...wow!! How so very far, we've come, in such a short period of time, with regards to society's embrace of the home video venue. Heck, in the not-too-distant past, this viewer fondly remembers a time when conceiving the possibility of actually building a personal movie collection, was a pipe-dream fantasy, exclusively realized and relished by the much more well-to-do, who had the financial resources, in maintaining a temperature controlled warehouse, chock full of multiple-reel feature films, on the standard filmstrip format (...at the time, my father, who serviced the Hollywood business community at the time, would often snag distributor movie catalogs in his ventures, which advertised the storage and rental of these multi-reeled films...and we'd waste countless hours and longing sighs...marking and dog-earing the catalog pages...dreaming of the unheard-of actuality of owning a home movie collection). Not too long afterwards, the short-lived war between Beta and VHS (...shhh!! Don't tell anyone, but this viewer actually eschewed Beta, altogether, as an introductory home video format, in favor of the stylus-based CED disc format, before succumbing to VHS), with the latter format, winning out in the end, gave way to a veritable boon, to prospective film collectors, as far as selection, as well as an embrace of the awesome artwork on the tape boxes, large and small...cut-to-fit and clamshell...which often rivaled the original theatrical release poster art of the film, if any...
...and of course, just as films on VHS became fully complacent (...or 'disposable', as director George Romero was once quoted, in saying), with both ardent collectors, as well as the mainstream public, merely wanting to watch the occasional movie, along came the digital format, with DVD giving way to BluRay and online digital download. But that's getting way too far ahead of ourselves; it is that phenomenon of the VHS format, which has exuded an extraordinary longevity...totally unexpected, by the initial purveyors of the format...a 'phenomenon' which, amazingly enough, has refused to die, in light of video store closures & rampant online accessibility...and herein, the focus of which is informatively celebrated, in "Rewind This!"...
