“His dad had passed and he was clearing out his garage with just stacks of VHS tapes. … Now I’ve got like 2,500 VHS tapes in my garage, I’ve got old like Blockbuster shelving, and I’ve got neon lights. We just started having parties in the garage, and people would come over and have drinks and watch old movies and laugh at ‘Short Circuit’ and ‘Ghostbusters,’” Peel said.

His VHS collection – and the popularity of his home-viewing parties -- expanded exponentially when he met a guy on Craigslist who sold him 1,500 tapes for $100.

“So, I talked to the wife and looked around at thrift stores and pawn shops, and you could get nice, big CRT TVs for $5, $10. Chained them all together with a coax cable, and hooked them up to a VCR so it shows the same image on all the TVs. I put about nine or 10 of them in the garage and just had parties, had people come over and watch old VHS movies I still had.”

He dubbed the garage parties “VHS and Chill” nights, and before he and his wife, Jessica, knew it, chairs were scattered down the driveway to accommodate the growing audience.

“More and more people kept showing up at these things, and they started inviting friends and people we didn’t know,” he said. “My wife was like, ‘OK, there’s people all in my house, in my bathroom. I don’t know who these people are. …You gotta take this and go do something with it.’”

To his surprise, he immediately found several venue owners around OKC willing to host public VHS screenings. He officially launched VHS and Chill to the public last year at Individual Artists of Oklahoma Gallery on, appropriately enough, Film Row.

“We did a Jeff Goldblum show where we had TV/VCR combos on pedestals all showing Jeff Goldblum movies and had him up on the projector. Brought the TV wall out there – like took it apart and put it back together there,” he recalled with a grin. “Then, our Halloween show last year at the IAO Gallery, … I brought like eight different VCRs. That way we had a different horror movie on every screen.”