21st Century Dodos: A Collection of Endangered Objects (and Other Stuff)

by Steve Stack

  Impress Your Friends. The teenage muso, and those quite a bit older, to be fair, would often share mixes with fellow music-enthusiast schoolmates and friends. These were crucial in securing your position in the social hierarchy, and balance was the key. You needed just enough recognisable-but-not-too-obvious stuff (lesser-known album tracks from popular new-wave bands were ideal) plus some indie anthems (‘God, I love that song, man. Good choice’), topped off with a sprinkling of really obscure songs that no one else would have heard. Even the geekiest nerd could shoot up the popularity charts if word got out that he had some REM demo tracks and that Violent Femmes’ song with the swearing on his last mixtape.

  Linked Themes. Mixtapes could take on any theme: Christmas songs, cover versions, driving, tracks to work out to; the list is endless. I was once given a mix where each song title contained a word from the song title before. It was shit.

  The Break-up Tape. Sadly, not every tape sent to a potential partner led to love, marriage, and happily-ever-after. The majority of relationships came a cropper, and that would inevitably result in a break-up tape, and no more sorry an example of wallowing in self-pity has ever been witnessed in popular culture. Whether it included ‘All By Myself’ by Eric Carmen, ‘I Want You’ by Elvis Costello (surely the most heartbreaking song ever?) or ‘Without You’ by Harry Nilsson, they were painful to listen to, on an emotional level at least. Thankfully, most break-up tapes never got sent to the ex and were just played repeatedly in darkened bedrooms to the backdrop of self-indulgent sobs.

  Nowadays, of course, mixtapes have been largely replaced by Spotify playlists, iTunes mixes and the habit of burning CDs, but though these represent technological progress, they lack the heart, the soul and the sheer effort of their cassette-based predecessor.

  And that is where a mixtape wins every time. If I were to create one for you, I would spend hours, days even, going through my records and CDs to compile the perfect tracklisting, a collection of songs that was just the right balance between stuff I like and stuff I think you would like. This would almost certainly be written down in a spiral-bound notebook, and go through many revisions before it was ready to be recorded.

  Running order and sequencing were everything. Some songs naturally work well when placed together on a mixtape; others jar or clash. Tempo changes need to be handled with skill – moving from a piece of thrash metal to some ambient dance might work, but it requires planning, a brave attitude, and a rather diverse record collection.

  Once all that was sorted, the physicality of the process would kick in, if that’s not too pompous an expression (I know it is, but it’s my book so I am using it anyway). I would have to arrange all the albums so they were in the right order for recording, taking each one in turn, queuing up the correct track on the turntable or CD player before dropping the stylus or pressing play, and then immediately releasing the PAUSE button on the tape deck. Any slip of the hand or delay and I’d miss the start of the track and have to rewind and start again.

  It was something that took a lot of time. The fact that I would spend hours working on a mixtape spoke volumes about my opinion of the recipient. Consequently, a mixtape beats a CD or playlist. It just does.

  And I haven’t even mentioned the artwork. Blank tapes came with a liner card, usually on the reverse side of the packaging, with space for you to write the tracklisting. Well, I say space, but there was never enough of it. A small grid might allow you to jot down ‘Stop’ by Sam Brown, but was no use whatsoever if your mixtape included ‘It’s The End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)’ by REM. Consequently, many mixtape compilers customised their covers by either ignoring the lines completely and creating elaborate spidery biro listings or, preferably, by creating their own covers by hand.

  Entire books and exhibitions have been dedicated to mixtape art, most notably Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture by Thurston Moore of the band Sonic Youth (who claims to only listen to music on cassette, although I think he might be fibbing). It was a whole subgenre of creativity, adding even further to the personal nature of the object itself. I once received a pop-up tracklisting from a girlfriend, and though she later dumped me for some tosser in the year above, she retains a small corner of my heart for the effort she put into the mixtape alone.

  Dodo Rating:

  VHS

  Ahh, who’s gloating now, eh, VHS? You thought you had won the war when you saw off the technically superior, but undoubtedly less popular, Betamax, didn’t you? There you were as the King of Home Entertainment, happily lording it up over laserdiscs and anything else that came along, only for you to be made almost completely irrelevant by the onset of digital technology.

  To add insult to injury when I tried to donate some videotapes to my local charity shop recently, they refused to take them. ‘No one wants these any more, love,’ said the delightful old lady in the polyester dress.

  Oh, VHS, how did it come to this?

  The Video Home System (or VHS, for short) burst into our living rooms in the late 1970s. It had been created by JVC in Japan, who realised that the road to world domination lay in sharing the technology, so they licensed it to other manufacturers to ensure a wide range of machines were on the market.

  The very first video cassette recorders (VCRs) went on sale in 1977, but were, to begin with, very much a luxury item. Once prices started to come down they became far more popular, and by the time the ’80s were in full flow they were a common feature in many homes below, or above, the TV set.

  Video had two major attractions. One was the fact that you could now watch films on your television when you wanted to, not just when the three (count them!) TV stations chose to broadcast them. The other was the ability to record programmes to watch later.

