In 1991, while working at a McDonald’s in high school, Nick Prueher walked in on his buddy in the break room watching a video. His friend was training to become a manager and, as such, was required to watch dozens of training tapes. This one, for McDonald’s janitors, was called Inside And Outside Custodial Duties.
In it, a new janitorial trainee named “Chris” buffs windows and sees “McC,” an ambiguous entity, or perhaps a state of being, that’s never explained. Delighted by the earnest acting and bizarre mythology of McC, Prueher stole the tape and, that evening, showed it to his best bud since he was 10, Joe Pickett.
That tape marked the beginning of a Friday night routine. Prueher and Pickett would invite friends into their parents’ living rooms and provide running commentary and jokes on the weird, esoteric VHS tapes they found at thrift stores. Eventually, the two friends would take this guided comedy tour of their favorite VHS moments out of the living room and into a New York theater. Turns out, people were ready to look back at the VHS era and laugh.
“It’s like America’s Funniest Home Videos,” Prueher told Gizmodo, “but with stuff that wasn’t meant to be seen in a theater, presented live.”
They called the comedy show the Found Footage Festival, and 22 years later, the pair remain co-hosts, touring the country with highlights from their VHS collection, which now numbers more than 15,000 tapes. Often, they track down the stars of the video, feature them in mini-documentaries, and bring them on stage to do bits. They also create other projects inspired by the tapes, such as their weekly YouTube show called VCR Party Live! for their more than 200,000 subscribers.
In Prueher’s words, the weekly show is a more casual, “fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants version” of their touring show, featuring whatever new videos they find on their shelves that week.
All of which raises an obvious question: Why VHS tapes?
According to Prueher, the fascination stems from the particular moment in technological history the tapes represent, a time when video equipment had become cheap and accessible enough that regular folks no longer needed to be a Hollywood studio, or even particularly competent, to record. It led people to experiment with the new technology, seemingly with little concern for whether anyone beyond their immediate audience would ever see their tapes.
That’s the magic, Prueher says. Every VHS is a potential human-interest story.
Which brings us back to the McDonald’s training video. It had no credits, so Prueher and Pickett couldn’t track down the actors. But when a fan recognized Chris the janitor in a movie trailer, the pair went to the movie to confirm, checked the credits, and reached out. It turns out the janitor, whose real name is Carson, had been running a candy factory about five blocks from their Brooklyn office for two decades.
“When we finally met him during the pandemic, I was actually wiping away tears,” Prueher said. “It was this completely full-circle moment.”
Gizmodo spoke with Prueher about the enduring appeal of analog video, the disappearance of physical media, and the unearthed old gems that they feel deserve an audience.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Gizmodo: How did you get into VHS tapes?
My buddy Joe and I have been friends since we were 10, and we started collecting VHS tapes and doing running commentary to entertain ourselves.
What was showing up in thrift stores in the early ’90s wasn’t movies. It was potty-training tapes for parents, Hair Club for Men videos, or a Mr. T educational video.
In 2004, we [started] making a documentary and ran out of money, so we thought: What if we took our favorite VHS moments out of the living room and into a theater? For 22 years now, that’s been our job: touring the country doing a guided comedy tour of our favorite moments from special-interest VHS tapes.
When you find a tape, how do you figure out what’s funny about it?
One thing we don’t like to do is manipulate the videos too much, because they’re funny on their own. It’s more about the context we put them in, how we set them up, and what we observe.
I’ll go through and digitize a tape and just watch it. I try not to fast-forward because you might miss something. Maybe somebody smacks their lips a lot, and suddenly you think, “What if I put together all the lip smacks?”
There are things I gravitate toward. Anytime there’s a celebrity, anytime they’re rapping and shouldn’t be. I’m partial to puppets.
So there’s a lot of actual curation involved in putting the show together.
Yeah, and we get our hands dirty. We don’t take any videos from the internet. We’re at thrift stores while we’re on the road or at estate sales, finding VHS tapes we’ve never seen before.
When we’re touring, we spend our days doing that, and at night we do the show in Boise or Cincinnati or wherever. When I’m home, I’ll go to an estate sale occasionally or take a little road trip to look for tapes.
How far will you go to find something nobody else has seen?
David Cross once gave us a tape from 1985 of mostly men in sweaters doing 90-second pitches to potential mates for a video-dating service. It had very low distribution, and we always wondered if there was a version with women seeking men.
We researched the credits and found the guy who made it living in Burbank. He told us they had made one, but it had never been released. For years, we would remind him: “Hey, did you get a chance to go to your storage locker?”
