Once I finished transferring my dad's massive recorded VHS collection to digital, I figured that would be it. But then I discovered my local Goodwill was taking people's tape collections, so I started in on that. Seven years later, the number of videos I've salvaged from Goodwill is starting to rival the number of videos Dad had. It's insane how this has turned out and how much I've stockpiled now. I guess archiving the heyday of linear television is just one of the things I was put on Earth to do.
And from these years of observing all these throwaway tape collections, I've noticed patterns. I've noticed trends. I've noticed some things are more common than other things. And they're not always the things you'd expect! It's time to share my gathered knowledge with you, so here in no particular order are
THE MOST COMMON VHS RECORDINGS OF ALL TIME, 1980-2009
MOVIES
Odds are good that if you start diving into Goodwill bins to find home-recorded VHS tapes, the most you will find are movies. Typically these tend to be off HBO or some other pay-cable service. When they're not this, they are bootleg copies of movies sold at retail. Network TV movie airings with original ads are possible, but since more than half of them aren't, I don't risk it.
But if you insist on taking the chance, there are ways to tell. Sometimes a movie tape will have the number of minutes marked on it. If it's not exactly two hours or close to it, it's either HBO or a copy.
THE FINAL SEINFELD
Despite the negative public reaction to this episode, the final Seinfeld continues to be one of the most common recordings I find. Seinfeld in general is an easy find to make, though it depends on what season. The later in the run you go, the more common the surviving tapings are. The most I've seen are from Seasons 8 and 9, while I've only seen Season 3 pop up once.
NBC's Must See TV block in general is a common sight, with Friends being the second most popular recording, and then everything else they ran from Mad About You to 3rd Rock to Caroline in the City showing up in various blocks. If we count more than just sitcoms, ER shows up even more often than Friends.
THE FINAL CHEERS
Probably for the same reason the final Seinfeld is so common...people liked preserving "final" episodes of things, especially in the 1990s. Johnny Carson's final Tonight Show episode could have made this list.
RUDOLPH THE RED-NOSED REINDEER
Believe it or not, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer is one of the most overtaped shows in TV history. I run across recordings of it all the time. One might wonder exactly why, given it has aired annually without fail since 1964. Did people thnk it was going anywhere?
My own mother gives a clue. There was a point in the late 90s where she took care of babies and toddlers, and needed something for them to watch, but did not want to spend any money (beyond the base cost of a blank VHS tape). So she recorded a bunch of holiday specials. Because I had to live there, I ended up seeing the 1997 airing of It's The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown many, many, MANY times. I can recite the ads by heart. And I remember this one bizarre moment where Mom heard a joke on that special for the 47th time and, that time, finally laughed at it. Oooookay.
Babysitting kids with out-of-season tapings of Rudolph seems like the laziest move one can possibly make, and it totally is. But millions did it.
STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION
Fans of Star Trek: The Next Generation tended to be preservationists. It's the most common Trek show to turn up, as well as the most common sci-fi or genre show. I don't know if I'm going to be able to build a complete library of airings, but I'm well on my way.
Note that in some cases the ubiquity of a show affects its value, and in some cases it doesn't. This is a latter case. There are a lot of ST:TNG tapes, but there are also a lot of people nostalgic for the days they were watching ST:TNG on their tube TVs.
LONESOME DOVE
Lonesome Dove was a Western miniseries that aired on CBS in 1989 and was then re-ran in 1991. It is by far the most common miniseries that turns up in tape piles, as well as the most common anything. After my third copy of Lonesome Dove, I started rejecting any more of them, and at least nine more have turned up since. I know nothing about Lonesome Dove nor the kind of appeal it held to have every single Boomer in the country desire to preserve it.
THE SIMPSONS
The most common animated show. Sometimes the airings are prime time and sometimes they're from syndication. The first-runs tend to be one or two episodes a tape, while the syndicated ones tend to be six-hour EP blocks built up over a month's time. The one thing they all have in common? They're all Classic Era. No one taped Season 15.
This is another common find that retains its value because most VHS collectors want and will pay for an airing of Classic Simpsons. It's as Evergreen as the Terrace their street is named after.
