Once upon a time, this movie on VHS cost someone 80 dollars. 80 dollars. For Maniac Cop.
Have had a copy on VHS for many years now and just noticed that price printed on the back. Not even a price tag, it's just printed on the cover with the runtime. Never seen that before. And 80 DOLLARS?!
Even here in the UK we had similar prices for videos back then.
The reason was because sell through had not come into being yet. You could only rent movies from video stores, you could not buy.
But a few big stores would sell them, but at the same price they had paid when they bought the movie from the distributors, hence the full price.
One sell through started and you could then buy movies, in the UK they were usually £9.99 on average.
Well that is damned interesting. Makes total sense. Thank you for the teaching moment!
shareMan, it takes a LOT to make me feel old. . .but yeah. I remember this clearly: initially, very few people owned VCRs, let alone movies. They were rented (as were the machines, if you needed to), and Roguemail is exactly right: Rental stores jealously guarded the exclusivity. If you wanted to own a movie, it cost you a pretty penny.
I can remember the annoying charges for late fees, and then the BIG charges if you somehow lost the tape. That was always a sobering moment.
The only movie I ever remember buying full price was Miracle Mile. Paid 80 pounds.
I also remember the problem of returning movies on time. In the early days there was nowhere to drop the movie off if the store was closed. That came later with drop boxes etc.
In the UK you had a mixture of large stores such as Blockbuster and the smaller 'mom and pop' type stores. I had a good local store near me, and got to know them very well so it was easy for me to get the latest movies when I wanted. They also had a lot of pirate copies of new movies 'under the counter'. I watched a few, but on VHS the quality usually sucked. Many of them were actually filmed inside the cinema itself, and you could hear the audience talking, and sometimes people would get up and walk in front of the camera.
“BIG charges if you somehow lost the tape”
I remember renting The Rookie in the early 90’s and never even watching it but lost it for months. The rental store wanted over 100.00 for the lost tape. I never paid it but I could never rent there again.
We all must have at least one story of being banned from a video store. in my case I stupidly signed the receipt without reading it and it was for a couple video game cartridges…I had rented a couple action movies.
I returned the movies on time but the store never realized their mistake so I was banned. It was quite a scene 😁
I can vividly remember brand new VHS movies in the mall being $80-100 in the 1980s. I remember showing E.T.($99.99) to my Dad, and asked him if the price was the reason we taped everything off cable...he confirmed my inquiry with "damn straight, Bucko!".
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