Maybe you could buy “classic” Disney movies for that price, but I remember that when I was a kid ('80s and early '90s) if we wanted a newer Disney movie like The Little Mermaid or Beauty and the Beast we had to wait until used copies became available. IIRC after a movie had been available to rent for a while the video stores would sell off a bunch of their used copies and keep just a few to continue renting out. $25 sounds about right for these used copies, but whatever they cost new it was too much for my family to afford.
Disney’s always been an entity unto themselves. They, for a couple of decades, anyhow, decided on a 7 year release schedule, to hit every generation of 7 year olds with their collection as if they were new movies. It was rather brilliant. They were either available at sell-through prices, or not available at all for another 7 years.
There was a time midway between releases of The Little Mermaid when you couldn’t buy a copy of the VHS for under $300. It was insanity. Most of my stores didn’t even have it for rental, because people figured out they could rent it and then never return it. They’d gladly pay our $100 “MSRP” (the computer automatically reverted any movie that we couldn’t actually order to $99.99) as that was the “replacement cost” of their “lost” tape. But even we couldn’t order a new copy for our own rental collection, so we’d just not have it.
It wasn’t the first that was priced to own, but I too remember it being the very first ‘quick’ release. Nowadays it’s an established, rigid cycle of promotion, release domestic, release worldwide, PPV, then DVD etc. but back in the early VHS days it routinely took ***years ***for any film of even modest popularity to get released on video. The top grossers (i.e. Jaws, The Godfather, the Star Wars movies etc.) took even longer.
But Burton’s Batman was released in theaters in Jan or Feb of '89 and was a huge hit (for a while I think the only one in the top ten that wasn’t a Lucas and/or Spielberg production). So I specifically remember being shocked when I saw a sign at a department store that summer with just the Bat Symbol and “Coming this Fall” below it. i actually had to ask if that meant what I thought it did.
Now that I think of it, it may have been the first blockbuster that was released ***initially ***as priced to own ($20-25). Before that the big films first came out priced to rent ($89.99) for a year or two then dropped.
I never bought new releases but I began collecting VHS movies in the late seventies. I never paid more than $30 dollars for a movie. I can specifically remember joining the Time-Life Video club and getting movies $19.95. Not new releases though, these were by and large 50 and 60 dollars. I too paid $24.95 for a blank VHS tape from 1975 to maybe 1980.
Our family had a Beta VCR about 1983 or so and I remember Dad using a “bomb release” remote control like the one you describe to pause/restart recording when he was taping things off TV/
IIRC pre-recorded VHS cassettes were quite expensive to buy in New Zealand until the early/mid-1990s when they suddenly dropped to about $25-$40 or so - not spectacularly cheap but not unaffordable, either.
What surprises me is the now exponentially shorter delay between a cinema run and DVD/Blu-Ray release. As someone mentioned earlier, it used to take months or even years for movies to get a VHS release after they were finished in the theatre - now it seems to be about 6 weeks (and sometimes there are movies which I’m sure are still playing in the theatre when the DVD comes out too.)
Batman was released in theaters June 23, 1989.
I seem to recall turnaround times of about 5-6 months in the late 80s and early 90s, from when a movie hit theaters to when it was released on video. The last movie I can remember having to wait a really long time for it to come out on video was Jurassic Park. I think it was more than a year after it hit theaters before it was released on VHS.
Anyway, at our local dollar theater, it’s not uncommon to see movies playing after they’ve been released on video. They tend to get movies about two or three months after their original release, more if the movie happens to be a blockbuster. I think the last Twilight movie was still playing a month after it was released on DVD.
We had one of those, but a lot earlier than 1984. Then in 84 we got robbed and they took that VCR, and the replacement we got had an actual honest to goodness remote control with no cord or anything!
Yeah, I was quite shocked when I found out Batman was not only going to be cheap enough to buy, but also going to be out before the end of the year.
Nowadays you have places willing to take your money to preorder blurays/dvd’s of movies that have only been in theaters for a couple of weeks. I can’t imagine what kids today would think knowing how long a wait was for movies to come to video if you missed the theatrical run. Of course go back a little further and there was no home video at all.
