The Quiet Panic Behind the VCR Boom

While the VCR was mostly widely accepted, some media warned of its potential dangers. Some people, like my grandmother, were listening.

The first successful videotape recorders began appearing in the mid-1950s. These units were expensive, bulky, and geared toward a commercial market. As a product, they showed a lot of promise, and over the next few decades, several companies worked to bring the technology to the home market. It was Philips that coined the term VCR (video cassette recorder) in 1970 to refer to their cassette-based system. They began selling it to consumers in 1972, and the name stuck. Still, it would take nearly a decade for the true impact of the VCR to find its way into living rooms across the world. When it did, a few people weren’t sure what effect it would have on the family.

By 1985, video was well-ensconced in my suburban New Jersey life. We had multiple video stores in town, and everyone I knew either had a VCR or was planning to get one. Some sort of blowback seemed overdue, but when it came, the mania for the technology was so strong that we largely ignored it. One person in my family who didn’t embrace this newfound TV and movie-watching magic was my grandmother. She was happy enough with basic network television and never got a VCR. So when, in the mid-80s, our local paper published stories about the potential downsides of the VCR, she was more than happy to share them with the rest of the family.

She also had a lot of sway in our family. When she stayed with us, we always deferred to her TV watching. This was a time when we didn’t have multiple TVs in the house, so if she thought we were going to watch a rerun of Magnum PI, rather than the copy of DC Cab I had rented, we were watching Magnum.

The paper, The Star-Ledger, based out of Newark, NJ, ran a two-part series on VCRs in the spring of 1985. With the ever-growing VCR market, these articles were timely and reading them now, they’re maybe even more interesting. For those who had not yet adopted the technology, like my grandmother, the articles attempted to shine a light on it, illustrating its popularity and raising concerns about its possible effects on society.

"Attraction of the ’80s: Video Stores Feeding Insatiable VCR Appetite" appeared first. It focused mainly on video stores, the very places I would find myself working for many years. The article highlighted massive growth, estimating 14,000 video rental stores spread across the United States serving the 17% of the population that owned a VCR. One person they interviewed mentioned that five video stores had opened near his home. This aligned with my experience at the time. My town wasn’t big, and we had that many if you included the supermarket, which was also renting videos.

It was a gold rush era. One record store near Rutgers University switched over to video rentals, which quickly became its biggest profit driver. The timing was perfect: in Christmas of 1984, the VCR was having a moment. Sales had risen over 115% compared to the previous year, meaning that 1.2 million new VCR users were out there, eager to watch whatever they could get their hands on. People were going hog-wild. One interviewee said they were often taking home a week’s worth of tapes at a time, now that they were no longer “a victim of TV, watching whatever was showing.”

This first article gave you a sense of where we were. The second article, published the next day, was titled "VCR Revolution Viewed as a Peril to Togetherness of Family Life." This one just screen “VCR Panic” as it tried to spotlight the unforeseen consequences of this rapidly adopted technology. Estimating that by 1990, more than half of American households would own a VCR, it asked: What impact will this have on the American lifestyle?

Will multiple VCRs enter households? Will families separate as they gain the freedom to program their own entertainment schedules? The article interviewed Professor Michael Rockland, founder and chair of the American Studies department at Rutgers University. Rockland seemed balanced but warned of reduced interaction when people not only watch shows separately but also don’t gather afterward to discuss them.

A sociologist from Princeton speculated, “People will tend to go off by themselves. Kids will do kid things, and adults will do adult things.” They were essentially warning about the loss of collective viewing, the shared experience of watching a film, television show, or performance with others, especially in a public setting like a movie theater or your living room. This shared experience can heighten emotional and social connections with fellow viewers.

While the experts expressed concern, they weren’t as pessimistic as the article’s headline might suggest. Instead, they were simply issuing a warning. That warning was all my grandmother needed, perhaps because it was what she needed. To her, the VCR now seemed a little bit dangerous, something that threatened to disrupt her way of life. I’m not saying this article alone kept her from ever buying a VCR, but it certainly didn’t help. I can’t think of a single instance where we watched a rented movie or recorded show together.

Not everyone believed the future of the VCR was all that rosy and cautioned that maybe peak-VCR was closer than we thought. Here is a report from Headline News at the time that talks about the potential for the technology to “hit the wall.”

While the VCR was disruptive, another technology that would be even more disruptive to how we were entertained was just a few decades away, the smartphone. Reading this second article, you can easily apply these concerns to that technology and see why people were worried then, and are perhaps even more worried now.

I cannot predict the future, it's hard to even speculate on the future, but hopefully we can learn a little from how we reacted to the release of the VCR. Enjoy our newfound tech and the freedom it offers, but maybe also question what its long-term unexpected consequences might be. Change is inevitable, but our prediction, and how we embrace that change is anything but.

So maybe the lesson here is not that we should fear new technology, but that we should pay attention to how it changes us. My grandmother never got a VCR, but I do not think she was wrong to be cautious. She just wanted to keep things the way they were for as long as she could. That does not make her a Luddite, it makes her human. We all have something we are trying to hold on to. Maybe that is worth remembering the next time something new shows up and promises to change everything.

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While reading about this chapter in VCR history I thought it would be fun to come up with a design that would embody the fears and potential panic around the technology. My initial thought was to use it as the featured image at the top of the article, but I decided it might be more fun to put on a t-shirt. So I give you my “VCRS ARE EVIL” t-shirt. Wear it with pride and confuse everyone who sees it.