Raiders of the Lost Mediums of the 80s – The VCR

The 80s were such a great decade for new electronic devices. You had the VCR, the car phone, the microwave, the personal computer, the video game system, and the fax machine. They've pretty much all evolved too, to the point their original form has become dead technology. The VCR is now known best as a Blue Ray player, the car phone is a cell phone, the Atari is now a Playstation 3, the fax machine has been lost with the combination of email and a scanner, the personal computer even bigger and morphed into a laptop, and the microwave, well is still pretty much exactly what it was in the 80s, which is something that makes it much easier to make popcorn.

I can no longer remember if it happened in 2008, or 2009, but there was a day I got rid of all my VHS tapes. It was quite the collection. I remember thinking about what I should do with them, give them to friend; pawn them, Salvation Army; yard sale or just throw them away? Sadly, I went with the latter. Unbelievably, I didn't learn this lesson of watching technology die, and I've built a massive DVD collection during a time in which DVD's are giving way to the Blue Ray, which in another 10 years will give way to something else. Hopefully there will always be a method to watch my DVDs or I'll be in great peril.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is best remembered by me as the first movie I ever watched on a VCR. It was either Mike Trinks' or Josh Roy's birthday party on Gillette St., and whatever parental unit was throwing the party, rented a VCR. I was much too young for the movie at the time, and was probably more concerned with playing whatever birthday games were going on and eating chocolate cake, but I'll never forget the ending.

In front of my, I don't know, 8 year old eyes let's say, I witnessed peoples faces melting off. It's kind of a dramatic experience at that age. It's not Darth Vader blowing shit up when you're 5, but it's close. Fortunately, due to this new technology of the VCR, we were also provided the technology of rewinding and fast-forwarding things. What this did, was enable the cool kid at the party to say, "Hey look, if we rewind the movie, we can see their melting faces go backwards so their faces are back on!" This eased the would-be horrifying traumatic childhood experience greatly.