Finally, he found it on this three-quarter-inch tape that predated VHS. We got the tape, found an antiquated deck that could play it, and digitized it. Even the service’s creator hadn’t seen it since then.
It feels like the VHS tape is often just the entry point into the person behind it.
When we meet the people in these videos, I think some of them are wary at first: “Are these jackasses making fun of me?” But it’s not that at all.
The treatment of these videos isn’t mean-spirited. It’s sort of a celebration of these regrettable videotape moments. Once people understand the spirit, we become friends with them. They’ll come to our shows when we’re in their city.
It’s this fun band of weirdos we’ve gotten to know over the years. In a way, we’ve styled our lives into an art project. We’re hanging out with these VHS heroes nobody else knows, but we’re huge fans.
What appeals to you about VHS as a technology?
Because it was so ubiquitous, all the flavors of humanity were right there. There wasn’t a polish. No one was there to make sense of it.
VHS was also at the vanguard of this exciting new technology that was suddenly everywhere. Amateurs with no business or understanding of the technology tried out new ideas to see what stuck. Because of that, you got a lot of weird, esoteric stuff.
What do you think about the disappearance of physical media in favor of digital video that’s saved on the cloud or uploaded to social media platforms? Does it change the culture?
There’s no American Film Institute that’s preserving Angela Lansbury’s exercise video or the Hair Club for Men promo tape. These videos aren’t being preserved in humidity-controlled vaults. We’ve got them on shelves in an office located on a Superfund site in Brooklyn.
But I think these amateur, often misguided videos say a lot more about our culture than the consensus best films of the last 70 years. This is a warts-and-all history of our videotaped culture, and I think it’s important.
Things saved on digital video and iCloud aren’t forever either, but people are way more tech-savvy now, and it’s hard to find that wide-eyed innocence of the VHS era on a digital format. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, people tried out crazy ideas for very specific audiences, with no idea they’d be seen by anyone outside that context. That’s what makes it so fun to discover and recontextualize.
Has AI changed the way you think about the human element in the videos you collect?
We’re not big fans. The thing I like about VHS is that very human quality. With AI-created content, you see those Facebook videos of a teddy bear saying “Happy Monday” or “Glad I had a second cup of coffee.” There’s something dumb about that that you could certainly find funny.
But even then, I’d want to know: What prompt did the person enter? Did they not notice the bear had a deep voice and didn’t sound like a cartoon bear at all? I would want to know the human story behind it.
Do you ever work with home videos?
Absolutely. Oftentimes we’ll find a camcorder in a thrift store that still has a tape in it. We’ll plug it in at the Goodwill, hit eject, and see what’s there.
We found one at an estate sale in Queens that started with a guy filming the demolition of a house across the street. He gets into this classic New York argument with the foreman. Then it cuts to a close-up of a poodle with the manicured puffs and everything.
Then it zooms out, and it’s the same guy who had been behind the camera, now wearing a dress, looking directly into the camera, and dancing. Then it cuts back to the demolition footage.
We were like, “Were we at David Lynch’s estate sale? Where were we?”
Found Footage Fest has a searchable database for all your VHS tapes. Do you digitize them all?
No one else is archiving these kinds of special interest videos and home movies—we’re kind of the last line before they get lost to history. And with a VHS tape’s lifespan of about 40 years, we have to digitize them now, or they’ll deteriorate.
So we currently have a couple of volunteers in the Midwest who are slowly but surely digitizing the tapes. We have over 15,000 videos, and you have to ingest them in real time, so this is a years-long project without a budget.
Will the public ever be able to watch them?
We currently don’t have any plans to make the collection public. We don’t own homes or have any financial assets—our lovingly curated VHS collection is just about the only thing of value we’ve got. Can’t give that away.
Why do you think VHS produced so much strange material?
VHS was the gold rush. Jane Fonda’s workout tape in 1982 sold millions of copies, so mom-and-pop production companies sprang up and asked, “What’s the next trend?”
We had a video called Rent a Friend for lonely people where a guy kept you company and asked you questions like, “Where are you from?” and you were supposed to answer your television. There were VCR board games where you’d play along with the VHS tape.
The technology had been democratized. The barrier to entry went away. You didn’t have to be a big Hollywood studio anymore. We found a video last week called How to Identify Machine-Made Marbles, for marble collectors who wanted to tell machine-made marbles from hand-blown glass. Maybe 30 people in the world needed that tape, but the technology was cheap enough that somebody could say, “Why not sell it at a marble convention?”
