What was the first vhs you ever watched?

petes · 24-09-2007 08:21AM #1

The first vhs I watched was Superman. Our local shop started to rent them out years ago (they had about five to start with). We didn't have a video player but my auntie did. We used to go there every Sunday to visit so I was allowed to rent it and watch it there. Can remember it clear as day. I was very excited!!

chakotha · 24-09-2007 10:37AM

Capricorn 1

Followed by Tora! Tora! Tora!

murphaph · 24-09-2007 12:26PM

Funny but I remember the exact one, where and when we rented it too. It was Platoon and I think I was too young to be watching it!

Ah, our brand new Mitsubish Black Diamond 21" and Mitsubishi VCR. I remember it well. We must have been one of the last on the road to get a bloody TV that didn't have a wooden enclosure!

crosstownk · 24-09-2007 01:49PM

Star Wars - the original one.

Wishbone Ash · 24-09-2007 01:56PM

Some sort of educational video/documentry at school circa. 1980.

(Were the top loading video players 'VHS' or were they Betamax (spelling?)?)

Ruu_Old · 24-09-2007 02:07PM

Some dog hunting video that my Dad got. Then rented Space Angel from a shop (which was also a pub and a small grocery, gotta love small town shops!)

It BeeMee · 24-09-2007 02:08PM

Wishbone Ash wrote:

(Were the top loading video players 'VHS' or were they Betamax (spelling?)?)

Dunno about Betamax, but the original VHS machines were top loading.

The first VCR that came into our house was a second-hand top loading jobbie.

It had a pirated copy of "The Thing" in it, but the last 20 minutes were taped over :mad:

Took me years to find out how that film ended.....

Dudess · 24-09-2007 05:00PM

Haven't a clue what my first one was - although the earliest one I actually remember seeing was The Neverending Story (1984). We didn't own a video recorder - they were extremely expensive - but we'd borrow my uncle's from time to time. It was one of those chunky silver ones that took up half the room and when you pressed "eject" the tape holder part would rise up REALLY... SLOWLY.

We finally got our own video recorder in 1988, a Phillips one. We also swapped the old formica-encased Hitachi TV for a wide-ish Sony one. Still have it today and it's in very good nick.

Ruu_Old · 24-09-2007 05:06PM

Below was nearly identical to our first VCR and when you took the tape out when it was finished, it was nearly in the melting stage.

When we finally got a proper VCR, it cost £295! :eek:

mickrourke · 24-09-2007 07:09PM

Erm, the frist video i saw was Tron
enough said really.

aidan_dunne · 24-09-2007 07:14PM

petes wrote:

The first vhs I watched was Superman. Our local shop started to rent them out years ago (they had about five to start with). We didn't have a video player but my auntie did. We used to go there every Sunday to visit so I was allowed to rent it and watch it there. Can remember it clear as day. I was very excited!!

Well, being pedantic, for our household it was Betamax instead of VHS. But, yeah, I know what you're saying.

I seem to recall Superman II being the first video I saw. In fact, any time we rented out videos I was always allowed get out Superman II. Lost count of how many times I watched that film on Betamax!

Came across a few old Betamax tapes some years ago when doing a clear-out. Don't have a machine to play them on and see what was recorded on them but one had a label on it that said 'Late Late Toy Show'. Given when we had the Beta machine, at a guess I'd say it must date from about 1982 or 1983! :eek: Would have loved to have been able to play it back and see what the big toy trends of Christmas that year were.

kelle · 24-09-2007 07:23PM

Ruu wrote:

Below was nearly identical to our first VCR and when you took the tape out when it was finished, it was nearly in the melting stage.

When we finally got a proper VCR, it cost £295! :eek:

Actually, in the Summer of 1989, my uncle from Australia bought a VCR for us (Mum and Dad had lent him their car while they were on holidays here for 3 months, and this was their thank you gift) and it cost £495!!!!
Nowadays, I wouldn't lend my car to anybody for love or money!

The first Videotape we ever hired out was "Baby Boon" with Diane Keaton.

mickrourke · 24-09-2007 07:38PM

aidan_dunne wrote:

In fact, any time we rented out videos I was always allowed get out Superman II. Lost count of how many times I watched that film on Betamax!

Man that film rocks....
"Kneel before Zod"
class. I always watch it every Chrimbo

Ruu_Old · 24-09-2007 07:41PM

kelle wrote:

Actually, in the Summer of 1989, my uncle from Australia bought a VCR for us (Mum and Dad had lent him their car while they were on holidays here for 3 months, and this was their thank you gift) and it cost £495!!!!
Nowadays, I wouldn't lend my car to anybody for love or money!

The first Videotape we ever hired out was "Baby Boon" with Diane Keaton.