NORTHERN EXPOSURE
This one was really surprising. As of this writing, I've found over 30 separate airings of CBS's Northern Exposure, from many different homes and machines. It was regarded as a "cult show" in its prime, and it wasn't believed that EVERYONE was watching it, but the preserved record suggests otherwise. Northern Exposure is one of the most overexposed VHS recordings in the world.
The February 13, 1996
episode of All My Children, in which Erica is locked
inside a rehab center. It probably didn't work.
SOAP OPERAS
Most tapes with no labels will be soap operas. They're not marked because they were not regarded as important -- these tapes were proto-TiVOs whose purpose was to tape whatever the watcher wanted to see that week, in the process dumping everything from the previous week. And the people who did this were most often soap devotees.
Since each episode of a soap opera ran only once, they are lost media and hold some value. Their contents depend on when the owner stopped using the tape.
SEWING WITH NANCY
You can always tell when a Goodwill tape collection came from an old lady who just died, because stuff like this and other dry PBS content will be all you get. When sewing and painting shows turn up, they turn up in great volumes.
*****************
The popularity of a show doesn't always correlate to recordings being plentiful. In fact some of the most popular shows of their day happen to be incredibly scarce in the tape trading scene. And no, I have no idea why.
Here are the rules for this next list: the show has to be popular within the peak of the VHS era, enough so that a lack of tapings would be curious. For an example of what wouldn't apply, I found an episode of Maximum Bob, a show ABC ran for seven weeks in the summer of 1998. Maximum Bob is not on this list because it's obviously rare -- it doesn't need to be said. We're talking about things that are rare which don't make sense.
THE LEAST COMMON VHS RECORDINGS OF ALL TIME, 1980-2009
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER
If everyone watched Buffy, why did no one tape Buffy? This is one of my biggest headscratchers. I almost never see a Buffy tape, or of Angel for that matter. In fact The WB as a whole is not common. Of the shows they ran, Charmed shows up the most, but not often.
STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE
Figure this one out. ST:TNG is one of the most common taped shows but DS9 is one of the rarest. And it gets even stranger. Star Trek Voyager is closely behind Next Generation for most common Trek -- I've seen a lot of Voyager tapes. DS9 came between TNG and Voyager and...where'd it go? Was anyone watching? Even Enterprise shows up more than this does. Highly illogical.
XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS
As of this writing I've only come across two recordings of Xena. One had no ads in it, and the other was reruns from a cable network well after the show had ended. Neither count in my eyes.
TGIF
I mean the whole thing. I've seen bits and pieces, one show or another, but I've only had the entirety of the night show up on one tape. We'll get into why a bit later, but prime-time programs that aimed younger are harder to find.
TWIN PEAKS
Highly influential, highly popular, and unexplainably scarce. The most I've found is one episode, and the back half of another, and that's it.
MOONLIGHTING
Highly influential, highly popular, and...same deal. For better or worse every TV couple for the next twenty years would be based on the one from this show. They based my Zelda cartoon on this. I'd always wanted to see it, and after they put the show on Hulu, I found it does live up to the hype. Unlike a lot of mid-80s shows it's aged very well, has an infectious sense of fun, and is highly rewatchable.
So you can see why I was bouncing up and down last summer when two six-hour tapes of Moonlighting at the peak of its popularity, the 1986-87 season, finally turned up in the bins. After years of searching that is all I've ever found, unless you count a video file labeled "Worst Moonlighting Recording Ever" from two years prior, where I tried my best to coax a whiny, creaky tape to display a garble-voiced David and Maddie for an hour's length of time.
<
For those who can't read it, Tom Servo is saying
"I farted"
MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000
Despite a fanbase geared toward taping this show, and pleas from the show itself to keep circulating the tapes, MST3K almost never shows up at Goodwill. The one crazy exception was the day I walked in and found someone's massive collection taking up two or three bins. I left with everything and digitized it all. Even wilder: the collection was entirely Comedy Central, with just one Sci-Fi Channel tape in the bunch.
