Upsetting Day: Video Baby (Patreon)

We didn't quite know who we were as VHS consumers in 1987. Did we want the theater experience at home? Or did we want Video Baby? What the fuck did I just say?

I don't know what Video Baby is and I'll never be able to explain it. There will never exist a person for whom Video Baby is for. Everyone knew this at first glance and then forever. There is no digital archive of Video Baby online, I bought the only copy on eBay, and it was still sealed in its original packaging. I would have been the first man to see it, but it had been locked inside with decay and entropy. It came to me like this:

When I opened it, every part of it that could fall off, did. The top label slid off, the spine label never was, the door had snapped off, and the tape itself had separated from the spool. Whatever Video Baby was, I would never know. "Thank Multrox. It's broken on this world," said three sudden travelers from another universe. "Not so fast," said my friend Bad Candy Mark, who easily transplanted it into the case of a foot acupuncture video and put it in his VCR. I guess we're watching…

When I was in third grade, I saw an elderly man in a yellow workout suit power-walking next to our school bus. He had ironed letters onto his sweatshirt to say "HOW SWEET IT IS!" And he wasn't, like, the town's "HOW SWEET IT IS!" old man who power-walked that street every morning. His suit was brand-new, and I never saw him again. I only bring him up because he used the same font as Video Baby's title cards. I've called this the HOW-SWEET-IT-IS font since I was eight. And with that treasured memory flashing across my mind, we're about 20% done with Video Baby. The box says "PROGRAM TIME: 10 MINUTES," but it's exaggerating by almost three.

The narrator says, "Congratulations. You're the proud parent of a Video Baby. A child who doesn't cry or throw poop unless YOU want it to." I dare anyone to find comedy in that. Or meaning of any kind. Does the narrator think we can command a pre-recorded VHS tape to cry? To poop!? It's the first line they wrote and Video Baby's own creators are already helplessly confused.

The narrator recites a truly clumsy adoption papers bit (shown above in its entirety). It's not quite jokes; it's more like a wobbly concept misunderstood in different ways by different amateur writers. The idea is that the tape itself is our baby, kind of, but every detail is frustratingly wrong. Neither a baby nor a VHS tape weigh 1 lb, 4 oz, and the punchline is "Nationality: VCR" That's nothing. Ignoring how VHS tapes actually have nationalities, this is like holding up a bird and saying "Nationality: Whore" or "Occupation: Bread." We don't know what you're talking about, man, and this next part is important: fuck you.

A baby crawls in and the narrator says, "Other parents may worry their baby will end up at an airport chanting 'Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna' or as fundraisers for Lyndon Larouche. But your video baby is a model of obedience, and will be a delight for many years, or 300 plays, whichever comes first."

It's technically "humor," but not something ever meant to be said out loud. It's like a robot reciting all the throwaway gags behind Dee Snyder in a MAD Magazine story called "Raiders of the Lost Farts." Then, related to no actions happening on screen, the narrator inexplicably says, "Say hi to your new baby … uh, try again. Good!"

And that's got to be a clue. Was this meant to be an interactive human baby experience? Unused footage from some kind of VCR game? The narrator says, "You can begin the bonding process by embracing your television and repeating the words…

I love you.

I love you.

I love you."

It's fucking gross. It's something a serial killer would ad-lib while filming a diaper commercial. But we'll have to consider it later. For now, WARNING! WARNING!

Nothing happens and the narrator says, "WARNING: Under no circumstances embrace your video baby under an electrical storm." So we're still doing the TV hugging thing? This writer had no idea what the bit was, yet they are lost in it, beating it to death. He adds, "Now: say we're mommy and daddy. Welcome to your new home." Which means Video Baby is meant to be watched as a couple? Fucking insane. Impossible. Right now, my best theory is this is an artificial human pet for a barren widow with no sense of humor and an unlimited suspension of disbelief. Now I find out this woman, this sad woman so desperate in her loneliness she is breast feeding her television, is assumed to have brought a date? To this!? I say again: fuck you.

