Author's note: Wrote this one before Christmas. Is it too late (early?) to post a Christmas column? Survey says: Nah.
At
one time, Christmas was all about the VCR. My preservation-obsessed
mother would tape Christmas specials as they aired, and watching them
every year became a tradition, as is the case with many around the
holidays. The difference with us was that, instead of waiting until
these specials were broadcast on traditional airwaves, we’d pop in our
tape and blow through all the Swiffer and Burger King
commercials with impunity. This was the height of technological wonder.
Now it’s all about my hard drive. But I’ll get to that.
Nostalgia
is a big part of the holidays, and lately I’ve been feeling nostalgic
about my old VCR. What a beast this thing was. A sleek silver
and black that looked futuristic at the time, it was one of those
old-school tanks that loaded from the top and made a satisfying metallic clink sound when you snapped the
tape into place. It was about the size of a basketball court
and sucked more power than a particle accelerator, but it was reliable
and indestructible. You could toss it in front of a bus and just the bus
would break.
Many
a Christmas was passed in front of that tank, and while video viewing
methods have become sleeker and prettier, there’s something to be
said for old videotapes. The picture was often grainy and had lines of
snow running across it, the colors faded with time, and the beginning of
the tape always looked and sounded warbly, like it was being played for
an underwater audience of Aquamen. But darnit,
it had character. Plus it was all we had. These whippersnappers today
don’t know even know what they’ve got.
What’s
odd is that when I watch some of these same Christmas specials today,
I’m always a bit surprised that there isn’t a little video skip
here, a patch of missing audio there. I watched that tape so many damn
times I memorized the imperfections of the format itself, so when I sit
down as an adult and flip on “Frosty the Snowman,” it’s almost jarring
when Santa goes into his speech about Christmas
snow and doesn’t sound like he has a mouthful of golf balls.
Younger
fans of older media formats are increasingly common; they’ve
popularized vinyl to a degree that has sparked a mini-Renaissance. Talk
to a young vinyl collector and they’ll tell you about the warm sound
quality, the rich bass, the expansive cover art suitable for framing.
They’re onto something there.
By
contrast, there’s no reason I or anyone else should be nostalgic about
VCRs and VHS tapes. The performance is not superior in any way to
DVDs or BluRays. Pure, unadulterated nostalgia is the format’s only
redeeming factor, which means Millennials and post-Millennials, the same
ones who resurrected vinyl, will almost surely let videocassettes die.
Nobody tosses in a weathered tape of “Goodfellas”
and says, “Look, look at the way you can barely make out the expression
on Joe Pesci’s face! See how all the reds are bleeding together? This
is epic!”
And yet.
A
few years ago I set about on a mission: Scour the internet in search of
all the Christmas specials that were on that ancient tape, download
them, and renew my love for those old shows with a digital collection
that won’t deteriorate over time. Amazingly, I found them all, many
tucked away on obscure European video-streaming sites, hidden amidst
clips of mustachioed street performers and mimes
riding elephants. To download them I utilized technology that sits in a
kind of ethical gray area; for that reason, I’ll not divulge my
methods, lest I get a knock on my door from the producers of “A Garfield
Christmas.” In my imagination they’re a pair of
eight-foot-tall goliaths wielding baseball bats.
The
digital versions of these Christmas shows fall into two categories --
the ones with pristine quality, and the ones that look like
twice-warmed-over
crap.
The
pristine ones are a delight, of course. They sparkle with a newness not
seen since they originally aired, likely sometime during the Cretaceous
period. The crappy ones, though, are crappy in a very specific way.
Someone
grabbed them off a VHS tape. It’s obvious. All the hallmarks are there:
the intermittent line of snow that creeps along the bottom
of the picture, a slight and occasional lurch in the video. Audio
recorded in a tackle box. The works.
You’d
think that would ruin my enjoyment, but on the contrary, it’s really
quite charming. I’m sure a younger person, spoiled on digital riches,
would find it headache-inducing, like trying to read a blog entry on a
faded rag of papyrus. For me, the hisses and pops are a time machine,
delivering me into a boys’ body, hunched forward with his finger on the
fast-forward button to blow through Arby’s
ads.
As
the saying goes, “Everything old is new again.” In this case, the
opposite is also true -- everything new is old again. And that’s part
of what makes Christmas special. Time twists and contorts, until the
memories of past decades live side-by-side with the here and now; Santa
swoops in at the end of “Frosty” and saves the day for the 32nd time,
and yet the familiar beats are somehow still
fresh. They’re small things, these TV shows made for kids, but it’s the
small things that matter. If the quality more closely resembles that of
the old VHS tape -- now collecting mold in a basement -- that’s
fitting. It speaks to the boy who still lives somewhere
inside this cranky old fart’s heart.
