Here’s an image that has me wondering. I don’t see an exact date on it but I’m guessing it has to be 1980, cos I can’t imagine that Buck Rogers was available to buy before at least the end of the first series (which Wiki tells me was the end of March 1980)… might be 1981 cos that’s when the second series aired, but anyway, this means we’re in the age of home video (indeed, by 1980 VHS already had over half the home video market ahead of Beta). Very early days of it, to be sure, and I suppose some amount of overlap between the old home media and the new one was inevitable (much like VHS and DVD overlapped for a while), video wasn’t going to completely displace film immediately… but it just has me wondering now how long the big studios continued selling their product on film rather than tape. I know Blackhawk Films was still selling prints into at least the 90s, but they were a specialist outlier, not one of the majors; I don’t think I’ve ever seen a definitive date for when the latter finally gave up on super 8… though I rather suspect this ad here was among the last of its kind.
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