My 90's and Early 2000's Experience: TV Shows on VHS

 Hey everyone, how were your weekends? Mine was rough and weird, which is an interesting combination to say the least. Anyways, in honour of my guest appearance (my first of two) on The VHS Club Video Podcast this Thursday night at 9 pm eastern, where hosts, Katie and Nat, and I will be talking about the history of VHS, I've decided to talk about TV shows on VHS, and take a look at some of the tapes that I own now, and ones I owned or rented or borrowed when I was a kid. So let's get into it.

Unlike movies, TV shows very rarely made it onto the VHS format. Alot of older shows such as I love Lucy, Gilligan's Island, and The Dick Van Dyke Show (to name a few), along with all four original live action Star Trek shows got fully released on VHS through either Columbia House or Time Life, which were mostly known for releasing exclusive music compilations on audiocassette and CD through a monthly or weekly subscription service. But you never saw weekly network shows like Full House or Family Matters getting VHS releases in the 80's and 90's. Though the first season of Friends got a VHS box set release alongside its DVD counterpart in 2002, though, that was an extremely rare thing.

Usually the TV shows that got VHS releases in North America were TV shows made for kids. Particularly cartoons, though some live action shows made for kids, such as Power Rangers, and the rest of the Saban family of Tokusatsu shows, also got VHS releases throughout the 90's and into the early 2000's. These tapes usually contained anywhere between 1 and 4 episodes per tape, depending on the show. For example Anime such as Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball Z, Digimon, and Pokemon got complete season or series sets, with each tape containing four to five episodes per tape. Though Sailor Moon had to wait until 2000 for it's complete season releases for the four seasons that aired here in North America, as its initial VHS release contained six tapes with two episodes per tape, making up the major story episodes of the first season, as well as a four tape box set that contained the first thirteen episodes of season 2.

I think one of the reasons this was is because, well, VHS wasn't as good a quality as Betamax and Laserdisc were, and so the limitations of the medium meant that only so many episodes could be placed on the retail releases of VHS. And it was impractical for consumers to collect more than a handful of these volumes given that there were about 177 individual tapes released for all seven seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation, as each retail tape only contained one episode per tape, with the series premiere, "Encounter at Farpoint" and the series finale, "All Good Things...", being feature length, or the equivalent of two episodes worth of content on their tapes, though the Columbia House Collector's Edition releases for the series contained two to three episodes per tape, depending on whether an episode was a two parter or not, though both "Encounter at Farpoint" and "All Good Things..." each had their own tape, with "Farpoint" getting a version where it's the broadcast two part version of the episode that began airing on TV following the premiere in 1987, as well as the original feature length version that aired as the premiere in 1987.

Most kids shows that had home video releases in the 80's, 90's, and early 2000's rarely had more than five volumes released, which usually only contained a small portion of the show's first season, or first couple of seasons. We'd have to wait until the early 2000's to get DVD season sets for our favourite shows. And not every show had VHS releases in North America at all. Often in PAL regions like the U.K. and other European countries released entire shows onto VHS for some reason. For example, while we only ever got one VHS release for Power Rangers In Space, Australia got two or three releases.

Let's take a look at the shows that I either owned or borrowed or rented on VHS both when I was a kid and now as an adult. I'm just gonna go in alphabetical order as the images are organized in the folder on my computer. I'm also not going over every single tape that I owned, rented or borrowed from that particular TV show, if I owned, rented, or borrowed multiple tapes from that series either. So let's get into it.

First up is Alvin and the Chipmunks: Go to the Movies - Batmunk. This tape, released in 1992 by Walt Disney Home Video contained the season 8 episode, "Batmunk", which originally aired on September 29th, 1990. The eighth (and final) season of the 1983 series, Alvin and the Chipmunks had been named The Chipmunks Go to the Movies, and each episode parodied a movie, episode 4, "Batmunk", was a parody of the 1989 movie, Batman, which had just come out on home video in 1990. My parents rented this tape for me when we went over to my grandparents's house for some event that was adults only. I stayed in my grandparents's basement for the evening. This is the only VHS release of Alvin and the Chipmunks I've ever seen, though the show itself had reruns on both YTV and Global throughout the early 90's. I've never owned, rented, or borrowed any others, though the Go to the Movies releases seem to be the only home video releases that this series ever had.

Next up is Animorphs. As mentioned in a previous post, the Animorphs TV series only had four VHS releases under the title, Animorphs: The Invasion Series, containing about 12 or 13 episodes of the show's first season. While I saw all 26 episodes of the series on TV, I only ever owned the first VHS release, The Invasion Begins, which contained the first three episodes of the series, "My Name is Jake Part 1", "My Name is Jake Part 2", and "Underground".

