or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Betamax
By Steve R.
So the next step was to check the internet. This was before I was on eBay, so it was limited to painful searches through about five million video stores, most of which wanted you to email them what you were looking for. Finally, I found eBay and learned a quick lesson on the economics of Supply and Demand. This was still early enough so that the video pirates hadn't taken over. Legitimate copies of the old videotapes were going for around fifty dollars. Too cheap to pay that much for a 17-year-old tape, I figured I should wait for HBO to show it again. Which had about as much chance of happening as someone developing time travel so I could go back to 1983 to buy a copy when it first came out.
Then I noticed there was something called a "CED." It was the first publicly available video disk format, introduced by RCA in the seventies. It's actually a pretty clever technology, given the limitations they were working with at the time.
The site CED Magic explains everything much better than I can. But briefly, RCA found that a PVC record could physically hold enough information for a movie, but the problem was how to press that information in a way that could be retrieved effectively. So here's the cool part. The CED track has a series of pits in it, making up the information to be read. Individual pits are far too small to be read with a needle, so they were read electrically. A quartz needle, many times longer than the individual pits, rode in the track. A fine gold wire imbedded in the needle detected the depth of each the pit -- and therefore it's value -- by measuring the capacitance of the air in the pit. The deeper the pit, the more air, and the greater the capacitance. ; Wow, great. Now I could probably buy a CED copy of the Final Countdown and a player for about the same cost as a used videotape. But the vinyl movie would have inherently better quality. A solution! Meanwhile, I spend my spare time searching the internet for a copy of the soundtrack. Auction copies of the LP are going for forty, so I find a used record store and get one for half that. But, if you want to play an LP, you need a turntable. I buy a Goodwill turntable for almost nothing, and replace the belt drive for about two dollars. Which is good, because it turns out to be a rotating pile of junk. I nearly get my money's worth out of it from the pleasure I get in destroying it. I bury the pieces at a crossroads during a full moon and salt the earth. I buy a second turntable from a friend. It's a pretty good one, good enough to transfer the album to a CD, so I could listen to it in the car. But the resolution of the music is such that in places the LP can't reproduce it well. (Some of the tones are so fine and at such a high frequency that they sound more like static than music.)
Back to the movie. I buy the CED player and the movie. Said player relies on belt driven mechanisms. Because when you absolutely have to have 450 RPM, why not rely on an easily stretched rubber belt driven by a polished friction wheel? Long story short -- new belts, lubricated bearing, 450 cycle timing light. Everything cleaned and fixed, except the damn machine won't run quite fast enough, so the color is off. I like this movie, but not enough to enjoy watching all the characters with purple skin. Good bye CED, hello Laserdisc. While checking a few dozen Laserdisc sites I stumble on a CD copy of the soundtrack. I buy it, not knowing it was a corporate pirate. That is, a real company, with a copy of the original studio tapes, publishes it without paying for the rights. But the quality of the music is fantastic. Now what I didn't find was the Laserdisc. So I go back to eBay for Laserdisc copies of the movie. They were going for about one hundred dollars at the time (now past two hundred and rising), so I was hoping for some kind of luck. The luck came in the form of eBay's then-new Buy It Now feature. A Laserdisc collector was getting rid of some disks, and not knowing the demand for The Final Countdown, he listed the Laserdisc with a Buy It Now price of only twenty-five dollars. What wonderful, wonderful luck! Something that will probably never happen again! Just unbelievable luck! Especially for the guy who bought it about half an hour before I saw the listing. I hoped he appreciated his luck. I wished him well. I also hoped he would get hit by a bus and his widow would sell the disk to me. So much for the Laserdisc. On to Betamax. ; Checking eBay's past auctions, Beta copies of the movie had been going for ten dollars. Great, except I'm not the only one who just decided that an old Betamax for ten was much better than an old VHS for fifty. I manage to buy one for only twenty-five dollars plus shipping. I finally had some decent luck and scored an old Betamax machine for only twenty dollars -- though shipping doubled that. It didn't happen to fast forward or rewind, but if you want to get a deal you have to compromise. So assuming I could sell the CED and player for what I paid, so far I've spent maybe seventy dollars to get the movie without paying fifty for the old VHS or twenty for a pirate. Add fifty or more for the soundtrack. ; Sometimes I'm a little too stubborn for my own good. But now after a little work and the extraction of really large, really dead spider, I have a working Betamax player. Which means I can buy pretty high quality movies for less than the cost of renting them. And the Beta copy of the Final Countdown plays like it was new. With direct (But unfortunately mono) connections, I then make a VHS copy for myself so I don't have to swap machines every time I want to see the movie. Then through this web site, I was contacted by someone who was willing to make a "casual" copy of the movie for me from his laserdisc. I traded one of my paperbacks for it. Very good quality, and in stereo, too. I got rid of the Betamax machine, which by then had died an unexpected death. Grrr! If you've had experience with old electronics you know that sometimes they'll work for a while after a long rest -- usually a sign of a bad capacitor or a fried resister. I took one look at the innards of the Betamax and decided that it would be best if I didn't disturb its eternal rest. Of course the moment the DVD was available, I ordered three copies. I had intended to keep them around just in case, or maybe to sell on eBay some day -- the pirates taught me a lesson. The only problem was that five months later I was still waiting for the DVD. A few people managed to get their copies at this point, and told me their impressions. Said impressions were not good ones, and based on a few other things I won't go into now I cancelled my order. I called the company several times, never getting a reply.
Three weeks after I cancelled my order, a package containing three copies of the DVD was dropped off at my house. I ran after the UPS guy and was able to refuse delivery. In the end, I had to dispute the charge to my credit card. So right now I'll stick to my dub off of the Betamax copy I bought and another which has a provenance I'd rather not go into here. There is one small hope for the future, though. There is another company which maintains that THEY are the legal owners of the movie. Maybe some day they'll come out with their own version of the DVD, one worth owning.
