I started collecting movies the year I graduated high school and got my first VCR as a gift. It was a Beta machine. This was in a time where most people believed in the superiority of Beta over VHS. It was also a time where video stores would have deals to rent you a VCR (in a big silver industrial suitcase with a foam cutout inside) and two movies for $20/night. This was because not everyone had a VCR of their own, so renting just a movie was... obviously pointless.
So a typical summer weekend that year after graduation would be to shlep my Beta VCR over to a friend's house whose parents either had a VCR, or one who would be up for renting a machine and two movies on a Friday or Saturday night. A blank beta tape, on the slowest record speed, would hold 4 1/2 hours of video... enough for two movies and a television program. So that summer... and pretty much up until the beginning of the 1990s I made it a semi-regular practice of dubbing movies.
In clearing out storage this Fall I'm finally getting rid of all the Beta tapes (which isn't so long in coming, since up until 2-3 years ago I had a working Beta machine)... so I thought I'd make a photographic record of this fond farewell and discuss the movies I grabbed... which ones I replaced... and which ones I'm ok with letting drift away. If I get through this lot we'll turn our attention to the rest of the collection... post-Beta.
Note, the tapes are numbered, but weren't photographed in order... so I'm just taking them as they were stacked.
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