Next was Barney's Birthday, which contained the Barney & Friends season 1 episode, "Happy Birthday, Barney!", which had originally aired on April 21st, 1992. The Barney franchise is weird when it comes to home video releases, because most of the releases aren't episodes of the TV series, Barney & Friends that aired on TV. Instead they were mostly direct-to-video episodes or feature length specials like Barney's Imagination Island, which did air on ABC as a Primetime special called Bedtime with Barney: Imagination Island in 1994. While TimeLife released the majority of the first season of Barney & Friends on VHS, the episodes they didn't release, like "Happy Birthday, Barney!", were released by Barney Home Video. What's interesting about this release is that the cover art resembles the 1992 re-releases of the Barney & The Backyard Gang direct-to-video episodes that began the franchise from 1988 to 1991, and the original 1993 release of the direct-to-video episode, Barney's Magical Musical Adventure. Other episodes of the TV show did get home video releases throughout the 90's and 2000's, but there's never been North American complete season DVD sets. This is the only episode of Barney & Friends I ever owned, rented or borrowed when I was a kid, but we had plenty of other Barney VHS tapes at the time.

Next up is Beast Wars. I watched this show on YTV when I was a kid, but I never owned, rented, or borrowed any of the VHS releases at the time. I actually own all three Canadian Beast Wars VHS releases now as an adult. My best friend bought them for me at conventions in the last couple of years. Each tape contains about three or four episodes edited together into a feature length movie. The U.S. has six VHS releases for Beast Wars, though neither version contained the entire series. I've only watched the first tape but I plan on watching the other two tapes soon.

Next is Donkey Kong Country: The Legend of the Crystal Coconut. This is a tape containing four episodes of the animated series, Donkey Kong Country, which aired on Teletoon here, edited together into a feature length movie. My parents rented this tape for me when I was in my early teens sometime in like 1999 or 2000, maybe 2001 at the latest. My brother and sister were going out and it wasn't something I was doing with them so my parents rented this for me so I could have my own mini movie night by myself. This was the only VHS release that this show ever had, but it's an interesting look at the show.

That's the thing about TV shows on VHS versus TV shows on DVD and Blu-ray. It was much easier to sample a TV show on VHS than it is to sample it on DVD and Blu-ray because one VHS tape might hold about 1 to 4 episodes of a particular show on it, and chances are pretty good that, even if there are multiple VHS releases from a show, you wouldn't've gotten every VHS tape from the show, so these tapes were the best way, outside of actually watching the show, if it was current, on TV, to see if you like that particular show or not. And the best way to introduce a show to someone else.

Gargoyles was one of my favourite shows when I was a kid. And, like most TV shows for kids at the time, it had five VHS releases, which completed all thirteen episodes of the first season. The first VHS release (not pictured here) contained the five episode pilot episode, in a condensed movie form titled Gargoyles: The Movie - The Heroes Awaken. The remaining four volumes contained two episodes each, rounding out the remaining eight episodes of the season. In addition to Gargoyles: The Movie my parents rented Volume 1, The Hunted, which contained episode 6, "The Thrill of the Hunt", and episode 7, "Temptation", and Volume 4, Brothers Betrayed, which contained episode 12, "My Brother's Keeper", and episode 13, "Reawakening". Disney shows on home media are always interesting to see, because they either never get fully released, or if they do, it takes forever to get the entire series out.

As I've mentioned before on the blog, Goosebumps wasn't a show that I watched growing up. So when my best friend found the VHS release of the first episode, "The Haunted Mask" at the same convention as the first Beast Wars tape, I asked him to pick it up for me for exactly the reason I mentioned above. I wanted to sample the series, and I've never found any of the DVD releases that the show has. I've only watched the tape once, and that was on Halloween, so I think I'll be watching this tape as a Halloween thing every year, since I'm not a fan of horror movies.

Inspector Gadget was a show I loved when I was a kid. Even though it aired in the 80's, it aired in reruns all through the 90's and I watched it right up until 1996 or 1997. Except we never rented or owned or even borrowed any VHS releases for the show. I didn't even know if it had any VHS releases because I never saw them in stores, nor did I see them for rental at the video store. I finally got one of the show's VHS release, The Invasion, when I got a massive haul of VHS tapes from someone I knew a few years ago now. This tape was from 1990, and it contains season 1, episode 16, "The Invasion". Another thing that I like about owning episodes of TV shows on VHS is that in the case of a show like Inspector Gadget, where the show's DVD releases, including the complete series set, are all out of print, and are prohibitively expensive to buy a copy, having an episode or two on VHS is a way for me to watch the show on physical media, even if it's just the one episode.

