I should get rid of more of them, but it’s hard to upgrade when a title was full-frame to begin with, or the DVD offers no significant extra features. I still have a square tube set too; the few times I’ve tried to watch tapes on a larger flat screen they look terrible, so maybe it’ll take a TV upgrade to finally convince me to dump the tapes.

But there are still all those titles I can’t get elsewhere…Mask of Dimitrios, Rolling Thunder, Murders in the Zoo, The Boogens, that series of Paramount silents that included W.C. Fields’ Running Wild and Docks of New York, and utter trash like Little Girl–Big Tease or The Arousers (Curtis Hanson’s first feature, a.k.a. Sweet Kill, with Tab Hunter). At least I hear Murder at the Vanities is coming out on DVD from Universal in a collection of pre-code titles. Maybe we’ll finally see a release of Temple Drake?

And like that copy of King Kong, there’s the VHS of Frank Henenlotter’s Frankenhooker that says “Wanna date?” when you press the button on the box. And nowadays they think putting a disc in a metal tin is clever marketing.

When I was done I gave everything away to library sales or through Yahoo Freecycle. The DVDs and CDs I made take up much less space than the tapes did, and the quality of the copies is nearly as good as the original. I keep the DVDs and CDs in the binders they sell at Best Buy and record stores, and I have a bunch of them.

I still use the Toshiba to record movies off TCM. I sometimes use a TV card to record shows off other channels and make a DivX copy with the commercials removed. Some of these I’ll convert to watch on my ipod.

So while I agree that VHS and Beta were a boon to us film buffs, we do have some pretty attractive alternatives these days.

I just wanted to give an “I hear ya!” to Johnathan Lapper…I, too have the original Star Wars on VHS, and hate watching the changes they made to it on DVD. When my son was old enough to enjoy it with me about two years ago, the VCR version is the one I showed him…he was gonna watch it the way I had seen it long ago, and not the way it is now…I just can’t bring myself to embrace the updated version that is now being sold, and dread the day that the VCR eats one of the tapes, or breaks.

As a volunteer I bring VHS movies to a local senior center for the elderly to watch. Each week they show a different one from my collection. I think the seniors would prefer more recent films than ones made in the 50s, 40s and 30s, but the center is located on the bottom floor of a church and I am not going to cause a scandal by having some right wingers walk in and get shocked at seniors watching “dirty movies.”
Sometimes the seniors are excited about what they’re watching. “Meet Danny Wilson” with Frank Sinatra and Shelley Winters got them all worked up. Sometimes the small group all falls asleep. The lesson I learned from that instance was: Don’t show them George Raft. Once an elderly couple held hands while they were viewing that week’s feature.
Last week was Roberta, with Irene Dunne, Randolph Scott, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. After Fred and Ginger had performed one of their most dazzling dances, I asked an elderly lady how she liked it. “It’s okay,” she said.

I can remember when all the local stations and some cable stations showed old movies all the time. Often you started watching something you never intended to spend time seeing.

But things change.

I am really thankful for TCM and I hope they never change their format like AMC did.

This week I am showing “Jane Eyre.” In coming weeks: Not as a Stranger, The Gunfighter, Angel and the Badman. (Of course there is no charge and the films are not advertised.)

See ya at the movies.