VCR Family Hits Replay Button

Did you miss watching your favorite television show last night?
If so, you probably could watch it at our house. We are living in the VCR (videocassette recorder) age and my kids are recording most of it.
Whenever a show gets taped at our house, it’s not only watched, it’s memorized. The latest kick is the TV show “Rags to Riches.” The kids have every episode on tape, which they replay and replay.
Luckily it is a cute show set in the ‘60’s about five orphan girls taken in by a swinging and rich bachelor. It’s sort of a musical, with the girls and dad singing their versions of popular ‘60’s songs.
On the day after the big snow, the previous evening’s episode played continually until everyone, including the painters working on the house, were singing, “I love him, I love him,” from one of the show’s songs and saying, “I don’t want to miss the Untouchables,” one of the show’s lines.
Another tape, “Better Off Dead,” has been run so many times that 2-year-old Pete thinks he’s one of the characters. He runs around the house with a head band over his eyes saying, “I want my 2 dollars,” a line from the movie (It’s better than the name sounds).
When the situation comedy “The Cavanaghs” premiered, I had Patrick tape it because I couldn’t watch when it was scheduled. I was interested to see if the tv Cavanaugh family got into as many predicaments as my Cavanaugh family does.
After seeing the show numerous times with the boring scenes fast-forwarded and the good scenes played again and again, I decided it would be great if I could do that with the action around here.
Sometimes on the weekends we rent a movie from a video store. Patrick and John usually go out to get it.
I say, “Get something funny,” and the under-10 crowd says, “get something for us.”
Seeing what they bring home, I usually think I should have gone along to act as a censor. The movie with a shaky PG-13 rating that I can comfortably watch in a dark movie theater, I don’t want in my family room.
I don’t plan on watching the movie until the kids are in bed, but they are never all in bed at once.
Usually Mike falls asleep earlier watching the tape of the Muppett movie and is wide awake, playing with Lego blocks and ready to key in on the television screen just when I wish he wouldn’t.
In addition to shows off TV and movies from video stores, we also have quite a collection of tapes made with our video camera by the resident movie maker, Patrick and his buddy, Tom.
I have to admit these movies are clever, even though the boys make a big mess that they promise to clean up after filming but never do.
The latest series involves a dummy you are supposed to think is Patrick because it is dressed like Patrick, who is playing the roll of a spy. They film the dummy getting thrown off the roof of our house, and the next scene is one of Patrick landing on the ground.
For the last few years at Christmas they’ve made their own version of the “Christmas Carol” using our little kids and Tom’s younger brother and sister as the cast.
I try to appreciate their creativity when they traipse all over the house and yard rearranging furniture and dragging out clothes for costumes to film the different scenes of Scrooge’s Christmas.
The moral to this story is you don’t only live once, because once you’ve been videotaped, you can be freeze-framed, fast-forwarded and rewound over and over.

April 15, 1987