Book Review: VHS: Absurd, Odd, and Ridiculous Relics from the Videotape Era

VHS: Absurd, Odd, and Ridiculous Relics from the Videotape Era
By Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher
Running Press
272 pages

You won't find many people waxing nostalgic about VHS tapes. While used book stores still do brisk business selling an obsolete format like vinyl LPs, no real secondary market exists for VHS tapes. To the vast majority of media consumers, VHS is garbage, a gleefully-abandoned format prone to wrinkles and distortion. However, a few stalwarts remain enamored by those clunky plastic cassettes. Let's not call them "hipsters." Let's call them “ironic enthusiasts.” Which may seem to be a synonym for hipsters, but trust me, it's not. Mostly because I don't want to label myself as a hipster. Anyway. That's not to say that these people are choosing to watch, say, a VHS copy of “Pee-wee's Big Adventure” in all its poorly-framed, pan-and-scan glory over a DVD or Blu-ray copy of said movie. It's about experiencing the hidden gems, the weirdness, the horrors that somehow never seemed to make the transition to DVD. To borrow a joke from “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” it's about finding a tape wherein every frame looks like someone's last known photograph.

In the book “VHS: Absurd, Odd, and Ridiculous Relics from the Videotape Era,” by Joe Pickett and Nick Prueher, artwork from the stranger realms of the format are explored. As the founders of the Found Footage Festival, Pickett and Prueher are the self-proclaimed champions of VHS as well as the proud owners of over 3,000 cassette tapes. For the book, they've mined their collection to showcase bizarre, disturbing, and unintentionally hilarious cover art from the Golden Age of VHS.

Click here for a slideshow of few sample pages.

It's not your typical fine art coffee table book, but the cover of a videotape called “Bowling for Women Only” is likely to provide more laughter than black and white pictures of the Guggenheim. The snarky commentary running through the book has probably already told the joke you just thought of in your head, delightfully in tune with you on just how incredibly, awfully awesome these tapes are. Recommended for the “ironic enthusiast” in your life.

Click here to purchase a copy.