Power Rangers is a massive franchise, containing three movies, and thirty seasons of Television, and its history on home video is just as extensive. Especially during the time between 1993 and 1996 when Mighty Morphin Power Rangers was on TV, because those three seasons alone had alot of VHS releases. Particularly the first two seasons. While I never owned any of the show's VHS releases, outside of the Christmas special, Alpha's Magical Christmas, we did rent all five parts of the "Green with Evil" mini-series, which introduced Tommy Oliver, the Green Ranger, from Rogers Video in either 1994 or 1995. Then later, in high school, I borrowed five of the six Power Rangers: Power Playback VHS tapes that were released in 1999, from one of my friends. The only one she didn't own was the Blue Ranger Adventure tape, which contained the season 1 episode, "Food Fight", and the season 2 finale, "Blue Ranger Gone Bad", which was the only time that that episode was ever released on VHS. At some point during this series I'll do a complete overview of the Power Rangers: Power Playback line as it not only contained VHS tapes, but a toyline as well. 

Renting the VHS releases was the only way my siblings and I ever got to watch Rainbow Brite. For whatever reason, the show never aired in reruns here in Canada in the 90's, unlike other cartoons produced by DIC Entertainment, like Inspector Gadget and The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin. But the VHS tapes were always available to rent at Rogers Video, which is where my family went to rent VHS tapes. So this was how my siblings and I saw the show. Out of the six releases that the show had (one episode was released as a single tape, and as two individual tapes as it was a two part episode, and was technically the show's pilot episode), we rented four of them, and we rented them frequently. In fact, I think half the time we went to the video store just to rent Rainbow Brite tapes.

Rugrats is another show that I watched on TV all the time, but I never saw on VHS. By the time the show started here in Canada, replacing Mighty Morphin Power Rangers after Batman on the Zone on YTV in the fall of 1994, we weren't going to Rogers Video as often, and had started renting videos from the gas station, so we weren't getting as big a selection of tapes like we did at Rogers Video. So I didn't see any Rugrats VHS releases in the stores. I have A Rugrats Vacation in my collection now as it was part of the same massive collection that the Inspector Gadget VHS I own was part of, but, growing up, the only Rugrats thing I ever saw on VHS was The Rugrats Movie that came out in theatres in 1998.

Spider-Man: The Animated Series (just called Spider-Man on merchandise and the show's title card) was another show I watched on YTV that I never saw on VHS when I was a kid. There seems to be alot of those aren't there? My best friend also found two tapes from the series at conventions. I reviewed The Venom Saga on the blog late last year, but I haven't watched the second tape, Tablet of Time, yet.

Oddly enough I did watch the pilot episode of DS9, "Emissary" on VHS when I was a kid. Just not the official retail release. My parents taped the premiere off CHRO back in 1993. Last year, I was at a friend's place for the weekend before my birthday and she took me to a local thrift store, where I found the VHS release of "Emissary". I was shocked because, up to that point the only Star Trek VHS tapes I'd found at thrift stores were the movies and the Columbia House Collector's Edition release of "Encounter at Farpoint", so to find any Star Trek episode tapes at all was awesome.

Something else that I wanted to bring up in this post is that, if you had any TV shows on VHS, chances are you had a certain selection of episodes, and that's it. So, you'd end up watching those particular episodes over and over again because that's all you had, whether you taped them off the TV or owned the official releases if a show had any. Like, for example, I had most of the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation on VHS because my grandmother bought the official releases for me. Because of that I have more nostalgia for the first season of TNG than most people do, even if they were old enough to have watched the season as it aired during the 1987-1988 television season, because I watched those episodes so often. That's what you did back then. You watched what you had in your collection or what you could rent from the video store, or borrow from a friend or relative. 

"The Enemy Within" from the first season of TOS is another Star Trek episode tape that I found at the thrift store where I got "Emissary" from. This release is the original 1985 VHS release, with the transporter background on the front cover rather than the 1991 blue coloured re-release. When I was a kid I had the Columbia House Collector's Edition release of the season 3 episodes, "The Enterprise Incident" and "The Empath". These are the only TOS episodes I ever owned on VHS because I'm not a huge TOS fan. As I've said in other posts, I appreciate what TOS did for television in the 60's, and the fact that it began one of my favourite entertainment franchises of all time, but otherwise, it's a TV show from the 60's that I watched when I was a kid. My parents's Star Trek so to speak, as they watched it when it first started airing in syndication in the 70's. 

