I found him having a VCR hard to believe
In 1981, they were so expensive that you probably wouldn’t see it in an apartment like his.
shareMaybe he'd scrimped and saved.
share
MovieChat Forums > Joker (2019) Discussion > I found him having a VCR hard to believe...
Maybe his mom got it from Thomas Wayne.
shareI would totally believe that Penny would have possibly signed whatever papers she may or may not have in actuality for, among other things, a VCR. Something tells me that she would have been sold on the prospect of being able to record television.
Or maybe it's a scathing indictment on consumerism. I don't know.
Thomas maybe gave her the VCR in the 70s when it was really really expensive, when they're still in love. I was told by mom that the fact dad bought her a microwave in the 70s (it was like $1000 in today's money I guess?) was a romatic gesture. It's akin of young couples nowadays buying the latest and greatest iPhones for their significant others.
sharesuper underrated comment lol
shareYeah. My mom and I had about the same economic level as the Joker and his mom and we didn't get a VCR until 1986.
shareI was rich and I didn't have a VCR until 1988.
But it was the 80's, that's ancient history to kids now.
This article refutes you:
"From the late 1970s to early 2000s, essentially every home had a VCR and a mountain of tapes to accompany it."
https://legacybox.com/blogs/analog/when-did-vcr-become-popular
Not true. We were one of the first families to get a VCR in 1982. All of my friends would come over and watch movies, because they didn't have one.
shareWe lived it, I'd trust that over an article written by someone who wasn't alive at the time.. NOBODY had a VCR in 1981 that was even remotely a working class citizen.
shareI recall seeing ads for them in the papers back in the late 1970s and they were 1,000+ dollars. That's about $3700 today. Not the kind of thing all that many people would buy. And movies to own went for about a hundred bucks each at first. VCRs didn't become widely owned until the mid-late 80s.
share"essentially every home had a VCR and a mountain of tapes to accompany it."
In the 70s? No way. I lived it -- in the NYC/metro area, too.
You were bleeding edge with money to spare if you had one. Not to mention mountains of tapes.
Tapes back then were so expensive, like around 80 bucks, they would practically cost you a paycheck. If you buy old tapes off of Ebay, you might sometimes come across tapes with old price stickers on the packaging that said they were, retail price, around 75/79.00 bucks a piece.
shareYes, the first tape I bought for our VCR in 1982 was very expensive. We would have to continuously tape over it, because buying any new tapes just wasn't an option until about 1984.
shareWhat tape did you guys get? The format wars were very interesting. Its quite fascinating to me how VHS won out for being more affordable to reproduce, when it was still super expensive.
shareWe had a regular VHS tape. We fortunately didn't jump on the Beta bandwagon. I remember the first tape we bought was in a black plastic case and we treated it with kid gloves. I think I did get another tape the following year as the price started to slowly go down. I kept checking to see the prices of tapes and then it suddenly seemed like one day tapes became completely affordable. Now I was able to tape my favorite shows and keep them. I remember taping the Michael Jackson Thriller video one late night and played that for months afterward. Luckily that video premiered on a Friday night, so I could stay up and tape it. Even though our VCR had an automatic record option, I never trusted it 100% so I rarely used it.
shareIt's funny because I remember my family taping some Michael Jackson stuff off of MTV (or VH1) back in the day too. When his Smooth Criminal video debuted, my Dad recorded it, and he also recorded this special where they talked about the allegations against him back then (including that taped statement from Neverland Ranch that aired on MTV). I remember also recording Nickelodeon's 20th anniversary block (they showed a bunch of old shows/episodes, like the pilot for a show that had AJ McLean from Backstreet Boys called Hi Honey I'm Home). It's a shame that recorders are now a thing of the past, with on demand there's an assumption things are always available but that's not the case sometimes.
shareI had a VCR in the early 1990s and even then it wasn't very common. Only a few other kids in my class had one.
shareI don't know. By then everyone had one where I lived.
shareSame, in the 90's they were commonplace. I don't know anyone who didn't have one. I was born in '84 and by 6-8 years old (1990-1992) Everyone owned Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Batman Returns, etc on VHS. So they probably became really common in the late 80's?
Now in the case of the Joker, even if he couldn't afford a new VCR it could have been used, someone could have tossed it out, etc. He didn't have to go buy a brand new one.
Even in the mid-90s, VHS movies were $25-30 or more.
shareYeah that article is BS. In the mid 80's I used to rent a VCR for the weekend because they were too expensive to buy but I did eventually buy one in the late 80's. VCRs were common by the mid-90's but popular movies were $25-30 to buy.
shareWe got a VCR in 1992 (or 1993). But we were living in a former Communist country.
shareMaybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think answering machines were common in the early 80s either, especially the compact ones.
shareYeah, seems more like a late 80s thing. It's a common device in movies where someone lets the answering machine take the call and they listen and then pick up. Normally they have the person about to end the call and they run for it (micro moment of conflict.)
Movies add these micro moments all the time. I thought the scene where Arthur and Murray were talking with the producer to be conflict for the sake of conflict.
Answering machines were around in the early 80's, but most people didn't have them.
shareThe answering machine seemed out of place to me as well. My family had an ATT answering machine in the late 70s that someone gave to my dad. But unlike the ones available in the late 80s it was big and included the phone itself.
shareI was trying to look them up in some old online Sears calalogs to look up the prices. I remember in the late 70s they were about $1,000 but by around 1984 they were around $300 to $400. My dad was a TV electronics technician and I was always trying to figure out in the late 70s as a kid how you could make an audio tape recorder to record video. My dad kept trying to explain to me that it couldn’t be done because of bandwidth requirements but I didn’t get it as a kid.
share^ I thought the same thing....
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