While I was working on this week’s story about the history of Red Bay Plaza, so many things came back to me from the old days.
In fact, once I had mentioned ‘The Cayman Triangle’ (an independent movie filmed here in the mid-’70s), I had to immediately watch it again. Even though I’ve viewed it several times over the years – always fast-forwarding through the parts shot in the US – I still noticed people and places I’d either forgotten were in it, or hadn’t previously recognised.
I don’t think I’d twigged that Wendy Lauer was the tour guide in George Town, or that Geraldine Duckworth was the sassy barmaid. Of course, there was no mistaking Arek Joseph as the raffish Sir Nevil Scott, nor George ‘Barefoot Man’ Nowak as the fool. I also spotted Darvin Ebanks – Cayman’s most famous buccaneer, who never seems to age – and who could miss Andy ‘Cayman Cowboy’ Martin, singing about the ‘super service’ at Delworth’s Esso station?
The scene in the Legislative Assembly building featured a veritable who’s-who of prominent people in Cayman’s society at that time, such as Desmond Seales, Rudy Selzer, Bernard Passman and Stanley Panton. None other than Steve Foster was swinging through the jungle in little more than a loincloth and then-director of the Department of Tourism, Eric Bergstrom, played the part of TV newsreader Ted E. Bare.
Ted E. Bare. The screenwriters were a witty, esoteric bunch.
Do I think ‘The Cayman Triangle’ wuz robbed when it came to the Academy Awards in 1977? Not exactly… the Turtle Rangers and Nazrat were a hard act to follow, no question, but ‘Rocky’, ‘Network’ and ‘All the President’s Men’ had big money behind them. Difficult for Hefalump Pictures to compete at that level.
All joking aside, it is so fabulous to have that record of Cayman, when large developments were barely a glint in landowners’ eyes, and everyone was willing to jump in and have some fun with the film. I don’t know that politicians and well-respected businesspeople in modern times would be quite so keen to sign up for such a romp, but those days were different.
Along the lines of the same subject – films, I mean – I must again enlighten those who weren’t here decades ago, about those tape clubs I touched on in the other article. Some businesses were just absolutely unique to small islands like ours, where, due to the absence of certain services or products, a few enterprising or creative individuals came up with ways to fill the gaps.
Any time my family went to the US for a vacation, one of the biggest thrills for us kids was to wake up early and watch ‘The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Show’, ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ and whatever else we could find on the channels before Mum and Dad got up and we had to ready ourselves for a shopping or activities day. Then we’d fly back to Cayman and either have to do without or, if we were lucky, be invited to a friend’s house where there resided the rarest of birds: satellite TV. A big dish in the garden would mean we’d struck gold. The key was to never arrange a playdate on a cloudy day, as the feed would then be unreliable.
Such bounty clearly left an impression on me, as I can still distinctly recall one family’s big-screen TV with RGB projector lights. Just Google ‘Sony VideoScope’ and you’ll have an idea of what I’m talking about. Back then, it was one of the only large television options – either as a single unit, or in separate pieces. I love the wording from an old 1981 ad for the model with its projector in a coffee table: “When you switch it on, movies come out of your furniture, your favourite news reporters emerge from beneath the glasses and ash trays, and your living room turns into a theater.”
Ash trays, folks.
Anyhoo, I’m getting off-topic a bit.
We wanted to see our shows, but how to do it if we had no dish? Well, that’s when the tape clubs started opening. Shelves and racks full of VHS tapes occupied different stores around the island.
The owners of the clubs invested in multiple VCRs, along with satellite dishes, and set programmes to record daily, which they would subsequently rent out. Unlike Blockbuster Video, a company founded in 1985 and fully licensed and authorised to rent Hollywood movies, these were happily operating without permission from cable networks et al. They probably figured NBC had bigger worries than taking a handful of islanders to court over some hijacked episodes of ‘Cheers’, ‘CHiPs’ and ‘Hill Street Blues’.
The well-organised clubs had membership cards, rental rules and tapes neatly grouped in categories, from films to TV series, to children’s shows. They would also date them, so you didn’t get home to find you’d rented the same episodes you’d watched the week before – the very definition of a tragedy.
The less-professional places were a bit more devil-may-care, with less selection, and the odd mis-labelled tape. I think we’d rented ‘Police Academy’ one night, only to get home and find it was ‘The Amityville Horror’ – two less-similar films, you’d be hard-pressed to find.
However, no matter how rigid or lackadaisical these places were, one thing was true across the board: They were very serious about their ‘Be Kind, Rewind’ policies. The sign implied it was a choice, and hoped you would do the right thing, but in actuality, there were non-negotiable fines that kicked in if you weren’t ‘kind’. Sensing customer weariness, quite a few of the clubs also sold machines dedicated to doing nothing else but rewinding tapes. They were faster than the recorders themselves and if you went all fancy, you could get one shaped like a sports car. It was almost fun to rewind; just imagine.
Of course, over time, technology improved and much like audiotapes got replaced by CDs, so VHS tapes made way for DVDs. The clubs slowly disappeared and the next new thing took over.
Whenever I tell non-islanders about the tape clubs, they always look at me with incredulity – the very idea! – but it was just one of the natural parts of my childhood here, and I thought nothing of it.
Maybe recording those shows and making a business out of them wasn’t exactly above-board, but I’m grateful to the businesspeople who did it. If not for them, I would never have had my crush on Don Johnson in ‘Miami Vice’, or got to know an alien called ‘Alf’, or seen a very witty, young Bruce Willis in ‘Moonlighting’ before he got hired for all these action film performances he’s phoning in these days.
The only thing I don’t miss is rewinding those tapes.
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