Speaking of 60's television, this Batman VHS, containing episodes from the 1968 cartoon, The Adventures of Batman, was the first time I ever saw any Batman animated show, as I wasn't allowed to watch Batman: The Animated Series yet. I enjoyed it though because this Batman cartoon felt like the 1966 TV series, even though Adam West and Burt Ward were replaced by Olan Soule as Batman, and Casey Kasem as Robin, in the series, though they'd return for the 1977 follow up cartoon, The New Adventures of Batman. I actually borrowed this tape from the local library as one of the assistants at my school at the time, worked at one of the branches of the public library on the weekends, and got it out for me to take home to watch. 

Now we return to the 80's for this next batch of VHS releases. If you've spent any time at all on either of my blogs over the last few years, you know how much of a fan of Teddy Ruxpin I am. Not just the original toy and the book and tape sets, but the animated series, The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin, as well. I had four of the original twelve 1987 VHS releases for the show when I was a kid. I had Guests of the Grunges, Take a Good Look, Grubby's Romance, and Tweeg Gets the Tweezles. I watched these four tapes so many times when I was a kid that I'm surprised I didn't wear any of them out. Thanks to a long distance friend, who was kind enough to digitize all twelve tapes, and send them to me through Dropbox, I've been lucky enough to be able to revisit the four tapes I owned when I was a kid, as well as the one tape we rented, Escape from the Treacherous Mountain. These tapes are another example of watching the same episodes over and over again because that's all you had from the show in question. Especially once the show had ended its original run, ended its initial syndicated run, and didn't come back in reruns ever again.

The Care Bears Family is another show I watched in reruns on TV, but also had VHS from as well. I only had two tapes. One, Travels In Space, contained episodes from the show's third season that homaged Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, as well as campy Sci-Fi movie serials like Flash Gordon. The second tape, which I didn't include an image of, was called Fabulous Fables, which contained four episodes of season 2, where Grams Bear tells Hugs and Tugs stories that the other Care Bears stand in for the characters in those stories.

My dad had an episode of The Jetsons on VHS when I was a kid. This tape was part of the Hanna-Barbera Super Stars collection. There was a trivia game at the end of the episode, making the tape a full 30 minutes, as the episode, without all the commercials, was only about 25 minutes long. I didn't watch this tape quite as often as I did the other ones I had in my childhood collection, but I did watch it a few times. 

Being the Winnie the Pooh fan that I am, I loved the 1988 animated series, The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, which I watched alongside reruns of Adventures of the Gummi Bears on CJOH (CTV Ottawa). I also had five of the ten VHS releases as well. I had The Great Honey Pot Robbery (my favourite), The Wishing Bear (which I still own), Newfound Friends, Wind Some, Lose Some, and King of the Beasties. And because I only had these five tapes, this is another example of watching what I had once the series had finished airing in 1991, as it didn't stick around in reruns after that here in Canada. At least, not on any channel I ever watched. While the show did have some DVD releases in the 2000's, they've been out of print for over a decade now, and no complete series sets have been released. Though the entire series is streaming on Disney+.

I only ever had this one VHS tape for the 1985 Star Wars: Ewoks cartoon, and it broke on me almost immediately. I only got to watch it the one time before my parents had to throw it out because our VCR destroyed it. I suspect it has more to do with the condition of the tape when we got it rather than the VCR itself, which was an older top loading one, because it only ever did it with three of our tapes.

I had a ton of Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends VHS tapes. Maybe not a ton, but I had seven of them. Technically six, since one of them was destroyed by that top loading VCR that my siblings and I had in our space in the common area of the second floor of the old log farmhouse we lived in from 1993 to 1996. Funnily enough Shining Time Station was airing on YTV at the time we first started getting these tapes, so alot of the episodes on these tapes I also watched on TV as they were part of the Shining Time Station episodes.

The last tape I wanna share with you today is Where's Spot?, which was a VHS released by Walt Disney Home Video in 1993, containing episodes from the BBC animated series, The Adventures of Spot, based on the children's book series by Eric Hill. The animated series that began in 1987, and had a second series in 1993. Somehow Disney got the North American home video license for the show. I only ever owned this one tape, but the VHS releases were heavily advertised on other Walt Disney Home Video releases, such as the Disney Sing-Along Songs releases, throughout the mid to late 90's, beginning in 1993.

That's it for TV shows on VHS. Like I said at the beginning of this post, very few shows got the VHS treatment unless they were shows made for kids or a Sci-Fi series like Star Trek, The X-Files, and Doctor Who. But it was fun looking at the tapes in my collection throughout the years. I'll be back on Wednesday for another Star Wars post. And don't forget to check me out on the VHS Club Video Podcast on YouTube on Thursday night at 9 pm ET, or on Friday on your favourite podcast streaming/downloading platform. So until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.