I know I'm looking to deep into this but wouldn't the tapes have been affected
by the elements. They were only protected by the wooden box and spent almost 20 years in cold winters and hot summers which might make the tapes unlistenable. Not to mention the fact that the original Palace of Depression was destroyed in a fire in 1966 making the tapes totally lost.
Indeed, how the "Season in Hell" tapes where stored for nearly 20 years always bothered me. However, I overlook it, as the movie has a certain poetry. It's a suspension of disbelief that's stretched thin, but -- at least for the ones who wish it were true -- not too thin.
"I can resist everything except temptation." --Oscar Wilde
This past Christmas (2005) my father found my sister's voice recital tapes (reel-to-reel, like the tapes of "Season In Hell"), they were fine. he even had them made into CDs for all the family members.
shareWhen I watched it I thought the box they were stored in was actually metal or something (didn't Joanne open the top of it while they were riding in the car toward her house)which would definitely keep rain and snow off. Heat and cold maybe could have been an issue, but it looked like they were in this metal type box as well as being in the original cardboard box.
shareAnalogue is a lot more durable than digital (ie CD). Analogue like the RTR tapes could last cold very easily, and they're pretty durable for heat too. Because the music is physically embedded into the tape in analogue like RTR, the only way to destroy it is to make it get so hot that the plastic melts. I don't remember exactly where the film took place, but I doubt it would get hot enough to melt the plastic that bad outside of somewhere like Texas or Georgia.
There'd be some warpage probably from the fire and all, but a RTR could actually last that long with no problem.
Tapes can take cold & even mild heat pretty well, but the killer is humidity because the moisture turns tape into glue. For that reason, archival tapes have to be stored in climate controlled environments. So yeah, I'd think a few summers at the Jersey shore would result in total bubblegum.
But there's a common practice of "baking" old tapes to remove the moisture so even the most gunked-up tapes can be peeled & playable again. I guess we can assume they did that. So if the tapes survived the fire (and coyotes & mice who love to make nests out of that sort of thing) maybe we can believe they still worked.
If it's a flaw, I'm willing to overlook it, though. This film rocked.
When you think about it, yeah that was pretty much a plot hole!
Cared & stored for properly the tapes would've survived well all those years. Being out "in the open" i.e. stored in a place that would in no way protect the fragile tapes? Like was stated earlier it'd be a miracle if they could get anything back, much less the entirity of Season in Hell
Still its just a flick, and a good one.
Funny thing: if their ex-manager went to those lengths to get Joanne to give him the original masters, you can imagine what would've happened if he opened the box to find the reel sitting in a glob that was once the actual reel tape!
They did seem to be stored in what was practically a cave in the junkyard, so it might have stayed a cool temperature even in summer.
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