Hehe! I was looking around for an old video recorder in the shops and nowhere sells then, only DVD/VCR combos and even those are hard to find anymore.

mental07 · 24-09-2007 07:50PM

I remember watching a Simpsons video, I was very young at the time. It was not only the first time I watched a video, it was also the first time I ever watched the Simpsons! I remember "The Telltale Head" was on it, and I distinctly remember watching the bit when the boys were lying on the grass looking up at the clouds

admiralofthefleet · 24-09-2007 07:51PM

the quiet man, great movie

Mrs. MacGyver · 24-09-2007 07:55PM

the never ending story

BendiBus · 24-09-2007 08:00PM

Airplane II: The Sequel

aidan_dunne · 24-09-2007 08:02PM

mickrourke wrote:

Man that film rocks....
"Kneel before Zod"
class. I always watch it every Chrimbo

You said it, man! And don't forget Superman having a massive fight with three super-powered Krypton criminals, knocking the shíte out of Metropolis/New York while they're at it! Fantastic!

Like yourself, if any of the channels happen to be showing either I or II at Christmas, I'll tend to sit down and watch them again for the umpeenth time. Pity the Superman film series went downhill after II, though. III was just about passable but the less said about IV, the better!

byte · 24-09-2007 09:33PM

Ah, sadly, I do remember.

It was Three Amigos, with Chevy Chase back in the late 80's.

colm_mcm · 24-09-2007 09:40PM

Mine was Zig and Zag "Nothing to do with toast"

monkeyfudge · 24-09-2007 09:41PM

It would have been around 1982 and the film would have been the brilliant 'Scanners'

You used to be able to rent tapes out of the Golden Discs in the Ilac Centre.

dazberry · 24-09-2007 09:51PM

A pirate copy of ET circa 1982. There were two families on our road that had VCRs, and all the kids went in to either/both at some stage to watch it.

D.

mike65 · 24-09-2007 10:01PM

Superman 11 in 1981

Mike.

Sarsfield · 24-09-2007 11:19PM

First VHS I saw was at school. A 'Horizon' programme about reproduction! I think none of the teachers had the bottle to talk about sex so they let us learn from the BBC

Would have been '81 or '82

Doctor DooM · 24-09-2007 11:22PM

The first Childs Play... I was about 8!

rossie1977 · 25-09-2007 12:43AM

Mr. T: The Toughest Man In The World; in 1985.

The guy that sold us the video recorder gave us two video tapes for free. First tape i rented would have been an old superman animated series.

meglome · 25-09-2007 12:56AM

The first one I ever saw was Conan the Barbarian.

Reku · 25-09-2007 06:51AM

Don't honestly know but at a guess I'd say it was probably a Transformers one....

gucci · 25-09-2007 07:41AM

colm_mcm wrote:

Mine was Zig and Zag "Nothing to do with toast"

"ssssssssshhhhhhhhhh dont mention to........that stuff!!"
think that zig and zag video was the first video i owned

the first one i recalled seeing on my cousins video player (see we were very poor...) was planes trains and automobiles!!

Firetrap · 25-09-2007 07:52AM

E.T. - a pirate copy. If my memory serves me right, it didn't come out officially on VHS until 1987 or 1988.

monkeyfudge · 25-09-2007 08:23AM

Firetrap wrote:

E.T. - a pirate copy. If my memory serves me right, it didn't come out officially on VHS until 1987 or 1988.

That's right. Pretty much everyone had a pirate copy of that film.

It BeeMee · 25-09-2007 09:27AM

monkeyfudge wrote:

That's right. Pretty much everyone had a pirate copy of that film.

"a friend" had a copy, but the "bicycles across the moon" bit was all snowy from being watched so much...

uncle ernie · 25-09-2007 10:34AM

Young Blood, some ice hockey thing. havent seen it since

Doctor DooM · 25-09-2007 10:35AM

farohar wrote:

Don't honestly know but at a guess I'd say it was probably a Transformers one....

I recorded nearly every episode of transformers onto VHS from the fun factory on sky, painstakingly, every sat and sun morning.

Now I have them all on DVD... shouldn't have bothered!

Reku · 25-09-2007 11:29AM

SDooM wrote:

I recorded nearly every episode of transformers onto VHS from the fun factory on sky, painstakingly, every sat and sun morning.

Now I have them all on DVD... shouldn't have bothered!

We were all young and foolish... my family had loads of films and such recorded off the TV on VHS, we never even bothered to look into getting them copied onto DVD since you can readily pick up many of them for cheap since they're so ancient.

SpitfireIV · 25-09-2007 11:38AM

'The Raccoons' was my first VHS memory, my uncle was going off on holidays for a week, so he left his VHS player with us (just incase it got robbed while he was away! Just show you how valuable they were in the mid/late 80's!).

