The Princess Bride

Well, I finally got around to seeing The Princess Bride for the first time and I still feel like punching myself for not seeing it sooner. On the surface, it is your standard, run-of-the-mill fairy tale, but what makes it so enjoyable is its colourful characters and the endlessly quotable script by the legendary William Goldman. Funny enough, even though I never saw the movie before today, I still recognised a lot of its lines through pop-cultural osmosis. Yes, I know that sounds inconceivable, but I can assure you it is very conceivable, thank you very much.

I saw this film at the Queen’s Film Theatre in Belfast, but the caveat was that we were watching the VHS copy. It was a little strange seeing a movie on VHS that was, in turn, being projected on a cinema screen, but it was a fun experience regardless. Filmmaker Brian Henry Martin and film historian Dr. Sam Manning are currently doing a series on VHS as part of their podcast, the Wonder Cinema, and they did a live recording of one of their episodes before the film where they talked about the history of the video rental shop in Northern Ireland. Obviously, I wasn’t alive for much of VHS’s heyday, but I grew up watching a lot of my childhood favourites on video and I have many fond memories of going to places like XtraVision, Video City (if anybody around my neck of the woods remembers that) and even some of the local shops to rent a movie, so it’s not like the novelty is completely lost on me. Far from it. I have plenty of nostalgia for video rental shops. Obviously, DVD was the dominant home video format in my childhood, but even up until roughly around 2005, it was still fairly common to see tapes in the shops.

The video rental shop was the main topic of this particular podcast, but there’s also episodes dedicated to the format wars in the early days of VHS, the video nasties panic and the tragic decline of VHS, all of which I’m looking forward to watching. I was even interviewed after we left the screening where I talked about my own memories with VHS… in the most disconnected way possible, but still.

Yeah, VHS definitely was rough-around-the-edges, but I still have a soft spot for it. it’s a format that I would love to see make a comeback somewhere down the line. If vinyl can make a comeback, I don’t see why VHS can’t. Surely, that’s not inconceivable.