BAYWATCH
Not that I care that much, but to this day I've never actually seen a taping of this show, which was very popular in its day. Perhaps no one who watched it wanted recorded evidence lingering around.
MIDDLE OF THE
ROAD
Some days you run across these, some days you don't...
OLYMPICS
For some reason, Olympics tapes from any year tend to be either the opening or closing ceremonies...and nothing else. I don't know why this is. You're asking me to explain Boomers here and I simply can't.
If it's not the very beginning or very end, it's trimmed footage of the recorder's favorite sport, usually figure skating or gymnastics. But around one-third of them have been uninterrupted, uncut all-day coverage, and the frequency is enough for me to keep picking up tapes labeled "OLYMPICS" when I find them.
SPORTS THAT AREN'T OLYMPICS
Sports I find tend to be local games from local teams (in my case the Blazers, or college football). The most common non-local sports are Super Bowls, but they do not appear as often. NASCAR sometimes shows up.
CHILDREN'S SHOWS
Tapes of children's shows are the Holy Grails of tape collecting, for obvious reasons. But they don't occur as often as people want them. Their origins are never clear, but after sifting through hundreds of tapes it's evident the kids in America's households were rarely ever in charge of the VCR. A deliberate attempt to tape a children's show would involve that show appearing repeatedly over and over in separate recordings, and most tapes with children's shows are of the marathon variety, where a tape was stuck in and simply left running until it reached its end.
A kid wouldn't really do this, an adult would...an adult who wouldn't stoop so low as to tape Rudolph, but needed some kind of babysitter and so would grab six hours of Saturday Morning, Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network. I believe it's for this reason that Disney Channel (1997 and later) tapes are rarer. They didn't always run cartoons...they ran kidcoms, which aimed a bit older than the babysat crowd, and the One In Charge Of The VCR did not want to tape themselves. This is also why TGIF is so hard to get.
You'd think that super-popular blocks like The Disney Afternoon would be prime bait for these babysitter tapes, but that block is also rare. Quite often, I've found a coveted children's show on a tape that didn't intend to have one...the taper was after something else, the tape was left on all day, and cartoons were caught on the back end. Unfortunately, the only way to find such phenomena is to buy tapes blind.
DISNEY CHANNEL (1996 AND EARLIER)
The Disney Channel was a premium channel for its first 13 years. 99% of all Disney Channel recordings are from "free weeks" where the channel would descramble itself for a special weekend to entice people to subscribe. The evidence suggests people didn't, they just hoarded what they could get.
MISCELLANEOUS
INDEX
Throughout my travels I have found....
ALF -- 8 airings
Thirtysomething -- 5 airings
South Park -- 15 airings
Doctor Who -- 19 airings
Joan of Arcadia -- 2 airings
Murphy Brown -- 10 airings
The Charmings -- 1 airing
In Living Color -- between 10 and 15 airings
Saturday Night Live -- 46 airings
The Critic -- 4 airings
Cagney and Lacey -- 1 airing
Drexell's Class -- 1 airing
Earth 2 -- half of one airing
The X-Files -- over 40 airings
Dynasty -- 3 airings and part of the reunion special
Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman -- 7 airings
Man of the People, a show Corinne Bohrer was in -- 3 airings
Lost -- 14 airings
The West Wing -- 13 1/2 airings
Nowhere Man -- 8 airings (and two more with no ads)
Platypus Man -- 2 airings
The Wonder Years -- 13 airings
The Nanny -- 4 airings
Married With Children -- 14 airings
Ed -- 5 airings
Ed, Edd & Eddy -- 6 airings
Sledge Hammer -- 1 airing
Survivor -- 14 airings
Cashmere Mafia -- 1 airing
V The Series -- 1 airing
Deadly Games -- 7 airings
Muppets Tonight -- 1 airing
Suddenly Susan -- 1 airing
Frank's Place -- 7 airings (and four reruns from cable)
Madame's Place -- 1 airing
Kate & Allie -- 2 airings
Gilmore Girls -- 18 airings
NewsRadio -- 2 airings
Cadillacs and Dinosaurs -- 1 airing