I guess we're naming this baby. Adrift in the disconnected thoughts of an apathetic copywriter, the narrator says, "Naturally you'll want to name your baby after a wealthy relative or similar beneficiary." Which means we're telling other people we did this? We are going to call our richest relative and say, "Hello, Uncle Francis, I have honored you with a VCR baby. He is seven minutes long and he too is now Francis. What do you mean? I just told you what I was talking about." The narrator adds, "But certain names should be avoided," and oh boy, here we go, you know this is going to be good!

You can sort of feel the light go out in the universe when the narrator reads, "For example, the name Bill McKenna with the initials B.M.," and the letters "B.M." pop up on the screen like that will help. Like all the joke needed was for you to see what those initials would look like for real. If someone walked onto the screen and gently put a plastic bag over the baby's head it couldn't have a more tragic tone. I wait for a zinger, a punchline. Every second feels like a lifetime as I get further away from the potential universe where there was more to this joke, where they were not already done with the Bill McKenna thing.

The next thing the narrator says is, "Also, ignore Zachary Ignatius Townsend. Or Z.I.T.." You might recognize this as the same joke with lower stakes. "Spare your video baby the grief of being called Robert Allen Tool, or R.A.T.," he adds. Which means we are three funny names in and we're already done with the Maybes and pulling from the No pile. "And especially Phoebe Underhill… P.U.," the narrator says, and he is done. The task was to come up with silly names leading to silly initials, they did four, and I dare anyone to fail harder. It's not funny, or realistic. I tried to do this bit with my second daughter and a nurse told me, "I see what you're going for here, but the state won't let you name your daughter Pizza Orenthal Oreo Padolphhitler."

The video takes a break from comedy, I think, to say, "Good names for the '80s are Traci, Scott, Christi, Dean." I have no idea what it is. It's certainly not humor as we know it. I've transcribed the entire thing; you know as much as I do. It might be a Traci Lords, Scott Baio, Christie Brinkley, Dean… Koontz(?) reference, or it might be a sincere list of four names they like. I think even they don't know. I think if you tortured the creators of Video Baby for a thousand years they wouldn't be able to explain what they're doing here. If doctors examined the brain that conceived and wrote this, each one of those doctors would die seven days later.

Video Baby gets back to what it may or may not believe is comedy to say, "Pretentious names like Madonna or Prince should be reserved for rebellious children." That's it. End of list, end of concept and explanation. More than ever, I have no idea what this is. This is an idiot's disorganized collection of random thoughts. It's the thesis for a D- paper in Stupid Bitch class. My leading theory now is this is an onboarding video for a Hungarian clam juice pyramid scheme. But there's no time for theories. There's now a ticking clock. "You will have 15 seconds to select a name for your video baby," the narrator says.

The baby watches us from a stopwatch during our pointless countdown. And I don't mean pointless like it doesn't matter. It doesn't, how could it, but I mean in the fiction of whatever this is, there's no rush. The narrator says, "If you need more time, you can just take a few more seconds." Maybe they're talking about a VCR's ability to pause, but if so, why not say that? Why a timer at all? Every single thing that happens in Video Baby takes us further from reason. This feels like a tape a skeleton would hand you after you poisoned a thousand jars of baby food. Dark deeds deserve a dark reward. Dark deeds deserve a dark reward.

The narrator says, "Now that you've chosen a name. Face the screen and call your baby by name. That's it. Now say, good baby!"

Whatever this was meant to do did not work, but the fact that I thought it might is a testament to Video Baby's haunting nature. If the baby crawled out of the TV and said, "HEARING MY TRUE NAME SPOKEN UPON A TONGUE OF FLESH IS A FEAST, FATHER," I would find this video the exact same amount of strange. For instance, the next thing said by the narrator is, "You're probably thinking you would like to show your baby off to all those insistent parents who have been telling you how precocious their kid is. Now you can have your revenge."

Fucking what!? No, no, no, no, if I'm understanding this tape correctly, your enemies must never know you are watching it. The last thing anyone should ever show anyone is Video Baby, and that's coming from me, the first and only person to ever do it.

