re: Wait, T2: Judgement Day cost $99 dollars on VHS back in the '90s?

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Too bad, home and car savings technologies didn't go thru the same price lowering process that home entertainment did.

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That's because home entertainment essentially does the same things it did 20 years ago, just with better quality.

Cars went from engines surrounded by metal with seats to a fricking home on wheels.

Video stores paid more for VHS because they would get them 4-6 months before they were available in stores.

Some titles came out in stores at the same time as Video stores could get them. In that case video stores would only pay the retail price.

Movies were crazy expensive back in the 80s. It's why video rental stores didn't frick around with late fees.

Also of note, good DVD players were so damn expensive early on the #1 reason the PS2 became such a massive seller was b/c it played games and doubled as a reasonably affordable DVD player.

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I knew some folks who had VCRs in the early 80s, and I recall they cost about $800.

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They were $800 to $1000 when they came out. My parents were lower working class so they refused to buy one. I was working for The Beast (Wal-Mart) and used my employee discount to buy them one for their anniversary in 1985, but I think I only gave about $285 - which was a lot when you were making $4 an hour.

Alot of times movie studios would sell video stores for that price.

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All VHS cost what the video rental places had to pay for it...

While they got their money back through rentals, you didn't.

Movies didn't fully become affordable to the masses until the early 90's.

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Yep.

I was working at a video store then and this is exactly right. Except for porn releases, which were pretty cheap, we paid out the arse for tapes...which is WHY late fees and replacement costs if you lost them were so high.

It was always kind of funny arguing with some guy who lost a first run tape we paid $70+ for who was convinced we were fricking him by charging him that much to replace it. Even if the tape had made its money back, it still made no sense to charge them less because if the tape was still hot you'd need to replace it so that you had more copies in to rent.

As an aside, we'd have idiots return melted tapes all the time, and then act stunned as to how they got that way. simple answer was that they'd toss them on their dash in the South LA summer and they would proceed to fricking melt! We even had a display on the counter warning people not to do this that we had created ourselves by leaving a broken tape on one of our own dashboards...still no one believed us.

Hey, sorry to revive an old thread, but I was curious where you had found out that 'The Devil in Miss Jones' was the first commercially released film on VHS. I have been scouring the internet for information on this movie's earliest release on cassette and have found almost nothing, but I'm inclined to believe that what you're saying is true.
I'm curious as to where you got the $95 price tag figure, did you happen to know someone who bought it in the late 70s? Any help or info would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Sure this has been answered already but at that point almost no one was buying movies to own and they were priced that high because only video stores were buying them.

I worked at an Alfalfa Video store in the early 90s and we'd pay roughly $70 or so for new release tapes. Significantly less for porn type tapes, which were huge money makers.

But this is why when someone left a tape on their dash and melted it (yeah, that routinely happened) or lost it, we charged them full retail replacement price, even if we'd have made our money back on it already.

Only exceptions I recall were the old Disney Clamshell tapes which were at sell through prices, and the first major release I remember being marketed as a sell through price was Batman 89.

ETA: BWAHAHAHAHA! Hilarious...I answered this question years ago, and didn't read through it and answered it the same way again. I may need to log in to this place less...

When I was in the Army I bought a JVC HR-S8000U from the PX which was is regarded as the pinnacle of consumer VHS decks kinda the Nakamichi Dragon of video tape. The thing was amazing and the features list was a mile long. One thing that was cool was it did digital freeze-frames so none of the noise or wear from the head just spinning on the tape like most VCRs. You could put up to 16 freeze frames on the screen at the time.

I found a picture of one. The fold out section on the right with all the buttons came down with the push of a little button. It folded down slowly and just oozed precision very similar to how high quality cassette decks of the time opened. I have owned a lot of mid-fi and hi-fi gear since then and you have to spend exorbitant amounts of money to find gear engineered and built like that deck. I think they were selling for 1,200 in most stores but I paid just over $800 from the PX in 1990.







It is funny how excited we get about new tech like S-VHS, Laser Discs, DVDs and recordable DVDs for the to get basically wiped out in the blink of an eye.