I don’t think you all realize how good tapes were. You’d have a tape. Big, wodgy thing. The size of a book, made of licorice. Inevitably noisy — predetermined to clatter, especially if you dropped one, which, don’t worry, they were basically indestructible, until they weren’t. The machines that handled them were noisy too: sound of a miniature forklift operating as you slapped the big wodgy thing into play and the mechanism took over, cradling it, moving it into place, cracking it open like a lobster to get at the runny innard.
The runny innard — the actual “tape” by which we refer to a tape — was the only fragile bit. Too fragile. Disproportionately fragile, compared to every single other thing about a tape. Once it was exposed in the hardened interior of the machine (and sometimes, indeed, outside it), anything could happen. Often did. Tangles. Garbles. Gets pulled into the mechanism the wrong way one time and then it’s a week of trying to fish all the bits out without ruining the message the tape carries (impossible).
And then you’d have those tapes, the ones that got fucked up but you kept ’em anyway, the ones who worked well enough overall, for like 98% of their runtime — I was an Extended Long Play kid due to an entirely imagined sense of resource scarcity, so my tapes ran six hours — but had their spot where the machine would start to howl and crunch and the picture would go fuzzy and dead but if you just had the courage or charisma to white-knuckle through it (or, better, stop and fast forward), you’d get to the part where the tape played again.
“The heads!” someone would scream. “The heads are dirtying!” I’m 45 years old now and I’m still not convinced that whole idea of dirty tape heads wasn’t just a capitalist prank. A scheme to sell “head cleaning casettes.” What the fuck did those things ever do, besides make things worse? Nothing. Little eye droppers of cleaning fluid. Cotton ribbons of not-tape. Unnatural sounds from the machine as the cleaning was in progress. Shortened life. Reliable players made of iron, brought low by cotton. So it goes.
When you taped things off TV, like I did, you were doing something that doesn’t happen anymore in the 21st century. You weren’t just taping “a thing.” You were taping “the entire contextual framework of a specific moment in time, featuring that thing.” You’d have the commercials — the ones that played that specific night, advertising those specific products. You’d have random artifacts like weather emergencies or that one time someone at the Fox station in Buffalo accidentally turned the bass way up on everything that went out, and all the people on TV sounded like James Earl Jones. Tapes weren’t just recordings of what we now call “content.” They were museums, thin-slice chunks, of specific moments in time.
I had a tape, for example, of the night they played Nicholas Meyer’s director’s cut of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan for the first time, on network TV. It also happened to be the first time I had seen / was going to see, that movie. If I recall correctly, it was preceded by an hour where Leonard Nimoy detailed his Star Trek memories. If I recall correctly, I missed the first ten minutes of that hour. So, for the rest of my life, every time I watched that hour, it started in progress, it started at the moment I’d raced to the machine and pressed “record.” (Actually, it was “play-record.” Secret two-finger hacks were the province of the machine.)
(Something similar happened with my copy of Return of the Jedi, by the way. That one was worth recording on Short Play. Short Play is only two hours, though — actually, two hours and two minutes, for those counting — and Return of the Jedi is two hours and fifteen minutes long, including credits. So, my copy of Return of the Jedi — the one I watched all the way through childhood and into high school — snapped into Rewind, abruptly, at the moment that Luke set Darth Vader’s body on fire. So it goes.)
Anyway. Star Trek II. Something else happened that night, a few hours after I’d run in twelve minutes late to hit play-record on a Leonard Nimoy special that led into a special screening of The Wrath of Khan. Either the ABC channel that was playing the film had some kind of technical issue or a local thunderstorm messed with our cable line, but either way, at a certain point, the quality of the cable feed began to degrade. It got fuzzier and fuzzier. It blinked out altogether in certain places.
Incredibly — in a manner that seems to me to be more proof of the existence of a divine trickster than most other things I’ve seen in my life — this degradation reached its zenith during the battle of the Mutara Nebula.
If you remember the film, Khan Noonien Singh chases Captain Kirk and the crew of the Starship Enterprise into a nebula to exact his final revenge. It’s a table-levelling move by Kirk: his Enterprise is crippled, but he figures, if we go into that nebula — which messes up a starship’s ability to sense, and see, what’s outside it — the odds will be even. Whatever handicaps the Enterprise will handicap the Reliant (Khan’s ship) as well. The Enterprise will have a fighting chance.
So here I am, watching Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan for the first time, and Captain Kirk takes the Enterprise into the Mutara Nebula to obscure Khan’s sensors and make it harder for both ships to see one another… and my cable feed starts to fritz and the picture quality of my actual television in the real world starts to fall apart in nearly precise lock-step with the action on screen.
And I taped it.
That was my tape of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. For, like, years.
The tape didn’t know any better. It just copied down what it was receiving, which was bad signal. I didn’t know any better (although I sorta worked it out). I’d never seen the film before. All of that just “was” Star Trek II, even though it was also an entirely unique, personal-entirely-to-me, artifact of a sequence of events. It was a night in my family’s family room, probably a Tuesday, sometime in the mid-to-late ’80s. Etched in tape, living forever.
When the “better things” — the DVDs and blu-rays and Apples TV — turned up, I was heedless of the danger. Tapes were big, wodgy things. Size of a book, made of licorice. They were inevitably noisy. They took up a lot of room. They broke and wore down. They became unplayable. The machines that played them became unplayable and eventually, irreplaceable. Star Trek II is in the cloud now, but it’s not a Mutara Nebula cloud. It is pristine, crystal-clear. I can watch Star Trek II anytime, now. It’s never been the same.