I came to the apartment with my Canopus card in hand, prepared to digitize my commercial-filled, taped-from-broadcast copy of Stephen King’s The Shining (not to be confused with Stanley Kubrick’s more famous movie loosely based on the same book). Once digitized, I was going to burn a DVD sans commercials. I had actually been rewatching the tape not too long ago and hadn’t finished it, so it needed rewinding first.
Hit the rewind button. Tape player makes a low-pitched braying sound and turns itself off. I hit the power button and turned it back on, ejected the tape, shrugged, inserted tape again, and hit play to see if the spindles were frozen or something. Instead, it seemed to play, or to think it was playing, but on screen was just snow. Turned on the audio and heard a choppy, fuzzy version of the sound, but no pic. Odd. Eject tape, find a different tape, insert it, hit play. Just to verify that the problem is the tape and not the device. Except that again I get snow.
OK, I says, I guess my VCR player just died. Just to verify that second hypothesis, I insert the second tape in the TV. The TV is an old hybrid, it has a VHS machine built into it, but it’s mono and I don’t have the remote for it (hence the standalone VCR player). Anyway, second tape plays just fine in the TV, so it’s definitely the VCR player. And the Stephen King tape is if course OK, see? I’ll just stick it in the TV and note that it plays and OOPS look at that, snow again!
OK, in the standalone VCR player, I tried the second tape and it didn’t play either. And the second tape just played fine in the TV. See, I’ll just pop it back in and verifffWHAT-THE-FUCK? Snow? OK, hold on. Now I’m confused. OK, I’ll go and get a third tape, a seldom-played commercial tape that should not have been in any way affected by whatever has gone south with the VCR player, if that’s the problem. And I’ll just pop it into the TV and…snow. Just for the heck of it, I’ll pop it into the VCR player and…more snow. I see, I now have two nonworking VCR players.
Tape in hand, I hie myself down to Radio Snack and look at sale-price VCR-DVD combo players for $90. Salesguy comes over, and I explain what happened, and I say it appears that I need a new VCR player and furthermore it doesn’t look like I’m digitizing The Shiningtoday after all. He looks at the tape briefly, pushes the little button that lets the shutter flip up, turns the takeup reel manually a notch or two, and to my astonishment says he doubts there’s anything wrong with the tape that could have damaged two machines like that and to go ahead and try it in the new machine he’s selling me, worst case scenario is the tape is ruined and won’t play, but it won’t hurt the tape player.
I go home, unpack, hook cables up, try a tape (plays fine), try a DVD (plays fine), try the third and second tapes that put up snow on the other players (both play fine), insert and attempt to play The Shining and get snow, eject, put in second tape, hit play, see snow, eject, insert third tape, hit play, snow.
Return to Radio Quack, box and receipt in hand, different employee at counter, I say (truthfully if not whole-truthfully) “DVDs play fine, tapes started out OK but then it quit working, now it only shows snow”. “When did you buy it?” “About 20 minutes ago”. “Oh…OK, hold on”. He brings me a new box of same model, takes old one for RMA to distributor, and I slink home feeling like a person of less than sterling character.
Digitized The Langoliers instead.
(Sure as hell wasn’t gonna do The Ring)