VHS Collecting Doesn't Make Any Sense

And yet

Goodwill doesn’t accept VHS cassettes as donations any more, unless they’re the clamshell Disney movie ones. The reason they only accept those is because they’re the only VHS cassettes people still buy at Goodwill. I can’t be 100% sure why this is, but if I had to guess it can be linked to a dumb article from the early 2010s claiming those Disney tapes were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. They weren’t. They never were*. People were listing them on eBay for $1000 a pop, but the person who wrote the article didn’t know the difference between asking price and selling price. Sure people were asking for $1000 for that copy of The Little Mermaid with the dick on it, but it was only actually selling for $2. Yet the idea these tapes are valuable persists, and people go into Goodwill and buy them, thinking they’re going to make a few hundred dollars. I have seen it with my own eyes. It’s sad and lame.

Since you can’t get VHS cassettes at Goodwill now, other thrift stores are following suit, phasing them out. Eventually everyone will have just thrown out their original collections, and they’ll be impossible to find. Which is fine, I guess, except I have weird nostalgia for VHS. I know it doesn’t make sense, because everything about them is terrible. They wear out and sometimes the machine itself will “eat” them. The picture is standard definition but basically the worst SD imaginable, and there are all kinds of other issues that make them one of the least desirable mediums for watching anything.

So I collect them when I can find them, and have occasionally ventured onto eBay to buy one or two. There are still a lot of VHS cassettes out there, but sadly most of them don’t fit my criteria for adding to my collection.

First off, if I see a movie I know was also released on DVD simultaneously, I tend not to give a crap. I don’t need a copy of The Notebook on VHS, that just doesn’t do anything for me. Most movies post-1995 don’t interest me.

I also don’t accept just any VHS. My brother offered me a collection of tapes about clock repair and I declined the offer. For the most part, I’m looking for movies from a pretty narrow window of time. Mostly 1980s, some early 1990s is fine. Comedy, action, even a few blockbusters are fine. I don’t want any classic movies, just the sort of disposable stuff you’d go into a movie store and rent circa 1989. I don’t have Citizen Kane on VHS and I wouldn’t want it. I would, however, like a copy of The Stuff or basically any other horror movie. The thing is, VHS horror is where the actual valuable tapes are, forget Disney. A lot of the really infamous tapes from back in the day go for $30-$100. If you ever come across a copy of Cannibal Holocaust at a yard sale, scoop that one up.

Speaking of which, yard sales are hard for VHS hunting because most peoples’ collections consist of the exact sort of stuff I’m not interested in. Lots of later movies, generic rom-coms, Bob the Builder and his ilk. It’s pretty rare to go to a yard sale with VHS for sale and find anything really interesting. People who have large collections of horror and underground tapes tend not to let go of them, much less hawk them for $0.25 a piece in a yard sale.

If you’re thinking of starting a VHS collection, it’s idiotic and pointless and I recommend you start now rather than later.

*One exception to the Disney VHS tapes being worthless is The Song of the South. People will pay good money to see Disney go full-racist.