I was helping my Mom clean out the basement when I went to see my parents for the holidays, and all over the dirty basement floor were some old tapes of ours, by the looks of it home movies precious enough to avoid the great VHS purge of 2020. At some point it seems that the box we had put them in fell over, so for some time they had been out all over the dirty basement floor and are now in pretty bad shape.
My partner and I have gotten in the habit of VHS collecting/hoarding, so I wanted to see if any of these were salvageable. For the most part it looked like they probably weren't. They had been molded over even before they had fallen in the dirt, and between the dust and grime I thought they wouldn't actually play.
I was checking online to see if there was any way to save it and I read about these electronic VHS cleaners that they used to make. After a pretty deep eBay rabbit hole I found one for sale and snatched it up!
Meet the Geneva PF-740, in all it's glory. It's mechanism is pretty self evident. Similar to a head cleaner for the player, the machine rewinds or fast forwards the tape itself through these fabric rollers you put a a couple drops of isopropyl alcohol on, buffing off the dust and killing any mold spores that may be lingering.
I'll be honest, I was pretty skeptical this would do anything that would make the tapes actually work. Most of the testimonies on the machine I saw online were middling, with most recommending another VHS cleaning machine that seems to have long vanished.
But what I didn't account for is that people posting to VHS restoration forums have much much higher standards then mine (get these clean enough that I can quickly burn them to a computer).
To my pleasant surprise, the machine worked great! And it had a lot to go up against too, some of these tapes are disgusting. But it managed to get the white spots off the film rolls, and even got a lot of the dust shaken out of the tape as well! If I wanted to I could probably take the cases apart and really deep clean some of those final spots on the plastic windows, but I don't so I won't. Finally, I am able to rescue these precious memories of my family's 90s heyday. In theory. The first tape I cleaned out was just one of the old Barney tapes.
This may be the first one of these they made. Back then Barney was a secret to the parents and would only appear when they were away from the kids. They soon changed this cause it sent out the message to kids that your parents wouldn't believe you if you started talking about strange encounters with adult figures.
The past is a wonderland.