Last Sunday I went to the Doncaster Keepmoat Car Boot Sale with my Brother and his Missus. It's the first boot sale I've been to this year and I enjoyed getting out in the cold May sun. There was a time when I would have bought tons of old toys and come home with two bin liners' full, but these days I prefer to browse and enjoy the bustle. To be honest there just aren't that many vintage toys at car boot sales anymore here [maybe I bought them all!]. There was one decent one on this occasion with an interesting mix of stuff like a loose but excellent Marx Chief Cherokee with accessories for £15 and a boxed Matchbox Stingray Marineville Headquarters [OK, it's not really vintage]. I didn't get the price on that.
What I was actually looking for were old big box VHS or Betamax videos, which I collect. I was amazed how few there were - just a solitary one, amongst countless modern video's, which nobody wants anymore. I love video, it's history and, like Super 8 before it, the impact it had on home 'cinema'. It was revolutionary and now it's all but faded. We are literally witnessing the death of a technology. Big Box and Betamax were it's beginning and they are inevitably the first to disappear, only to exist in the future on collectors' shelves like mine. One day DVD will go the same dusty way, just not sure when.
Anyone else collect films in home formats like 16mm. Super 8, Laserdisc, Video or DVD or the players they're played on?
Been collecting Big Box scifi titles, yet it is regrettably true that sightings have grown scarce over the past few years. Not all hope is lost, however. A couple of weeks ago I came across Star Wars TESB & ROTJ first issue rental videos from the mid-80's. They are seriously scarce as most were destroyed a long ago.
ReplyDelete...destroyed a long time ago in a galaxy far far away!
ReplyDeleteI love to collect vintage VHS, especially the giant clamshell cases, and small labels like Interglobal and Paragon. I still watch VHS all the time, although DVD and WiFi do have their charms. One of my most cherished collections is the complete VHS set of Roberta Leigh's SPACE PATROL.
ReplyDeleteI also have a stack of 8mm monster movie digests, and several 16mm monster movie features. Old formats are fantastic! Back in the day, if you wanted to see your favorite monster movie, you either waited until it turned up again on TV, or if you were lucky, you could go to your local discount house and buy the 8mm 200' digest for $5, or the 50' digest for $2. One of my favorites was the Japanese sci-fi gem BATTLE IN OUTER SPACE. When I accidentally discovered that the 200' digests usually contained different footage from the 50' digests, I bought both of any title I could find, and spliced them together, and made a 20-minute SUPER-digest!
Rob
What a fab collection you have Rob! have you put any of your digests on You Tube? I love the expression 'clamshell'. Not heard that before. Is that referring to the padded, squashy VHS big boxes as used by the likes of VTC?
ReplyDelete