Some might call that just as tacky, but certainly not the merchants of home video. Retro-visionaries like Trente are giving the industry a surprise lift. Today a trip to a video store is almost as likely to end in a purchase as a rental: last year sales of recorded tapes hit $2.7 billion, a threefold increase since 1985. The surprising part is that theatrical films accounted for less than half of that windfall; vintage television series made up much of the rest. While Americans have always been incurable collectors, their embrace of TV oldies seems inspired by a singularly collective yearning. Greater love hath no boomer than for the things of childhood, explains Terry Robertson, a 40-year-old maintenance worker. “I watched all the ‘Star Treks’ and the ‘Mod Squads’ as a kid, and thought then that I’d never see them again. Now that I own them, I don’t watch them every minute. But they’re there. Know what I mean?”
Gary Cahall knows. He’s coeditor of Video Flash, a 14-year-old video catalog whose current edition offers nearly 3,000 TV titles. Two of the hottest sellers are predictable: “I Love Lucy” and “The Honeymooners.” Others tap into small but fervently passionate cults: “Ernie Kovacs…… The Lone Ranger…… The Addams Family” (released just in time to feed off the film) and “Death Valley Days” (hosted for one season by an Old Ranger named Reagan).
Never reluctant to hook new vidiots, manufacturers have begun peddling currently running series as well as the classics. In a few months Paramount will release cassettes of NBC’s “Cheers.” And last week Disney unveiled two-episode sets of “Dinosaurs”-a bare eight months after the sitcom clomped onto the ABC schedule. That sounds like “Cheers” and “Dinosaurs” will be competing with themselves, but the industry’s marketing types claim it isn’t so. Just as songs played on radio boost their record sales, they say, TV series can be used to promote tapes of the programs. At least one major video dealer, however, isn’t buying. “I see no value in releasing something on cassette that was recently telecast,” says Los Angeles’s Stu Shostak. “If you’re after, say, ‘Twin Peaks’ freaks, they’ve already taped it off the air.” True, tapes of “Twin Peaks” are moving like cement doughnuts, Yet PBS’s “The Civil War” has sold 140,000 sets-at exactly $179.95 per.
What’s indisputable is that, like collectors of anything else, this market’s buyers are scooping up the junk as eagerly as the gems. Depressing probability: a family in the year 2001 wallowing in the grossest moments of “Married … With Children.” Semi-cheering possibility: upstairs, the real children are discovering Lucy.
