Social media contains many collective efforts to deconstruct the minutia of pop-culture icons. When it comes to Jerry Seinfeld, I’m but one man with one personal Waterloo : What’s his VHS collection like?
When TBS started airing a syndication of the show in High Definition it became easy to catch fleetingly clear glimpses of the finer details to set design items: fridge magnets, condiment labels, and a modest but most coveted VHS collection. Despite the fact the show has no slated Bluray release, I can’t rightly say how I managed to access these rendered screenshots from the 16:9 HD broadcast. But however you wanna slice it, I got the goods.
My access is limited to seasons 6, 8 and 9. In earlier seasons his shelf had an assortment of Re-Recordable Scotch VHS tapes. Perhaps I’ll track down those seasons and reveal the hand-written titles in a future post. For the time being, what’s on deck here? It seems that set decorators shifted things around on a whim between episodes but here is the most indelible list of his collection I believe to now exist on the world wide web:
- True Colors (1991)
- Pretty Woman (1990) *
- The Crying Game (1992)
- Child’s Play 2 (1990)**
- Goodfellas (1990)
- The American President (1995)
- The Hunt for Red October (1990)
- Arachnophobia (1990)
- Wired (1989)
- Back to the Future III (1990)
- A second copy of True Colors
- Benny Hill’s Video Follies
- Masking Tape disguising the first part of a VHS title that ends with “Copacabana”
- World Cup Soccer
- CBS Sports NCAA Championships
- Several Computer Games
- Simcity
- Tetris
- (Ineligible due to the entire title being masked out with tape)
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*Perhaps as an inside gag, masking tape partially covers the title of “Pretty Woman” so it reads as “Pretty Man”
**I postulate that the Child’s Play horror movies had a very particular influence on the show for several reasons. Thankfully, these embedded YouTube links will speak for themselves and save me from becoming pedantic…
True Appreciation 