I grew up in the days of VHS. A lot of the videos I watched as a kid were tv shows or movies that were very poorly recorded from live tv. If you were diligent, you could manage to record a movie from tv without commercials if you were poised and ready to stop and start recording every time there was a commercial break. Our home recording of “The Princess Bride” had a commercial break at the exact moment Westley jumps into the quicksand to save Buttercup. We’d try to hold our breath for the whole commercial break to see if we would have survived the quicksand.
Kids these days will never understand the struggle!
I never got to watch Nickelodeon except for the rare circumstances in which my family was staying in a motel while road tripping to take pictures of graveyards (I’m serious. My dad is an OG lover of genealogy- pre 23andme and ancestry.com days). I was so jealous of the “rich” kids who had cable!
One of my favorite poorly recorded home videos was Donald Duck, specifically the one where he visits the Grand Canyon. I also LOVED the Maurice Sendak videos, especially the super bizarre “In the Night Kitchen.”
But my favorite had to be “Animaniacs.” Even as an adult I love it and make sure to play clips of it to my kids. This show had the perfect blend of silliness and learning. What better way to learn all the countries than by hearing Yakko’s World? Wakko teaches us all the state capitals as a Jeopardy-like game contestant. I also learned about Michelangelo and Mozart through the silly antics of the Animaniacs.
Kids today have endless streaming libraries. They’ll never know the panic of yelling “Don’t record over that!” They’ll never have the reflexes required to stop and start recording. I didn’t have Nickelodeon, but I wouldn’t trade my memories of grainy home videos for anything.
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Packing for Adventure 
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