Ed's Alamo

Woodsy,

While I have a bunch of VHS tapes here in the hoard, I only have photos of two. I needed these to post on The Alamo Meta pages.

From The Vegas Hoard

Ed

I've Got it Taped

 I've been in the attic this afternoon now it's warm up there.

It's been years since I looked at my old VHS video collection, so I got them out of their crates and had a look, cleaned them up and formed a plan to put them on shelving. I guess I have around a hundred. 

Mostly 1980's big box VHS, there are some clamshells too, along with a group of slipcases. Quite a few are pre-certification. There are a very small number of Betamax. I'm only half way through getting them out.

Do you have any old videos?

Remember these?

Buxton Bounty

On a frosty day trip to the Peak town of Buxton nestled betwixt snowy hills the Missus and me mooched among the many charity shops.

Prices of vintage toys and games have shot up in Charities of late, especially old board games, of which I saw a few like Airport, Hotel, Escape from Colditz and Totopoly.

I did pick up some some old tech, namely a 1989 VHS pre-cert Kung Fu Horror film called The Men from the Monastery, a 1974 Shaw Brothers production. I collect old horror and thriller videos, preferably big box but small and pre-cert are fine too. This is the first 1980's horror video I've seen in a charity shop for years, so I was chuffed.

I also got a set of BBC Radio cassette tapes of their 1981 production of Lord of the Rings. This is the 2001 re-issue and just part 1, The Fellowship of the Ring, which I first heard, along with the rest, in the Spring and summer of 1981, whilst volunteering for the RSPB at the Ouse Washes. It was all very Middle Earth!

I like Tolkien tapes and books and have a few. The older the better and preferably with classic art on the covers. I have sold some old computer games like the Hobbit and regret it, as the box art was fabulous.

Have you any old VHS or Videos or Lord of the Rings books and cassettes?

Das Haul Up Close

 Here's a closer look at yesterday's German car boot €10 bargain haul of old cars and VHS.

Lots of SIKU, some Matchbox and a Japanese Hinshei crane.

The SIKU vehicles, like the yellow tow truck and the orange trailer, are really solid. All of them say made in Germany so are post-unification in 1989. Exact dates I'm unsure of.

I love the SIKU ADAC Prufdienst trailer, in which cars drive through to be checked! The Crane to the right is Japanese, my first MINI Power vehicle.

Here's some odds n odds too. Apart from the helicopter rotor I don't recognize any of the spare parts. You?

For the old big box* VHS videos I got - one of my collecting passions -  I chose this lovely 1880 cabinet in the flat to photograph them.

Eh voila!

I had thought they were all unrated, i.e. no age limit marked on them, which in the UK is known as pre- cert or pre-certificate and typically early to mid 1980's, but these German big boxes are all age rated. 

At this point I'm sure if unrated videos exist in Germany. Do they exist in your country readers? 

* Big box refers to the much bigger boxes of early VHS video cassettes from the 1980's. They can be solid plastic/ thick card or slightly padded plastic clamshells.

Have you got any readers?

Das Haul

 We both enjoyed strolls from our stall today and bagged a few nice Dinge at the Flohmarkt.

Here's some of them.

See what you think.

A box of old Siku, Matchbox and a Hinshei. €5.

An old German pirate figure called Captain Wood Leg. €4

Four nice condition cars, Matchbox and a Hottie. €4

Five old big box German VHS videos, unrated. €1 each!

Our biggest purchase, for our daughter to sell on, Lynch's Tina. Priced at €25, the Missus bagged it for just €15.

KEVIN'S SHORTS

Here are some small videos I've done:

Matchbox motorway

Lunar loop

Nomura dc9 airliner

Enjoy!

Kevin

UK

A CARNIVAL OF MONSTERS IN MY VCR

 

Sometimes a great notion leads to a carnival of monsters. It did with me last night. Having bought this 4 episode Doctor Who series on a 1990's VHS tape in a charity shop I was keen to relive my 70's Saturday Nights and binge-watch all four, just 100 minutes.

I even got my Missus to agree to watch!

We were all set. Video tape in hand, I slotted it into the VCR and .... instantly ejected. I tried again and the same. It has been a while since I played a video so I tried a few different tapes. All the same, ejected. Clearly my VCR has its own demons to contend with!

I tried blowing on the tape heads and pumping air onto them with a pump but to no avail. Finally I sprayed WD40 onto the heads and have left it.

In complete frustration and the opposite of what I wanted to do - spend more money - I rented the four episodes on Prime for £6 and voila,

A Carnival of Monsters!

I was back in 1972 and aged 11 again!

Even the Missus liked it, sort of.

Have you seen Carnival of Monsters?

HUMBER AND TRENTING

 The Moonbase Missus and me have just got back from an overnight stay in our new fave town, Barton Upon Humber in North Lincolnshire. An hour away from Moonbase down the M62, its old and pretty enough to keep us both happy and enough charity shops and cafes to make a sound Saturday morning.

 We also went to a Friday night gig, the main reason for going, to see one Nick Harper at the Ropery Hall.