Posting in an ancient thread, but since this comment is so far off the mark (by about a decade), I thought I’d chime in.
People have had movie collections since the first VCR was introduced in the '70s. Many of the early collections were recorded (and meticulously labelled) from cable or satellite. By the time I was 14 in 1984, my best friend’s dad already had a collection of several hundred films, all neatly organized on shelving he’d built right next to his entertainment center (which consisted of a nice sized, '80s television, and a very expensive stereo system with massive speakers… his tv was routed through the speakers as well, via what was then called an amplifier, which was basically a central hookup and audio selector that output directly to the speakers). He was not the only person I knew with a VHS collection or with a home entertainment setup, and it was not something solely for the rich - this was a typical middle class family.
As for official VHS releases, they were already under $15 when I graduated from high school in 1988. I still have most of my collection, which I purchased in college - and most of them still have their price stickers (I would cut the bottom of the plastic wrap off to remove the cassettes, leaving the boxes protected), and they cost anywhere from $9.99 to $19.99, most of them were $12.99.
My first DVD player was purchased in May of 1998, and it was a second generation player, meaning it could read dual-layer discs. By the time I had a DVD player, I’d been collecting studio released VHS for over a decade, and my recorded collection went all the way back to about 1984, when I was old enough to start purchasing my own VHS tapes to record shows on the family VCR.
Just wanted to add a link to some good info:
Not sure if anyone remembers, but Disney films were always very expensive in the '80s, and they ran $29.95. The first animated film released by Disney was Dumbo in 1985 (at $29.95), and it was a pretty big deal. I still have most of my family’s VHS copies of Disney films, some of them from the second half of the 80s, before I started collecting religiously in college.
I seem to remember Beverly Hills Cop being available right away for, like, $19.95, which is the first affordable VHS I can remember. (I still rented it and copied it, though.)
Well, the real thing was the legal fight about being able to record and watch movies at home without breaking copyrights. Once the studios lost that fight, it was over. They could either sell movies at more reasonable prices and take the income from that, or they could watch people trade VHS tapes of their movies and get nothing.
I can remember a neighbor who had a stack of VCRs so he could make multiple copies of movies. This was before video stores, and I think he sold them at flea markets and other black market venues. Most of his day was spent shoving tapes into recorder/players. Tapes, both recorded and blank, were expensive, and so were recorders back then. It was a rather limited market, even in Los Angeles.
Ah, memories!
I had no idea VHS tapes were so expensive at one point. I remember my family had a VCR and we would rent videos from the mom and pop rental shops. I don’t recall during that time ever actually seeing VHS tapes for sell anywhere. It was around the late 80s that I started to see chain rental stores like Wherehouse, Music Plus, and Blockbuster, and that’s when I started seeing VHS tapes sold, along with laser disc I think. By the mid 90s I remember seeing VHS tapes sold at places like Sam Goody and Target for like $15 bucks, and they were a lot lighter too.
Used to have buy a membership to a video rental club. The one nearest my house was $200 yearly.
Dropped to $0 membership rather quickly. No idea if they offered refunds.
Do I understand right that they originally charged $200 per year, plus a charge for each tape you rented?! :eek:
Absolutely. That was because of the legal issues that plagued the industry early on. The distributors argued that renting movies violated the distribution license, because it became public entertainment. The video rentals responded by making their customers “members” of a private club, therefore no longer the public.
The fact that the entry fee was exorbitant was either because they could get it, so why not, or it was intended to act as a security deposit in case you stole the tape you rented…depending on who you asked.
Blockbuster continued to call their customers members until they closed. If I recall correctly, the membership fee through the early nineties was $50, but if you provided a credit card number for us to keep in the computer, we would waive the membership fee. I can’t remember if we called it a membership fee or a security deposit.
They dropped it somewhere in the mid nineties, as part of their larger efforts to fellate the customers into not going to Netflix.
Yep