Letter sent to Nancy Giles in response to her CBS Sunday Morning commentary on 10/15/06

On CBS Sunday Morning on 10/15/2006, Nancy Giles did a commentary that explained how close she was to coming up with YouTube herself--she means this facetiously--because of her own angst over the years in having missed TV shows and how she turned to recording TV shows on audio cassette tapes in the days before VCRs (and DVDs and TiVo)--as did I! Today's generations have no idea how good they have it, TV-wise! Read my letter back to her below...

Nancy Giles:

I FEEL YOUR PAIN!

So help me, the best way for me to explain YouTube.com to my mother was to tell her, "Imagine if there was a web site full of clips from ALL of my old videotapes. That's what YouTube is!"

I have over 200 videotapes chock full of television episodes and specials and commercials and movies. I know that I have over 200 because I used to count them so that each tape's table of contents that I wrote (!) would have a consecutive volume number (!!)--"Val's Videotape Odyssey: Volume (Roman numerals)," I called them.

(Why, yes, I do now work in a library. Why do people always ask me that when I tell them this ;>?)

And yes, before that, I had audio cassette tapes of TV shows and specials and yes, movies! There are films and TV episodes where I know almost all of the dialogue by heart, because I've listened to them repeatedly! I have the TV editions of "Superman" and "Superman II" (which is why I'm really excited about the newly-restored version of "Superman II" being released on DVD later this year) and the episodes of "The Muppet Show" with Christopher Reeve and Dyan Cannon--and my brother had the ones with Mark Hamill and Brooke Shields. There's a long-forgotten Barry Manilow TV special with guest John Denver, and also the John Denver and the Muppets Christmas special that I have. There's the last half of an episode of "The Flintstones" and the last hour or so of "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," which was my way to "see" the ends of these before going off to beauty shop appointments. And I was thrilled as anything this past Christmas when I got the DVD for the animated film, "Rock & Rule"--but it wasn't the film that I was after, it was the little half-hour cartoon that was also included on the disc, "The Devil and Daniel Mouse," which came from the same animation studio and which I'd watched and recorded on cassette tape as a kid. And like I remembered, when I got to see the cartoon this 30 years later, there was only one line of the cartoon with which I was unfamiliar, because on TV all those years ago, the commercial break ended before I was ready and I'd missed getting that one line of dialogue on tape.

We can't be the only people who recorded all this stuff on audio cassette tape. YouTube, bah! If only there was the imagination for people to upload their old audio cassette tapes like this to the Internet--YourOldTVAudio.com! But people would never go for that; why in the world would you listen to a TV show in this day and age? Alas...!


Originally posted on Vox.