A Love Letter to the Labels We Used to Ignore
If you grew up during the golden age of VHS, you probably remember the movies.
You remember the giant clamshell cases. You remember wandering through video stores looking for something to watch on a Friday night. You remember spending twenty minutes arguing with your friends about whether a movie you'd never heard of was actually going to be any good.
But there's another part of the VHS experience that deserves a little more love:
The stickers.
Lots and lots of stickers.
If you have a collection of vintage VHS tapes, you've probably noticed that the little labels slapped onto those tapes were almost as much a part of the experience as the movies themselves. And, in many cases, those stickers tell us exactly where a tape came from, how many people rented it, and how many times somebody ignored the giant PLEASE REWIND warning.
BE KIND, REWIND!
Let's start with the sticker that probably defines the VHS era better than anything else:
BE KIND, REWIND.
Those three words were practically a commandment.
You finished watching your movie, and before you could leave the VCR humming away in the living room, you were expected to rewind the tape for the next person.
Of course, not everyone followed the rules.
There was always that one person who returned a tape with five minutes of the movie remaining.
And if you were renting from a video store, congratulations! You had just inherited their problem.
PLEASE REWIND
Then there was the slightly less friendly version:
PLEASE REWIND.
Notice the difference.
"Be Kind, Rewind" sounds like friendly advice from a nice old neighbor.
"Please Rewind" sounds like the video store employee has already dealt with your nonsense three times this week.
It was essentially the VHS equivalent of a passive-aggressive note taped to the refrigerator.
PROPERTY OF THE VIDEO STORE
Another classic was the PROPERTY OF sticker.
These were everywhere.
A video store didn't want its precious copy of Friday the 13th Part VI mysteriously disappearing into somebody's basement collection.
So the store would slap its name on the tape, the case, the paperwork, and occasionally what felt like every available square inch of plastic.
And honestly, some of those stickers became incredibly cool pieces of VHS history.
Today, finding an old rental tape with the original video-store sticker still attached can be more interesting than finding a pristine retail copy.
Why?
Because that sticker tells a story.
It tells you that the tape lived somewhere other than a warehouse shelf.
It was rented.
People watched it.
People returned it.
Somebody probably forgot to rewind it.
And then it did the whole thing again.
NEW RELEASE!
Few stickers were more exciting to a kid in the 1980s or '90s than:
NEW RELEASE!
You could walk into a video store and immediately spot the movies everyone was talking about.
These stickers were essentially advertising shouting:
"WATCH THIS ONE!"
And if you were a horror fan, you already knew what you were looking for.
You didn't need professional reviews.
You didn't need Rotten Tomatoes.
You needed a cool cover and a giant NEW RELEASE sticker.
That was enough.
HORROR
Speaking of horror...
Video stores often used genre stickers to help customers navigate their shelves.
HORROR.
Beautiful.
Simple.
Effective.
You didn't need an algorithm to recommend movies based on your previous viewing habits.
You walked over to the HORROR section and started judging movies entirely by their covers.
Honestly, Netflix could learn something from this.
PREVIOUSLY VIEWED
One of my favorite VHS-era stickers has to be:
PREVIOUSLY VIEWED.
This usually meant the video store was selling one of its former rental copies.
And these tapes had history.
They had been rented dozens—or potentially hundreds—of times.
The case might be scratched.
The label might be covered in stickers.
The tape might have a barcode on it, an inventory number, and what appears to be someone's phone number written in permanent marker.
And yet you could buy it for a few bucks.
For VHS collectors today, that's part of the charm.
THE RATING STICKER
Then there were the rating stickers.
G. PG. PG-13. R.
The rating was usually prominently displayed because parents wanted to know whether they were about to rent The Little Mermaid or something starring a chainsaw-wielding lunatic.
For horror fans, seeing that big R on a VHS case could practically function as a recommendation.
"Why is this rated R?"
Probably because it's awesome.
HI-FI STEREO
Then there were the stickers that tried to convince you that your humble VCR was basically a home theater.
HI-FI STEREO.
Suddenly your living room became a multiplex.
Well... sort of.
You still had a 19-inch television sitting three feet away from you.
But the sound was in stereo!
And that was enough.
DO NOT REMOVE
Some VHS tapes accumulated so many stickers that eventually one would inevitably appear:
DO NOT REMOVE.
Which naturally created an irresistible urge to remove it.
Humans are remarkably predictable.
Tell somebody not to remove a sticker and suddenly that sticker becomes the most fascinating object in the room.
RETURN BY...
Rental stores also had their various RETURN BY stickers.
These were important.
Very important.
Because video stores had discovered a revolutionary business model:
You could keep the movie... but they were going to charge you for it.
Those little date stickers were reminders that your weekend rental wasn't actually permanent ownership.
And if you forgot?
Well, congratulations!
You had just paid enough in late fees to purchase the movie several times over.
THE MYSTERY STICKERS
But perhaps the best stickers were the ones that made absolutely no sense.
A random number.
A barcode.
A little handwritten note.
A sticker covering another sticker.
A sticker covering part of the artwork.
A sticker covering another sticker that was itself covering a previous sticker.
Eventually you weren't sure whether you were looking at a VHS tape or an archaeological dig.
And that's what makes old rental VHS tapes so fascinating.
They're artifacts.
Every sticker, scribble and faded label can tell you something about the tape's journey.
YOUR VHS TAPES HAVE STORIES
Today, we can watch practically anything instantly.
We don't have to drive to a video store.
We don't have to search through hundreds of shelves.
We don't have to worry about rewinding.
And we certainly don't have to deal with late fees.
But something was lost along the way.
VHS tapes were physical objects.
They were handled.
They were rented.
They were shared.
They were sometimes abused.
And those little stickers were part of that history.
That's why I love them.
I made most of the stickers you've seen here because I wanted to recreate a little piece of that VHS-era magic—the weird, colorful, slightly chaotic world of video stores when picking a movie was an adventure all by itself.
So the next time you see an old VHS tape covered in BE KIND, REWIND, PROPERTY OF, NEW RELEASE, HORROR, PREVIOUSLY VIEWED, and PLEASE RETURN BY FRIDAY stickers, don't just see a bunch of old labels.
You're looking at a tiny piece of movie history.
And whatever you do...
BE KIND. REWIND.
What VHS Stickers Do You Remember?
Did your old tapes have a sticker that I missed? Maybe your local video store had its own unique labels, warnings, rental tags or wonderfully bizarre handwritten notes.
Tell us about them in the comments! Let's see how many different VHS stickers we can remember from the glory days of physical media.
