MARK JUDGE: ‘VHS Forever’ and the Transformative Power of Tech and Entertainment.
Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, a professor at Miami University, is the author of a great new book, Videotape, which offers an insightful history of the VCR and the VHS tape, from their invention in Japan to the last-standing Blockbuster store in Bend, Oregon. One of the most interesting chapters, “Viewing Parties and the Party,” recounts the history of the VHS in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in the 1970s and ’80s. As VCR players became more affordable and popular in the ’80s, more and more of them were smuggled into Communist countries. Kenworthy describes the “viewing parties” that sprang up in the Eastern Block:
Crammed in small apartment buildings, a dozen or so people split the costs of the VCR rental or paid a small entry fee to the host of the party. News of the parties spread by word of mouth, from teenagers loitering behind the blocks of flats, to neighbors, relatives, or work colleagues. The most popular genres were films featuring Jean-Claude Van Damme or Bruce Lee, the action films of Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, but also miniseries such as The Thorn Birds (1983), or Shogun (1980). Since most VHS tapes ran for two hours, and most feature films were 90 minutes, the space left at the end was filled with MTV music videos or even advertisements. Commercials were an unknown genre in the communist economy and, unlike in the West, where the videotape enabled viewers to fast-forward past the ads, in Eastern Europe, they functioned as sheer entertainment, since the products they promoted could not be found on the local market. In the Soviet Union, where the legal penalties against illegal videotapes were harsher than in Romania, people found even more creative ways to dodge the police. Instead of hosting in a private apartment, in Baku, Azerbaijan, grubby taxi minivans of Latvian manufacturing, popularly known as Rafiks, doubled as mobile screening rooms equipped with a VCR and a color TV. They’d tour the city and then show up in neighborhood streets at random times, like an American ice-cream truck, offering Soviet children a motley fare of Tom and Jerry cartoons, B-category action movies, and silly Hollywood comedies crudely dubbed in Russian, but immensely enjoyable anyway.
Kenworthy notes the irony of Nikita Khrushchev telling Richard Nixon in 1959 that he was wrong to boast of Americans having color TVs while the Soviets did not—that the technology responsible for color television was irrelevant. In fact, it was that very technology that, years later, would help bring down the Soviet Union.
As I noted last month in my review of John Kleinheinz’s 2023 book, The Siberia Job:
The Soviet Union began running episodes of the CBS nighttime soap opera Dallas in the early 1980s just to show how eeeeevil those scheming bourgeois Texas capitalist hoarders and wreckers could be. The best-laid plans of mice and Mensheviks backfired when Soviet audiences gazed in awe at the wealth of the Ewings and wanted a little of that for themselves. Even the quotidian details of American life seemed astonishing to them, as Karol Markowicz, now with the New York Post, wrote during her blogging days:
In 1977, the year I was born and the year my father, his mother, his aunt and many other Jews left the Soviet Union (my mother and I left in 1978), the Soviet propaganda machine began circulating a rumor. It went, roughly: life in America is so terrible that the old people eat cat food.
This was…perplexing.
People didn’t quite get it: they have food specifically made for cats in America? What a country!
A lot of things about America remained beyond their comprehension.
The disparity in quality of life previously threw both Soviet peasants and grandees a curve decades earlier, Jonah Goldberg wrote a couple of years ago:
Stalin allowed the film version of the Grapes of Wrath—retitled The Road to Wrath—to be seen in the Soviet Union because it was a searing indictment of the failures of capitalism. Soviet citizens saw it and were like, “Holy crap! The peasants all have cars and pickup trucks in America? Man, we’re poor.” Stalin quickly yanked it from theaters.
No doubt, the videos coming from America, plus photos of pre-Ayatollah Iran are helping to fuel the ongoing revolution there. In 1961, JFK’s FCC chairman Newton Minow infamously told the National Association of Broadcasters:
Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.
And endlessly, commercials — many screaming, cajoling, and offending.
I think he meant all of that as being a very bad thing, not comprehending the eventual power of that metaphorical vast wasteland to inspire the defeat of the real thing.