  The film thing was really a very big deal at the time, something we can often forget in this age of Sky Movies, LoveFilm, and internet streaming. For one thing, the UK didn’t get to see US films in the cinema until quite a while, often months, after America, something I talk about in more detail in a later entry. Outside of the cinema, the only place to watch a film was on the telly, but TV stations did not get to show the big Hollywood blockbusters until years after release. Because of this, the first showing of a big film on BBC1 or ITV was a major deal, and there would be trailers for weeks beforehand, often resulting in huge viewing figures. For example, Jaws premiered on UK television on ITV on 8 October 1981. It had first been shown in cinemas in 1975, six years earlier! That night, 23.25 million people tuned in to watch it, just under half of the entire population, and more than the peak audience for the Royal Wedding between William and Kate in 2011.

  So you can see why the home video rental market exploded as the ’80s went on. Every town, and almost every village, had its own rental store, and people had access to thousands of films whenever they wanted to see them, changing the sorts of films we watched. This was before the day of the multiplex cinema, and most local film theatres only had two screens. Two cinema screens and three TV channels did not really offer a huge selection, but all of a sudden we had video stores with aisles of cassettes. This meant that you could rent a new film, or perhaps an old classic, but you could also borrow all sorts of shite you had never heard of – the straight-to-video market was born.

  The appetite for watching films at home was so great that it was difficult to meet the demand. Studios realised that consumers would potentially watch almost anything, especially if all the blockbusters were out of stock at 8pm on a Saturday night, and films that had previously sat on distributors’ shelves unwatched and unloved were quickly converted to VHS and sent out. All manner of low-budget thrillers, action films, or true-life stories (most of which seemed to feature Brian Dennehy) found audiences that simply hadn’t been there before.

  And then there was the porn. At one end of the scale, the legal end, a plethora of erotic films hit the market. They were incredibly tame compared to the explicit material that is only a Google search away for people today, but they we
re pretty much all that the average person (OK, let’s face it, bloke) could get access to at the time. Every video store had a top shelf full of the stuff. At the other end was the hardcore pornography that was illegal in the UK, but was exploding across the US. Much of it found its way here. It is said that the porn industry is often the first to exploit new technology, and that can certainly be argued when it came to VHS.

  Such material was not without its understandable controversy, but it wasn’t so much the pornography that was dismaying the Daily Mail readers of the ’80s. They really had it in for horror films, the so-called ‘video nasties’. Titles such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Evil Dead were banned in the UK for many years, despite them now being seen as classics of the genre and the inspiration for many of the major directors of today.

  Home recording was the other big feature of the VCR. Never before had you been able to watch a TV programme if you weren’t sitting down in front of your set as it was broadcast. Early machines were famously hard to programme and this led to numerous devices languishing in living rooms flashing 00:00 for weeks on end, but, once mastered, users were able to record what they wanted, when they wanted. Never again did you have to miss an episode of Neighbours (especially that one where Bronwyn did a bellydance, or the one where Henry wound up naked in Mrs Mangle’s garden), or the show jumping on Grandstand.

  Most homes built up a significant library of recordings, piles of blank tapes lying around, each with handwritten scribbles on the stickers. There were endless family arguments over ‘Which idiot taped over Dallas?!’ You could buy fancy plastic cases, often modelled to look like hardback books, so as to house your collection with more style. The VHS was a fundamental part of the social fabric throughout the ’80s.

  The early ’90s saw another big leap in VHS use, with a growing market for purchasing, as opposed to renting, films on video. For a long time the cost of films on video had been kept high – typically between £30 and £75 so as to encourage people to rent them rather than purchase. Hardly anyone was going to pay £50 for a copy of The Toxic Avenger so your local video store coughed up on your behalf and then hoped to rent it out for more than 50 times at £1 a go, or something like that. As the ’80s came to an end, film companies realised that there was a significant desire for people to own their favourite films or TV shows, and most big films started to be issued in cheaper editions, six months to a year after the rental copy.

  When you consider the speed with which technology is developing these days, it is testament to the durability and success of VHS that it has only really died out as we have entered the 21st century.

  The better quality and extra bonus materials available through DVD won people over at the end of the ’90s and saw many replacing their VHS collections with this more expensive, but far sexier, new format. The launch of Sky+ and other personal video recorders changed the way we recorded TV content. As the 2000s came to a close, the manufacture of pre-recorded video cassettes had pretty much ceased, with only a handful of films being released in the format, and this was often more of a marketing exercise, such as with the film Paranormal Activity, than anything else.

  Many people still own a VCR for watching home films or all the old stuff they have on tape, but the transition to digital is fast apace and the sturdy oblong video cassette is soon to be no more.

  Dodo Rating:

  Betamax

  Despite the fact that Betamax came out two years before VHS, and was widely perceived to be of better quality, it ultimately lost the battle with its younger, chunkier partner, and became a classic example of how not to establish a new technology format in the marketplace.