Ardent · 25-09-2007 11:47AM

monkeyfudge wrote:

That's right. Pretty much everyone had a pirate copy of that film.

I saw that copy too. One of my first memories of watching a movie on VHS.

Mad how technology has changed over the last 25 years but movie piracy hasn't!

Mawg · 25-09-2007 12:21PM

A badly animated version read-along of the story "Twon mouse and country mouse"

DeadSkin · 25-09-2007 02:23PM

A Bruce Lee flick, can't remember which one though.

keefg · 27-09-2007 01:38AM

My mate Sean was the only one with a video on my street, this was in the early 80's.

His dad used to rent videos from a bloke called Dave The Video Man who used to come around the estate in a white Ford Escort van loaded with vids, but here is the outrageous bit....well at the time it was...Sean's dad bought, yes bought (no one bought films at the time) an original VHS copy of Mad Max.......for 80 pounds sterling!!

This was crazy money to be spending back then but we all got Sean's dad's moneys worth out of that film. A gang of us used to watch it, rewind it & watch it again for days on end during the summer hols. The next film he got was The Life of Brian which got the same treatment....I still, to this day, can remember every scene from both of those films.

As for my own household, we got a VHS player a few years later and the first films I remember was a double box set of Conan The Barbarian & Red Sonja.

Pigman II · 27-09-2007 06:01AM

First VHS = Star Wars (prob around 1984-5).

I've done a lot of cool stuff since but the sheer simple act back then of getting up one Saturday morning, running downstairs and actually being able to choose what to watch for the first time ever is still a personal highlight for me. Better than any xmas I can remember.

You couldn't even explain it to kids of today

Abdiel · 27-09-2007 09:25AM

First video I watched was Gremlins but that was on a Betamax

Looked like this one: http://www.palsite.com/7000ovi.html
First VHS was probably Missing in Action or some other Chuck Norris flick.

Mr Mojo · 27-09-2007 09:49AM

keefg wrote:

...Sean's dad bought, yes bought (no one bought films at the time) an original VHS copy of Mad Max.......for 80 pounds sterling!!

I remember Virgin Megastore in Oxford street, asking £100 for a copy of ET - crazy money!!! that was way way back in 1983/'84.

Scarface was my first, I remember running home with it from the local Indian corner shop (yep they didn't give a $hite that I was only about 10 years old at the time) and stacking it just out side my gaff, I had cut elbows, knees, the lot!!!

I didn't care though, cos we had a VCR (exactly the same one as Ruu posted up). I can still remember the noise of those beasts when you rewound the tape, sounded like a jet engine.

cmurph · 27-09-2007 01:04PM

the first video we had was up in arms and it starred danny kaye

it was brilliant.....after that we had a video man call and ever week we just kept the same movie... girls just want to have fun

Pigletlover · 27-09-2007 02:16PM

Mannequin

on a rainy afternoon, think it was back in the late 80s,

arch_stanton · 27-09-2007 03:07PM

The Sound of Music in school. It must have been around 1982.

Our teacher's husband had a tv shop. One day they brought in a video camera, one of those huge ones with a separate vhs machine to do the recording. I'd love to see that tape now.

kelle · 27-09-2007 05:27PM

Pigletlover wrote:

Mannequin on a rainy afternoon, think it was back in the late 80s,

I remember it took us ages to get that out for rent as every young person in the town had it taken out night after night! That was 1989.

steveone · 01-10-2007 07:55PM

Conan the Barbarian.....
i was about 10... and did i enjoy the lightly clad women.....er....yes:D

Dudess · 01-10-2007 11:51PM

What the hell is this Betamax lark? You nerds!

keefg wrote:

His dad used to rent videos from a bloke called Dave The Video Man who used to come around the estate in a white Ford Escort van loaded with vids

Classy!

Sean's dad bought, yes bought (no one bought films at the time) an original VHS copy of Mad Max.......for 80 pounds sterling!!

Yeah I remember videos being that expensive - and being gleefully reminded of same by my brother when I thought I had damaged a tape from the local rental (I hadn't, much to my bro's disappointment).

Keefg, since you were in the UK in the early 80s, do you remember the lovely Maggie's clampdown on "video nasties"? The biggest windfall ever for practitioners of video piracy!

Nunu · 02-10-2007 12:03AM

The first film I remember on VHS was 'Halloween'....I was only 6!. I will never forget it - my uncle used to babysit us the odd time and would always bring over a video. I got to see so many flicks I shouldn't have:o
Should have scarred me for life, but is still one of my all time faves!

I'm pretty sure I saw 'Rocky' and a few others before that though.

What was the first vhs you ever watched?

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