I just realised we got books on tape in lieu of VHS copies.

I got stuck on a channel that’s made a handful of video essays on Disney movies and their cultural significance and historical relevance or allegorical importance. I appreciate the way people can marry historical education within the framework of pop culture, you’ll never find this stuff on network TV unless some station took it and chopped it up. It’s why Netflix trying to do this with the Toys that Made Us was such a bad idea. You ain’t no Defunctland, baby.

I saw very few Disney films before the Little Mermaid. I think I was supposed to see Snow White once and saw Charlie Brown and the Wizard of Oz instead. I never saw it on home video, nor did I see Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty (which I actually would like to see now). Best I got was Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast and Lion King, the really good ones. But there were a handful of less popular ones, like the Rescuers, Robin Hood and the Fox and the Hound, that I had as a book and tape version, that were popular and cheaper to buy for your kids. I don’t even remember asking for them, I think because we didn’t own a VCR and sat in the car on long trips out of town, it was better to just inundate us with these. Even at five, I sat in my dad’s van with the key in the ignition just to run the tape player and listen to our books. Or we’d be on a single foam mattress pretending to be sicker than we were in a warehouse while my dad did his work. I carried my little black radio with me for ages.

So my memories of those Disney films is reduced to whatever the abridged book on tape version was, along with pictures which were just stills from the movie, of course, so they would’ve been much cheaper to make than VHS. Now I’m seeing clips from these movies and I’m remembering what I saw in the book but there’s nothing from the movies themselves. I’m not so bummed, seriously if you’d given me a book on tape adaptation of the Last Unicorn, I’d have still loved it. I technically did it myself by recording the whole thing onto a cassette tape, like I did with multiple movies, contenting myself with listening to it, which is apparently something a lot of kids did. I think buying VHS tapes was cost prohibitive, video rental stores didn’t start selling whatever wasn’t being rented or what was removed to be replaced with new stock. I bought a bunch of DVDs from the local rental place who were closing down and I don’t know why I got them, I haven’t watched them, I was sick and spending money I didn’t have. But I have a stockpile of DVDs now, some of which turned out to be damaged despite me rarely touching them, I still wound up buying the final episode of Six Feet Under off YouTube since my disc was unwatchable. So I used to settle for listening and building the movie in my head as best I could, either from pictures or memory. But it’s odd to have a nostalgia for movies I never actually saw.