Nick Harper is the son of folk rock legend Roy Harper, as in Hats off to .... by Led Zep. It can't have been easy forging a musical career in such a legendary shadow but Nick, who we only discovered last month, is enough of a songsmith and above all a guitar virtuoso to completely hold his own and being now 58 has done for decades.

Mind-blowingly original in both voice and guitar you can catch up with Nick Harper here. He's playing Birkenhead tonight!

Mr. Harper was ably supported by a fabulous warm-up act, Patrick Duff. Another fabulous singer-songwriter and guitarist, the small Barton crowd were definately blown away with his seasoned talent and incredible set of lungs! As a teenager he was the frontman of indie band Strangelove, compatriots of Britpop founders Suede and hailed as the next big thing before rock 'n' roll took its toll. You can read about Patrick's life here. We bought his biography for a friend.

After a decent kip overnight we hit Barton's church museum and shops this morning, fuelled by coffee and a Lincolnshire sausage butty.

St Peter's Church is a medieval structure now run as a museum by English Heritage. Full of preserved skeletons of dead residents, ample diseased bones, split skulls and burial artefacts from its hundreds of graves, its one of the most dug-up and researched places from the Middle Ages anywhere. Well worth a visit especially if you're a member of English Heritage, its a grounding pile with its many dark spaces like this, the bell tower.

The charity shops were reassuringly full of the living residents of Barton and proved bountiful too. Well at least I thought so. See what you think in the snap below.

The K-Tel 40 Supergreats double album, £1, is in near mint condition, a gift for a mate; the JLA novel collection I'd never seen before and in very good shape for £1 each too; the Dr. Who VHS tapes were a punt to be honest - being from the early 1990's they're not old enough for my own VHS collection but maybe of interest to a buyer on Ebay. £1 each, the double set £3.

There were lots more Dr. Who VHS tapes - should I have got them all? -  and a huge collection of hardback books called the History of Dr. Who, each book sealed in plastic and unopened and probably a part-work. At £3 each they were too rich for my purse. What do you think? 

I also snaffled this Dragon magazine from the hey-day of Kung Fu.

With the great Jimmy Wang Yu on the cover and also the centrefold, I so remember these mags and had them all as a youngster. I still have a quite a few now boxed up with my Inside Kung Fu pile in the attic. Did you have magazines like this as a kid?

I was also tempted by this Starline LP of TV Themes from the 1970's, which included the wonderful Catweazle [was it shown were you are?], the classic Please Sir and the Fenn Street Gang, which I think was a Please Sir spin-off, is that right?

Being by the Pandora Orchestra I didn't succumb as anything might happen once opened!

We then set off and toured down the Humber and its tributary the Trent on the eastern banks around Alkborough. Have you been there?

Alkborough Flats is an ethereal drenching of three rivers meeting in the mud. A primitive place complete with an ancient circular turf maze, Julians Bower.

The land and villages around Barton on the Humber and the Trent all seem ancient. Its like stepping back a few hundred years just being there. Flat vistas, distant rises, red brick hamlets, russet soil, wide long rivers, aged trees and empty lanes all give the area an other-worldly feel..

My final shot is a return to St. Peter's. As soon as aI saw the ladder propped up against a bare medieval wall I thought of that scene in the Stone Tape.

You know the one, where a young girl's ghost lets out a blood-curdling scream as she stands at the top of a set of stone steps next to an ancient bare wall!

BBC

Shown to a snug, festive but unwary British public on Christmas Night 1972, the BBC and Nigel Kneale created one of the scariest TV shows ever made. I had just turned 11 and it frightened the bejeebers out of me, as it did Jane Asher's character pictured below near the dreadful steps to nowhere. I hope the Beeb shows it again this Christmas, do you readers?

BBC

Thunderbirds in the Garden by Orbital Wings

I've blogged it afore but I do like Orbital Wings' homage to Thunderbirds so much that here it is again. Its so well done!

Hope you like it too!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-WpjA8F_RE

THE AVENGERS ON VIDEO

When domestic Video Cassette Recorders first appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, most of what was available to rent or buy on pre-recorded tapes consisted of normal theatrical movies. 

TV shows were also released. Some programmes were edited (apparently by the villain from Texas Chainsaw Massacre, using his chainsaw) in to movie-length versions, combining parts of two or more TV episodes. Other tapes featured the original TV episodes.

As TV programmes were usually shorter than movies, you usually got two or three episodes per tape. Tapes were large, and expensive, so full TV season sets were rare. If you wanted a set, it had to be built up tape by tape, which was expensive, and only for the dedicated fan. Many shows only had a few selected episodes available.

Since colour programmes were generally thought to be more popular than those in black and white, some shows from the 1960s (when TV production largely changed over from black and white to colour) faced a problem. 

In the case of The Avengers, the early episodes were in black and white, and the later episodes in colour. Video companies feared that the colour episodes would sell more than the black and white episodes, leaving the black and white tapes sitting on shop shelves.

The answer, at least in this case, was to put one of each on a single tape. These Avengers tapes by Lumiere each have two Emma Peel episodes, but from a different season of the show. Season 4 was the first Emma Peel series, and the last to be made in black and white. 