Lost in the thought of this being not only a real baby, but a superior baby with which to intimidate one's rivals, the narrator says "This is one of the pleasures of parenthood. Running down your friends' homely children and lying about the virtues of your own." He then reads us three wordy, cruel, humorless insults you can say to other parents. After all, you are a parent yourself now. You have Video BAby. And your friend's child is too small, or maybe too big. Did they spill Drano on the filthy thing? Along with zero more insults!

In victory, the narrator moves on. "It's time to attend your baby's first problem. He needs to be burped. Gently but firmly pat your television on the back, being careful not to disturb the antenna. Now don't be afraid, go ahead, 123 go." It's fucked. If a team of rival parents saw you doing this, the leader would holster his gun and say, "Save your bullets. There are some fates worse than death." Then the story of you would fade out forever with you patting your TV waiting for footage of a baby to burp, you fuck. You piece of shit.

…

…

Aww, this next part is pretty cute.

The narrator says, "When your friends come to visit, your Video Baby is sure to impress them. Here are some video snapshots to show them." And that's crazy. The idea of you having friends over to show them this as if it was your real baby is a premise so faulty I can't quite hold it in my mind long enough to make fun of it. But then they show footage of Video Baby just draining threes, proving that if you leave even the most confused Hungarian clam juice marketers alone with a baby long enough, they'll eventually, probably accidentally, make something adorable.

Whoever made this has no idea what they're doing, it's rudderless madness, but it's becoming more clear they are a petty, vindictive monster. Ever since the idea of Video Baby being used for revenge entered their head, the whole premise became centered around it. The narrator says, "Since the honeymoon, the in-laws have been asking you when they'll become grandparents. They are annoying and pushy. Your Video Baby will shut them up." Fine. Premise granted, maniac. But then why, if Video Baby is what your in-laws always wanted, is Video Baby also how you get rid of them? Computer, roll that beautiful BAD BABY SEGMENT footage:

The narrator explains the BAD BABY SEGMENT of this seven minute tape is for when you're tired of your wife's parents. He says, "Play it when they come visit, helping to curtail their stay."

"I don't get it. Is that… supposed to be our grandchild? The 12 seconds of sad rock and roll baby? No, seriously, what is the premise here, you fuck?" they might say. And it gets less coherent! The narrator adds, "This part of the video is also useful for cutting off phone calls, getting rid of those people who sell The Watch Tower, and solicitations."

"I don't get it. I'm trying to share with you the love of Jesus Christ and you're cueing up 12 seconds of sad rock and roll baby? Is… w-was that your child? Have you seriously never considered the premise of any of this ever, you fuck?" they might say.

I'm hesitant to call his "hack" because it's truly not anything. But it ends the way every hack video baby video ends: AUTO-DESTRUCT. AUTO-DESTRUCT. AUTO-DESTRUCT.

I mean this as hard as anyone ever has: fucking what? The AUTO-DESTRUCT sequence is someone throwing pans against a wall. A Heathcliff writer would look at this and think, "I think you need to tighten up this concept." To which the Video Baby creators might say, "What if there was a HIGH LEVEL to the AUTO-DESTRUCT and it was simply more pans?"

"No, that's not what I'm fucking talking about at all. Things have to mean things," the Heathcliff writer would reply, adding the word "BUGS" to Heathcliff's helmet because he is teaching bugs to ice skate. "Pans on a wall are not a self-destruct, dumbass. Fucking impenetrable bullshit," the Heathcliff writer might add.

And he's right. Because next the Video Baby narrator whispers, with a hissing moistness, "Many video parents tell us that when they have had the video baby just a few weeks, they need only to bring HIM out. And immediately THEY fall to sleep. Nighty night."

Again, fucking what!? So now this tape is supposed to be soothing baby white noise to aid in sleep? Then why the zany names, like R.A.T. and Z.I.T., for instance? What of the roast comedy about the toddler our friend has to shave? The rock and roll baby meant to drive the in-laws out of our home!? We're supposed to fall asleep to that? In under 400 seconds!? What and why -the goddamn shit- is Video Baby!?

M-maybe the box has answers?

No, this is nothing more than a violent misrepresentation of what Video Baby is. Video Baby is a mostly text collection of a breast milk thief's worst guesses at what comedy might be. Yet this makes it sound like a companion for infertile couples without room in their trailer for a doll collection. But what's this? They want us to "meet all the Video Friends"? Video Girlfriend? Video fucking Boyfriend!? I had to learn more.

