I'm finally more or less getting around to an idea I had in late 2014.
Several years ago now, I acquired a fairly substantial collection of movies on VHS that I've been meaning to do something with for a good decade, if not fifteen years by this point. I did manage to watch a few of them the first year or two I had them, but that kinda tapered off quick because I had other things I was at least pretending to do with my time when I wasn't busy with my day job. In 2014, I had intended to try doing something like this with them, where I'd try to sit down and watch one so I could write a quickie review of it. Turns out, the VCR I had intended quit functioning in that regard, and I pretty much abandoned the project for other things, even after I'd managed to get a TV/VCR combo unit to work with.
Eight years or so later, I'm finally getting back to some of that because I've been contributing some of my old VHS tapes that either I recorded or someone recorded for me off cable to a YouTube channel called Dave's Archives, which is mostly about TV commercials from the 1970s through the early 2000s, as of this writing. That got me going through my movie shelf again, in hopes that I'd be able to pass along more than I already had. I'm pretty sure most of them are commercially pressed, or whatever the correct term for VHS tapes would be, but I figured I'd go through them anyway, just in case there were any hidden gems. I'm not saying there will be, but there's that possibility, because I suspect the tape this title was on is not the only one like it in the mix. It's got a home-user-generated label that reads “The Showtime 30 Minute Movie: “12:01 PM...”, which makes me think it was recorded off the Showtime cable channel somewhere. There were no commercials, but there was a 25-minute short film that, as far as I can tell, was based on a short story by Richard Lupoff.
In a nutshell, the story is about this corporate executive dude called Myron Castleman who winds up trapped in a time loop over his lunch hour one day and starts doing all sorts of increasingly crazy shit to get out of it because he remembers it all and it's driving him mad. There's also this physicist who kinda predicted that something like it might be possible but thinks it's just a theory until Castleman gets ahold of him and somehow managed to convince him that it's more than that just before the last loop of the short ends with Castleman blowing his own head off with a guard's gun at the physicist's lab, only to wind up back at the start of the loop again anyway.
The short version I'm working with here came out in 1991, and from what I can tell by a quick search on IMDb, there was a feature-lenght TV movie that came out in 1993. I'm not sure if I have that one, too, but I'm sure I'll find out, since I'll be digging through that shelf anyway, just to see what else is there. One other interesting note is that this short kind of reminded me of a season five episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation called Cause and Effect, where the ship is caught in a time loop, but manages to get out of it by the end. Not sure if there's a connection or not.
From here, the question is what I'm going to do with all these commercially produced tapes I've got once I'm done with them. I can't really see keeping them, since I doubt I'll ever watch them again, assuming I ever do watch them to begin with. I know there's a local second-hand media store with a couple locations, but I'm not sure they still buy VHS. In this case, they probably wouldn't even if the do in general because a couple years back, I went to sell off some old DVDs and there were one or two they wouldn't take because there was no UPC barcode on the case, and the same is true for this one. Unless there's somebody I know personally who might want it, I might just have to give it to Goodwill or something, and even then, I'm not sure they'd take it either. I'm sure I'll figure something out.
Anyway, it's time to wrap this up. I'll see you with something else before too long, I hope.
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