Season 5 was the second and last Emma Peel series, and the first to be made in colour. Clearly an attempt has been made to put together episodes that are linked in some way, usually by theme. The first two appearances of the Cybernaut robots are included on Vol.2 - there was also a Cybernauts episode in The New Avengers.

Vol.1 The Town of No Return/From Venus With Love

Vol.2 The Cybernauts/Return of the Cybernauts

Vol.3 A Touch of Brimstone/The Bird Who Knew Too Much

Vol.4 Death at Bargain Prices/Escape in Time

Vol.5 Too Many Christmas Trees/The Joker

Vol.6 The Gravediggers/The Living Dead

Vol.7 The Danger Makers/The See-Through Man

Vol.8 Small Game For Big Hunters/The Hidden Tiger

These tapes date from the 1990s - some have dated price stickers on the back, giving a date of 20th December 1995. As there was nothing available on tape from The Avengers in NZ, the release of these volumes was a big deal for fans of the show. 

They were $29.95 NZ each, for just two episodes, but I recall them being on special when they came out. There were eight volumes, although there might also have been one for Tara King (all of whose episodes were in colour), which we did not get.

As there were 26 episodes in Season 4, and 24 episodes in Season 5, these releases represent only about a third of the episodes made. As far as I know, these were the only episodes released on videotape in New Zealand. I had to wait a long time for the DVD boxed set to arrive, so I could watch the others.

The tapes have the Australian censorship rating of PG in a square printed on the paper slick that is inserted in to the plastic case. This meant Parental Guidance Recommended for Persons Under 15 Years in Australia.

For the New Zealand market paper stickers were applied, also with the PG classification. This is in two forms, the first three have PG - Parental Guidance Recommended for Persons Under 13 Years; the others have Parental Guidance Recommended for Younger Viewers, but without any age level being mentioned. 

The latter have a silver stripe down the centre (in NZ, video labels have a Silver stripe for Classifications that are not age-restricted, and a Gold stripe for those that have a legally binding age restriction). The classification appears on a coloured dot: green for General (British U); yellow for those with an age recommendation; and red for those with an age restriction.

These tapes are now a piece of history, an attempt to move the less popular black and white episodes of a show by combining them with one of the more desirable colour episodes.

They also illustrate the high price of videos in the 'Good Old Days'. At full retail price, these few tapes would have cost more back in 1995 than my full DVD set of The Avengers (Seasons 1 to 6) did in 2022, and taken up more space.

Paul Adams from New Zealand

MEMORY LANE IN THE RAIN

A real trip down memory lane today for me with the Missus as we ventured forth to the town I used to work in for twenty years; Morley. I hadn't been back since 2005, when I finished my 'big' job. I was 44 then. I'm 62 now!

Despite the winter's rainy drizzle we were emboldened by a local pork pie and took advantage of the many charity shops. some of which I used to visit on my lunch breaks decades ago!

Today's catch was slim but fun and along the way we saw some interesting items on the shelves. What do you think?

First up, a large boxed Lego set 744, 1980, priced £30. It looked impressive!

A large plastic robot Overseer priced £40 and one I'd never heard of. Next to it was a Beatles Sgt. Pepper's Music Cartridge!

An interesting and near mint boxed game called Snake Eyes by Vic Toy/ Invicta, 1969, priced £5. A lovely item in great shape. I had the Invicta Mastermind game as a kid.

This Darth Vader spinner from 1997 brought back happy memories as I sold one on my old toy stall in the Noughties.

A whole stack of Dr. Who magazines, not one I've ever read. You?

We liked this framed print of steam engines hanging above the Market's excellent vintage corner, Junk and Disorderly. A print of an oil painting by Barrie A.F. Clark from 1977. Reading about the artist, it would appear that he helped designed and made prototype toys in the early 1960's, as well as doing his painting! I wonder which toys?

There were badges too, 50p each. I bought one!

Next door in the Market's record shop was this fab window display of Beatles LP and Singles covers.

A blast from the past for me was seeing a Broons and Oor Wullie annual. Along with Giles, my older brothers always got one of these annuals at Christmas in the early Seventies. Did you?

The two-man sub on the cover of Valiant 1968 caught my eye too. Is this an annual you had?

And to finish, a snap of something I struggled to scoff as a kid but love now, Glace Cherries! I saw these in Morley Morrisons.  There were always some in my Mum's kitchen cupboard next to the equally unusual candy peel! Do you like them?

and here's what I bought, a meagre trio of fun stuff.

The Belly of an Architect is a film I'd never heard of and even better it was on VHS Video Cassette, which I collect. The Heavy Nuggets CD is a compilation of unusual heavy rock tracks for the car.

Perhaps the best buy was the plastic Batman Badge. At first I thought it was a variant of the well-known Plaston plastic badge but then I saw a different brand name on the back, Di Bro and Made in England.

Turns out its from a Batman collectable from 1966 and one new to me, the ABC Interpass Badge and ID Card, which I found information on and borrowed these pictures from Worthpoint. Is it something you know readers?