Animazement 2025 – page 12
No, seriously, does ANYBODY have any idea what format this was? The closest I can come up with is Cartrivision, though the Quasar Great Time Machine sounds like a possibility as well (even if it’s more of a lever than a knob). The thing is, there was actually a LOT of home video formats before VHS and Betamax, back before pre-recorded media was commonplace and these things were basically only meant for recording TV shows for later viewing. So really, there’s no telling WHAT kind of wild and wacky device this could have been.
Also, apologies to the guy who was asking about “that one format where you could only watch it once and couldn’t rewind” and we kept insisting it was probably DIVX Discs, even though he though it was a tape. Turns out Cartrivision DEFINITELY had one-time-only, no-rewind tapes, so it was probably that. Technology is hard.
It could be a VTR or like a U mat or other old analog format
That’s definitely the right time frame she was talking about, though those seem to lack the “turn a knob or lever or something before hitting play” aspect, which she kept emphasizing as a distinguishing feature.
I feel like the “turn a thing before hitting play” sounds to me like a “Okay, so the machine TECHNICALLY broke, but I figured out a work-around that works, despite it not making any sense whatsoever” type of thing to me.
Either that, or you pressed a button to make the area in which the video-equivalent raised, and the specific machine’s method of lowering it back down into a “closed” position was “spin this knob until it clicked into place”. If not that, then it was a locking mechanism, with “spin this knob so that the thing you’re pushing down doesn’t come back up”.
Honestly, this is the type of thing you want to have a picture of, no matter how poorly your drawing skill is, just to give some level of context.