It's International VHS Day, So Dust Off the VCR

Today is June 7, which means it is International VHS Day. Some calendars file it under National VCR Day instead, but it is the same idea. Nobody is entirely sure who started it either. Even the sites that track these little holidays admit the origin is a mystery, somewhere in the same fuzzy territory as National Vanilla Pudding Day. It does not really matter. The point is simple. Spend a minute appreciating the chunky plastic brick that ran home entertainment for a solid 25 years.

If you grew up with one, you know the sounds. The clunk as the tape slid in and the deck swallowed it. The whir of rewinding. The little jolt of static when you hit play, and the tracking lines you nudged away with that one button nobody fully understood. Movies came in big cardboard boxes or clamshell cases, and the good ones had worn spots on the tape from being watched into the ground.

VHS was not the only option at first. Sony had Betamax out a year earlier in 1975, and on paper it had the better picture. JVC answered with VHS in 1976 and won anyway, mostly because the tapes ran longer and JVC let other companies build the players. By 1987 VHS held around 90 percent of the market. Betamax diehards are still a little sore about it, and honestly, fair enough.

Tape did more than play movies. People recorded shows off the television to watch later, which felt close to magic in a world with no internet. That habit ended up in front of the Supreme Court in 1984, when the studios argued that home recording should be illegal. The court disagreed and ruled that taping your own shows counted as fair use. That decision is a big reason the format got to grow instead of getting sued out of existence.

Then DVD arrived, then streaming, and tape quietly faded out. The last VCR rolled off a factory line in 2016. You would assume that was the end of the story, and for a while it mostly was. A stubborn crowd of collectors never let go, though, and lately the format has been creeping back. Small labels press fresh tapes for people who want something they can actually hold in their hands. There are an estimated 10 billion videotapes still sitting in attics and thrift bins around the world, so the supply is not exactly running low.

The timing this year is hard to beat. A new science fiction movie called This Is How The World Ends comes out on VHS today and nowhere else, billed as the first film sent straight to tape in roughly 20 years. The release date was no accident. The crew picked VHS Day on purpose, which means the format is getting its loudest moment in years on the one day built to celebrate it.

Marking the day takes almost no effort. Dig the VCR out of the closet and play whatever tape is still loaded in there, even if somebody recorded over half of it ages ago. Stop by a thrift shop and grab a few tapes for a dollar apiece. Pull out an old home movie and get it digitized before the tape degrades any further, because that footage does not come back once it goes. Or just load up something familiar, hit rewind, and listen to that whir one more time.

Happy VHS Day from all of us at LonePortal. Be kind, rewind.