capacitance electronic disc aka “video disc” technology was conceived in 1964 but it wasn’t brought to market until 1981, and by then it was already obsolete and inferior technology to the Laser Disc (1978) and the VHS tape (1977)
It seemed like a good idea at the time, the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but 17 years of R&D didn’t help the video disc catch on. It was an analog stylus-read giant disc, like a juiced up LP record in a hard plastic case. Big and dumb. Really big and really dumb. If there were five different ways to fuck it up, they covered four of them.
"The 12-inch discs were crafted using PVC blended with carbon to allow the disc to be conductive, and a thin layer of silicone was applied to the disc as a lubricant. Discs were stored in a caddy from which the disc was extracted by the player. CEDs could store 60 minutes of video per side, so almost all films needed to be flipped over at some point."
Video Discs were produced for about 3 years before everyone gave up. I didn’t know all this disc shit and history of competing formats until recently when I carried a couple around in my backpack for 12 hours. At one of my favorite bars I showed them to the relatively young bartender and he had no idea what he was looking at.
I have vague memories of seeing a behemoth disc player hooked up to a TV in a department store in the early 80s. But at my house we had a VCR slightly smaller than our microwave oven.
A couple years ago at a thrift store, I found two Burt Reynolds movies on video disc – Gator (1976) and Stroker Ace (1983) – and bought them for Stevil, a Burt Reynolds fan. Useless, obsolete artifacts. Dumb as a mud fence. They’ve been sitting in my garage collecting dust until last Friday when Stevil was in town and I schlepped them all the way to Peloton to hand them over, where he may or may not have forgotten them. You can see them on the bench in the background in Bret's photo above taken at Peloton that night.
If you have a video disc collection you’ll need a double-triple reinforced shelving system to store them, screwed into the studs with giant lag bolts because all that PVC, carbon, plastic and silicone is really heavy.
the best part of this thrift store shot of the Stroker Ace disc is the peek a boo view of the Linda Ronstadt album and as you know no one knows Linda Ronstadt like this guy
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