First, I looked into who made Video Baby. There I found the same story you find across all media. The Video Baby distributors, Vestron Video, went bankrupt in the early '90s. Everyone lost their jobs and their library of 3000 videos was purchased by LIVE, a company formed during the corporate merger that cost everyone at IVE and FHE their jobs. LIVE then went bankrupt and fired everyone, becoming Artisan Entertainment until Lionsgate bought them and fired everyone. So the current caretaker of Video Baby is one guy who has all the money and owns every movie until he gets eaten by a wealthier, tinier man. I figured it wasn't worth asking him, so I tried Google. Let me skip to the bad news…

… I don't think the Video Friends are real. There is no record of these other videos ever existing in any form. Forgive me for bulldozing past this, but in 1988, a different production company did make a first-person pick-up artist VHS walkthrough called Video Girlfriend, but the name seems to only be a terrible coincidence. The Video Friends as a concept seem to exist only here, on the back of the rebuilt corpse of the only copy of Video Baby in a box in my basement labeled FUCK.

But let's not give up like the creators of the extended Video Baby universe did. Maybe I'm wrong! Google has been broken for years and it's easy for old media to get lost. I knew if somebody really made Video Boyfriend, they'd need a way to sell it. So I found a distribution catalog from the exact time they'd be marketing the Video Friends to VHS rental stores.

Here we go. If anyone bought Video Boyfriend, it would have been from this 1988 Vestron Video catalog I got from eBay featuring the enduring comedy hits You Can't Hurry Love and Computer Beach Party. Let's open it.

Well, sure. We won't find Video Boyfriend here in the front. The first two pages of the 1988 Vestron catalog are going to be dedicated to the tentpole title, You Can't Hurry Love. We all remember it. It's the movie where a witch curses a normal-sized guy to weigh 14,000 pounds starring Charles Grodin. Maybe? I don't know; neither do you. No one will ever know. Let's keep looking.

The next page is an ad for Computer Beach Party, a sex comedy where nerds use their home computer to get bikini babes and save the beach from a real estate developer. Maybe it started as something different, but in 1988, every good movie producer said, "Could it maybe be a sex comedy where nerds use their home computer to get bikini babes and save the beach from a real estate developer? And if not, could you maybe get the fuck out of my office?" Let's keep moving.

Damn, still no Video Friends on the next page. Looks like Vestron Video thought it was more important to promote their other four movies, You Can't Hurry Love, Computer Beach Party, You Can't Hurry Love featuring Charles Grodin, and Computer Beach Party.

No sign of Video Friends yet, but Vestron is offering these two summer sizzlers! Stock up on You Can't Hurry Love starring Charles Grodin and Computer Beach Party! Only one page left in this catalog! I'm sure it will have the information I'm looking for.

Nope! There's only an ad for some Charles Grodin comedy called You Can't Hurry Love starring David Leisure (TV's ISUZU Commercials). It looks pretty good!

Still nothing about Video Baby and his Video Friends on the back cover, but you CAN hurry love, you WON'T have to wait. Love DOES come easy, with Vestron Video's rebate coupon featured in every VHS copy of Steel Dawn! And if we can't find joy in that, maybe we deserve Video Baby to remain a myst– no! Never! The search continues!

I dug through a book I swore I would never reopen– Bowker's Complete Video Directory 2000 Volume 4: Education/Special Interest. It is an exhaustive list of every video made by man, and heavier than the beloved character of Eddie from You Can't Hurry Love featuring Charles Grodin. It is a document of man's desperate pursuit of meaning and capital, and one of the most depressing books ever printed. It is an open grave of bad ideas. It's like finding a ledger of dog fighting bets on a sunken slave ship.

And it was all for nothing. There was no record of Video Boyfriend or Video Kitty. But I also have bad news.

On page 3011, right after Video Atlas of Thoracoscopic Spine Surgery…

…

… I found a second Video Baby.

