Filed to: People With Too Much Time On Their Hands

Remember when you missed the season finale of Breaking Bad and you had to wait like a year until the series finally came out on VHS so you could watch it?


No, but now you could imagine what that might have been like. Here are some recent movies and popular shows reimagined as 1980s-era VHS tapes, and they are simply wonderful. Not just in their typeface-perfect execution, but in the way they scramble history. These objects never existed—and they will never exist.


As part of an April Fools’ joke (that’s Poisson d’Avril in French), blogger Julien Knez pretended that he interviewed a hipster who “only watches movies on VHS” (which I’m not really sure is a thing but is actually something that characters in the new Noah Baumbach movie do).

As part of the gag, Knez mocked up nine completely convincing VHS packages for movies and shows using the bygone brands and logos that have only ever been associated with such artifacts.


The detail is incredible, right down to the creased cardboard and weathered plastic. Now I feel like I actually might have watched Game of Thrones in my parents’ basement.


What’s impressive is how fully he committed to the gag, producing the packaging, tracking down a variety of cases, and photographing the tapes in a 1980s-era living room (where did he get that TV???).


Check out the whole story (in French) which might have been even better before you knew it was an April Fools’ joke. [stanVHS via Golem13]