Anyone remember VHS double cassette films?

[High Test With da Best]

Several of the Disney VCR releases came in two video cassettes.

The Disney cases were different too, big plastic chonky boys

bug trouble in little china

Was it about COVID-19?

 

[Deleted member 110072]

" bet when you were a kid at the rental store, you thought you were getting 2 movies for the price of 1"

you be wrong,,,,

Actually included the sequel as a bonus to fill out the second tape, Cage made sure it was kept to a snappy 80 mins...

 

[I Am Legion]

Oh yeah. ANd I had a dual deck. You wouldput tape on the corners and dub those good ones.

 

[BoomStronk]

Never saw the heat double cassette. That must be a special issue unit. My nwithbours had heat, in single tape form. I remember it well, though I never actually watched it.

The most disappointing cassette ever was the head cleaning cassette. Grandparents had one, and it had a normal looking case with late 80s neon graphics. I thought it was gonna be some kind of sweet Tron remake or something. Nope. Just bullshit. Went in hoping for a Sci fi computer adventure and got slapped in the face with a dose of adult reality and a reminder that things break and need to be cleaned. Ugh. Lame.

 

[Your Salad]

I bet when you were a kid at the rental store, you thought you were getting 2 movies for the price of 1

Why as a kid would I think one movie clearly labeled as whatever movie it was, were two different movies?

Back in the day my dad rented a VCR so we could try one out before he spent money on one for the house.

 

[AFanNotAFighter]

Yup. Also remember the Be Kind Rewind signs and stickers too.

 

[Law Talkin’ Guy]

I tracked down an explanation behind this double cassette version of Heat that none of us have ever seen before. It’s a bootleg apparently. Found the source of the photo on Reddit from the owner.

Commercially released films were always able to exceed the 2-hour recording limit imposed by recording on SP quality, but that wouldn’t be the case for a bootleg as blank VHS tapes off the shelf from stores if you were to record on SP quality had a hard stop at two hours, so a bootleg of a film like Heat which was about 2 hours and 50 minutes who absolutely need two tapes if it was using your typical off the shelf blank tapes.



@ICHEERTHEBULL
@Stump

 

[Your Salad]

The worst was when video games came on multiple discs or floppies



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Or when you had to use all of your skill as a 1337 H4x0r to copy said floppy's and you would run into something like this.

The first videogame copy protection I ever ran into.
I had to use my training to counterfeit one.
Loved that game so bad!

 

[ICHEERTHEBULL]

I tracked down an explanation behind this double cassette version of Heat that none of us have ever seen before. It’s a bootleg apparently. Found the source of the photo on Reddit from the owner.

Commercially released films were always able to exceed the 2-hour recording limit imposed by recording on SP quality, but that wouldn’t be the case for a bootleg as blank VHS tapes off the shelf from stores if you were to record on SP quality had a hard stop at two hours, so a bootleg of a film like Heat which was about 2 hours and 50 minutes who absolutely need two tapes if it was using your typical off the shelf blank tapes.

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@ICHEERTHEBULL
@Stump

Damn good work!!!

 

[TeTe]

Be kind, please rewind

 

[syct23]

Yup. Also remember the Be Kind Rewind signs and stickers too.

I remember some places even charged for not rewinding..

 

[BoomStronk]

I tracked down an explanation behind this double cassette version of Heat that none of us have ever seen before. It’s a bootleg apparently. Found the source of the photo on Reddit from the owner.

Commercially released films were always able to exceed the 2-hour recording limit imposed by recording on SP quality, but that wouldn’t be the case for a bootleg as blank VHS tapes off the shelf from stores if you were to record on SP quality had a hard stop at two hours, so a bootleg of a film like Heat which was about 2 hours and 50 minutes who absolutely need two tapes if it was using your typical off the shelf blank tapes.

View attachment 1038745

@ICHEERTHEBULL
@Stump

 

[helax]

I think the movie IT was the first double VHS I had. Well it was a miniseries I guess but whatever it’s a movie to me

 

[HereticBD]

Yeah, and I can still pinpoint the moments you would have to change tapes in "Casino", Titanic", "The Godfather" and "Braveheart".

 

[BoomStronk]

I think the movie IT was the first double VHS I had. Well it was a miniseries I guess but whatever it’s a movie to me

OOOOh, you just reminded me of The Stand on double tape VHS. Watched that bitch when I was at home sick. I was probably 7 with a high fever. I was tripping balls. It was a cinematic experience I'll never forget.

 

[BoomStronk]

I remember some places even charged for not rewinding..

My family received a red sportscar external video tape rewinder unit for christmas one year. Suddenly rewinding went from a chore nobody did to a privilege my brother and I would fight over. That thing was FAST, it would rewind a tape in like 12 seconds.

 

[helax]

Be kind, rewind

Special place in hell for those that didn’t rewind imo

 

[syct23]

My family received a red sportscar external video tape rewinder unit for christmas one year. Suddenly rewinding went from a chore nobody did to a privilege my brother and I would fight over. That thing was FAST, it would rewind a tape in like 12 seconds.

We had one too!

Not the car version though, sad.

OMG! We can rewind two tapes at the same time!!!

 

[DaleBoca]

Of course!

IIRC the highest quality playback speed gave you 2 hours per tape, mid was 4 hours and lowest was 6 hours. It was a noticeable difference too

SP, LP, EP. I didn’t care as a kid because I wanted to record as much as I could, so I went with SP.

 

[Bullitt68]

Hell yes. I also like telling kids these days about the green "Adult" labels that would be on top of R-rated VHS tapes to signal that some R-rated films were even more than just rated R. Usually it was for lots of swearing and/or violence and/or nudity. Warner Bros. covering their asses with the movie version of "Parental Advisory" labels.

But for the VHS double tapes, I vividly remember checking out Heat from my local library as a kid and watching it in the morning, being blown away by it and thinking about it all day, and then having to watch it again that night. Six hours and four tapes in one day...and I've watched it a million times since

This one actually brings back a bad memory. This is the one and only time this happened, but I also checked this one out from the library as a kid, and I was accustomed to the standard left-to-right order: Left side is Tape 1, right side is Tape 2. But just like it is in that fucking picture, Tape 2 was on the left and Tape 1 was on the right. So unbeknownst to me, I'm psyched to watch Sergio Leone's epic Once Upon a Time in the West, and I ended up watching Tape 2 first. I can still remember thinking the "opening scene" with Henry Fonda in bed with Claudia Cardinale was a weird way to start a movie where I don't know who's who or who they're talking about or what's going on, and then when I'm expecting the halfway point transition, suddenly the credits started to roll...and that's when I realized what happened.

Not even a fucked up first viewing could keep me from loving that movie, and to this day I think that it's the GOAT Western, but I was SO FUCKING PISSED when I realized what had happened. From then on, you better believe that I made sure every time that when I meant to be watching Tape 1 it actually was Tape 1