once they started banging on about Skull Island.

These tapes look old, and may be from a time even before video tapes, when people taped the audio of their favourite TV shows, because they were never, ever going to see them ever again. (Some episodes of Dcotor Who only exist in this form.) Or maybe somebody just really, really liked King Kong, and just wanted to listen to it over and over again.

I can't tape over them, or throw them out, even if their origins are a mystery. King Kong deserves better.

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