#1592 – Spool
Posted on July 25, 2012 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comics
I still remember the sounds our first VCR made. When you hit the “play” button there were many tiny thing that had to spin up to the proper speed before the picture would appear. You couldn’t watch a movie as quietly as the regular TV show. It always had to be a little louder so you could hear it over the whirring and buzzing of the VCR’s mechanical guts.
Tags: old school, pets, tape, VCR, what is that thing
*sniff* reminds me of the death of our old Betamax, I loved that machine, went down in a blaze of glory, literally, it caught fire.
AS for VCRs, I always rather liked them, there was something satisfying about being able to understand how a machine worked.
Ooooh, I remember our first VCR from when I was a kid, and all the funny sounds it made! When we fast-forwarded or rewinded a video tape, it sounded just like as if it was shouting “Roooolig fiiiiilm! Rooooolig fiiiiiilm!” (which is Swedish for “Fuuuuunny mooooovie!”)
I don’t know what is the weirdest thing about this; the fact that the VCR actually made such a fitting noise, or that I kept hearing words in the sounds I heard as a little kid…
And the tapes, they could survive a nuclear bomb detonation and still be there for our mutated ancestors to play 🙂
Man, miss VCRs
I have a DVD/VCR combo, mostly because of several taped programs from years past, and a few movies I haven’t found on disc yet. I do enjoy the “ch-kakt! whhhirrrrrrr…..” when a tape starts to play. I can do without the “chukt-yynngg-yynng-yngg***” when a VCR tries to eat a tape.
Ah, VCRs. I remember them. So many commercials for Kimba the White Lion, Bill Nye episodes, two weeks of frosty the snowman every December.
I have a lot of family videos on VHS and haven’t been able to play them… I finally found a working VCR at a thrift store a while back. (My old one stopped properly ejecting tapes. I took it apart, fixed it, tested it (it worked) and my boyfriend (ex now, for different reasons) took metal tweezers to the circuit board (live) to pick up a screw and fried it. One the bright side, it worked for 20 years before croaking.
biggest scam ever: auto rewinder….
There is at least one teenager who will see this comic and go “What’s a VCR?” I don’t think I’ll ever get over the recent shock of a friend’s younger sibling asking me what a cassette tape is.
Oh wow… I had forgotten about how tapes would get eaten.