I found the last remaining copy of the second Video Baby on Amazon, but the release date was wrong and the seller's name was Mr. Instructions for Tanning Woman Skin, Jr.. I'm a cautious consumer, so I clicked the image to see full view.

It was no help.

All I could do was buy the tape, which at $17.98 was almost four dollars less than the fruitful Vestron Video catalog. And I'm afraid I have worse news than before…

,,, the tape worked and I've seen a second Video Baby.

"We proudly deliver to you… VIDEO BABY," says a narrator, presumably from Hell. But this Video Baby isn't funny. It's raw baby, like a yule log video, or a fish screensaver. The box says "APPROX. 30 MINUTES," but it's 22 minutes of baby footage, made unsettling by post-production decisions. For instance, a grown man adds baby sounds in real time, so shortly after the baby opens his mouth, a psychopath coos, "ggooooo bgggg blpppbbb" until shortly after the baby closes his mouth. Sometimes he makes fart noises or munching sounds, the disgusting fuck. This Video Baby is something a former cop would watch every night in a movie where all seven of his babies were taken by the same baby strangler.

I sped this up 28x, mostly to prove it's what it looks like. It's a stolen home movie of someone's baby a baby strangler put up for sale. They had to know there was no organic market for camcorder footage of a stranger's baby with poop sounds. The business model for this was getting it on tape and hoping there were enough 1995 video stores blindly ordering one of everything. To hide among the thoracoscopic spine surgery tapes like a baby strangler in a wax museum.

This shouldn't exist. For a lot of reasons, but mainly because watching someone else's son take a bath is a terrible idea for a video. And before you say, "what makes you the expert on bad ideas," know this: eight hours ago I put the words "Billy O'Shuriken: A Billy Ocean Throwing Star Band" in my Notes app. What is that? Well, I'm glad you asked. It might sound a little something like this:

That's from Billy O'Shuriken's single, "Shuriken Queen (Throwing Stars Can Be Fun)" Where was I? Oh, no. I remember.

Video Baby (II) sucks so hard. The baby tries on two hats total and starts to cry because that's not enough hats for a fashion frenzy, and they still have the nerve to call it "Fashion Frenzy." I'm so tired of watching this tormented child cry with the screams of a man while title cards try to sell it as fun. This is what you would watch if you were an unknowable pulsing in a cave that fed on suffering.

Speaking of eating, a quarter hour into this they declare a "Pasta Party" and Video Baby smears spaghetti around for 8 full minutes. And like I should have long ago, they finally say fuck this, that's enough. They unceremoniously cut to the baby sleeping and fade out.

It's swindler-made slop. It's the dull background noise of someone else's ordinary life made worse by this meager effort, this pervert in a recording booth making Gremlin noises as he watches it. It's for no kind of person under any circumstances, but the back of the box somehow lists seven of them:

Again, fuck this. This copy sounds like what a ventriloquist hears when he sleeps between two rival puppets. "Video Baby takes care of itself, but it's great for practice! It's so lovable, but you can use it for revenge against teens and pets! It's too depressing to tell anyone about, but your friends will be in awe!" I've never seen a more befuddled idea, and I made this:

What else did these second Video Baby people do? What other nightmares are they responsible for? The Internet has no trace of them, so I started going through an older copy of Bowker's Complete Video Directory. And I have some bad news. For two years, our universe was host to…

…

… a third Video Baby.

Look, I don't know why there are three Video Babies in the 1998 version and only two Video Babies in the 2000 version. It's likely whatever erased it from our world will do the same to what I'm typing now. But in case my words survive, this third one was also released in 1987 making it a two Video Baby year. And somehow they talked the New York Times into rewriting their batshit press release as a news story:

The Chicago Tribune fell for the same fucking thing!

So not only was there a second group of lunatics who made a Video Baby that year, they also promised an extended Video universe of dogs and cats. And look at this:

They actually did it! They published and sold "nine" minutes of cat! I don't know what my point was, I may have gotten a little lost in the research process. I just can't believe this pitiful scrap of an idea was had by two people at the same time, that there was a Video Baby race forgotten to time, and then 8 years later someone had the same idea again, but worse and less. Oh, and speaking of ideas:

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