A Love Letter to the Labels We Used to Ignore
If you grew up during the golden age of VHS, you probably remember the movies.
You remember the giant clamshell cases. You remember wandering through video stores looking for something to watch on a Friday night. You remember spending twenty minutes arguing with your friends about whether a movie you'd never heard of was actually going to be any good.
But there's another part of the VHS experience that deserves a little more love:
The stickers.
Lots and lots of stickers.
If you have a collection of vintage VHS tapes, you've probably noticed that the little labels slapped onto those tapes were almost as much a part of the experience as the movies themselves. And, in many cases, those stickers tell us exactly where a tape came from, how many people rented it, and how many times somebody ignored the giant PLEASE REWIND warning.
BE KIND, REWIND!
Let's start with the sticker that probably defines the VHS era better than anything else:
BE KIND, REWIND.
Those three words were practically a commandment.
You finished watching your movie, and before you could leave the VCR humming away in the living room, you were expected to rewind the tape for the next person.
Of course, not everyone followed the rules.
There was always that one person who returned a tape with five minutes of the movie remaining.
And if you were renting from a video store, congratulations! You had just inherited their problem.
