Video Boxes Were Better In The Old Days

Some good while ago, my mother brought home an old VHS cassette.

This isn't unusual; it seems like my family are the only people in the world who still use them, and everybody else on the planet is selling them for a quarter (okay, a dollar) apiece and then laughing at us. So we often pick up movies and things we wouldn't have found otherwise, and are often pleased with it.

This particular instance was special, for a few reasons.

First off, it was from an ancient dub of an even older Ultraman anime, and as I've stated in the past, I loves me some Ultraman.

Second, although the tape was old enough that it had acquired a permanent extremely loud buzzing sound on its soundtrack, it was entertaining (often for the wrong reasons) and had a gaggle of old previews for other tapes at the end of it.

Third, and most importantly to this post, is that the box itself is fantastic. It is seriously one of the most beautiful and incredible pieces of disposable entertainment related material I've ever seen.

It's not because of the artwork, although the front cover is actually pretty impressive (my sister color corrected it, so this image is prettier than the actual box itself!).

I'll point out that all those little spaceships were totally unrelated to anything that happened in the story. (Also, note that the company, F.H.E. [Family Home Entertainment], credits itself as "America's #1 Babysitter.")

Not even the back, really, although it has a rather typical description of ninety percent of the plot on it (darnit, you jerks! No spoilers!).

No, the thing that fascinates me and causes the box to move from merely being a typical box to something that motivates me to feel nostalgia for a time period I wasn't alive for is the fact that it's a layered box.

For those of you who don't remember the days of VHS (gosh I feel old), VHS tapes were usually sold in one of three ways. First, sometimes they would be a companion to some other item, and would have no actual permanent box to hold them. (I hate that, and it's no better when CDs and DVDs do it.) Sometimes, they would be sold in cheap cardboard packaging (which would be wrapped in plastic to be sold [much like a DVD case generally is], so that a tape couldn't be swapped out). And if the manufacturer was a high quality manufacturer (such as the Disney distributor), the box would be a large, book-shaped implement that completely protected the tape from dust and the like.

This tape's box was of the last sort, with a cardboard box to put it in. A box to protect the box.

Looking at it, I'm certain it's the oldest functional video cassette I've ever seen. Even the video store cassettes of things like Mighty Orbots and whatnot that my family used to rent were much newer than this thing. I know because most of those were also F.H.E. distributed, and by the time all of those were made, F.H.E. had completely different logos and the like.

I must also add that I'm horribly amused at old tapes where the previews (or "prevues," as this tape spelled it-no joke) are at the end, because if you don't like them, you can just ignore them. Ironically, I'm usually more interested in the previews on those old tapes, if only because it makes me intensely curious. (In fact, I was so flabbergasted by some of the "prevues" on this tape that I'm going to blog about them at some point.)

Anyway, that's all I have to babble on the subject of old VHS stuff that nobody else in the world cares about.

-Signing off.

Codger Mode Go!

You might be wondering at that title.

Well, despite my age (25), I frequently have fits of nostalgia codger-style.

What's really scary about this is that many of these fits are nostalgia for that which precedes my birth.

Take, for instance, old newspaper comics. Way before my time.

I can still experience them vicariously through such works as The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics.

And I'll tell you what, the old folks are right when they say "The funnies were better in the old days." With the notable exception of Calvin and Hobbes, which defied newspaper conventions while generally staying within the three or occasionally four tiny panels to which modern dailies are relegated, most newspaper comics are forced to rely on either cheap one-off gags or a very slow-moving continuous narrative.

Those were the days when Mickey Mouse packed heat.

I kid you not. In a protracted daily storyline (even though it was forced into a small space, it was a smidgen larger than that of today's daily newspaper comics), Mickey Mouse once went on a prospecting adventure, and during it, he carried a revolver. He also buried two guys up to their necks in the middle of the desert.

Again, I kid you not.

Then there's Thimble Theatre. For those of you not in the know, Thimble Theatre is the "birthplace" of Popeye, the immortal and memorable spinach-eating sailor better known nowadays for the numerous cartoon shorts in which he starred.

In a series of Sunday comics in the aforementioned Smithsonian collection (well, I think they're Sunday pages, but the Smithsonian collection's notations are awfully sparse), Popeye embarks on a prolonged sea voyage with his old sailor buddy, Bill Barnacle, an almost suspiciously similar sailor with a heavier build and a slightly less cartoony form. (Speaking of suspicious similarity, have you ever noticed that it's always the sailor-themed characters with a little horde of "nephews" that look just like them?)

I'll grant you, this stuff is dated, but it's good stuff. Wacky, weird, and illogical, but it still follows a pretty strong logic all its own, and the Smithsonian author states "it may be the finest example of pure comic-strip narration" to date. (The book is from the late '70s. Dang, I read old stuff.)

Speaking of old stuff, Prince Valiant existed in this era. The main difference between it then and it now? More finished (by which I mean "using better printing techniques") art in a smaller area (the '30s vintage Prince Valiant has eight panels of varying but large size, and takes up a very good-sized page; the modern strip has about five panels which take up little more than the standard size of a Sunday comic). That, and the storylines are a bit more modernized, taking on less of the King Arthur story concepts and just kind of running around with cavemen and junk like that. (Speaking of Prince Valiant, at one point when I remarked that I don't usually read it, my mother said that we had to stop getting the Sunday funnies. She was mostly joking.)

So, yeah. Huzzah for old comic strips.

-Signing off.