  Sony created Betamax for the professional and home user in 1975, but made a few bad judgement calls which meant that they went from 100% of the market upon launch, to 7.5% only ten years later.

  JVC tried to make VHS as cheap and widely available as possible, licensing the technology to many other companies. Sony attempted to hold on to the perception of quality, thereby ending up with fewer machines on the market at a higher price. Consumers were eager to own video players, but were not keen to spend thousands of pounds on them, with many opting to rent. In the UK, the leading rental shops were part-owned by JVC so they really got behind VHS, and it wasn’t long before the format dominated. So much so that anyone owning a Betamax felt like a bit of a numpty, and no amount of declaring, ‘But the picture quality is amazing’ really made them feel any better.

  Betamax wasn’t helped by the fact that it had a shorter running time than VHS, especially in the US with the NTSC format. Sony also made the decision not to allow porn on Betamax. Many analysts believe this last point to be the biggest reason for its failure – a sure sign of our times.

  By the late ’80s, Sony pretty much knew the game was up, and started getting into the VHS market themselves. The last Betamax machine was produced in 2002.

  But at least Sony learnt from their mistakes and were never again to see a new format fail in this way. Just look at the huge global dominance of the minidisc!

  Dodo Rating:

  Minidiscs

  Such is the fast moving nature of technology that some inventions seem to die out within a short time of being born. This was the case with the minidisc.

  Sony launched it in 1992 as the future of home recording, and it was intended as a high-quality alternative to analogue cassettes. With music lovers converting their album collections to compact disc, it made sense that they would want similar quality for the stuff they recorded at home, didn’t it?

  The minidisc hit problems early on because it found itself up against the digital compact cassette (DCC) from Philips, and consumers weren’t sure which format to go for. Sony put their weight behind their invention by releasing albums by lots of Sony artists on the format, and also by licensing the technology to other hardware manufacturers, thereby increasing the number of players on the market.

  Ultimately, though, people just weren’t all that fussed about digital home recording. They were perfectly happy paying a few quid for a five-pack of TDK blank tapes, as they were mainly using them for mixtapes, voice recordings, and other stuff that didn’t rely on incredible sound quality. The format was popular with professionals, and some studios still use them to this day, but the high price just put most punters off.

  Anyway, less than a decade after the minidisc, a small white oblong called an iPod was launched, pretty much changing the face of portable music forever.

  Dodo Rating:

  Laserdiscs

  They were the future, they really were.

  But now the future has arrived they are nowhere to be seen.

  Laserdiscs hit the market in the late ’70s, offering a high-quality alternative to VHS and Betamax video cassettes. A forerunner to both the CD and DVD, they were much larger than those formats – just a little bit smaller than a 12” record – were double-sided, and contained analogue data, rather than digital.

  Picture quality was better than video, but discs and players were a lot more expensive so, in the UK at least, sales were restricted to early adopters and show-offs with loads of cash to piss away on fancy gadgets. There was a better take up in the US, and the format was a success in the Far East, particularly in Japan.

  As the technology improved, the discs were able to carry and process digital image data as well as additional audio tracks. The first director’s commentary was on a laserdisc, an idea that DVDs made their own nearly 20 years later.

  Ultimately, they just didn’t catch on over here. VHS tapes dominated the market and there simply wasn’t the range of titles available, or the enthusiasm from retailers, to give laserdiscs the kickstart they needed. It didn’t help that longer films had to be spread over two or more discs, and in the end they were consigned to the cupboard marked ‘Nice Idea, Wrong Time’.

  Dodo Rating:

  Polaroid Cameras

  It is rare for us to come close to understanding what it was like for Neanderthal man to discover
fire or for Victorians to witness electric light, how the first people to watch a cinema projection of a steam train ran out of the theatre in fear, or the sheer wonder of the first television pictures.

  But anyone who was around when Polaroid cameras came out will have some inkling.

  That first shot, the picture being ejected with a robotic whir, ripping the protective wrapper off and then watching as slowly, ever so slowly, an image began to emerge.

  It was magic, sheer magic. The stuff of witches, wizards, and sorcery.

  Instant cameras (they weren’t just made by Polaroid but their name became synonymous with the technology, just as Hoover’s did with vacuum cleaners) had been around since the ’60s, but it was in the ’70s that they started turning up in people’s homes and were more widely used. The distinctive print with its thick white border has become an icon.

  In this modern age of digital cameras, the Polaroid is viewed as an antique, although it still has a cult following. The company announced that it was ceasing production of instant film in 2008, but had to reverse the decision a year later due to overwhelming public demand.

  So, not quite extinct yet, but certainly endangered.

  Dodo Rating:

  Home Computers

  By which I mean that legendary array of plastic boxes that invaded our homes during the 1980s and seemed remarkably cool at the time, but actually had less memory power than it has taken my laptop to type this paragraph.

  Today our homes are full of notebooks (the computer version!), iPads, desktop PCs, Playstations, Wiis, Xboxes, and hand-held consoles, and we spend our time playing photo-realistic war games, challenging people on the other side of the planet to games of Scrabble, and hurling angry birds at a group of military pigs.