The American Odyssey VHS Box Set
presented in beautiful Extended-Play mode, ten hours of low-octane fun on ten cassettes
This post has been updated with working links and more information, please check out the new article below!
American Odyssey
This week, I have for y’all a little (big) update! Back in November, I realized that I’d misplaced this box set of RV travel tapes, and I’ve been on the hunt for them ever since. Luckily, a friend had borrowed them, and I’d just forgotten about it. The original digitization of these (which is no longer on Youtube) wasn’t never really something I was happy with.
As a rule of thumb, I try to make sure that when I release a piece of undiscovered or nearly / fully forgotten media, I do what I can to research and understand what I’m archiving, at least to the extent that I’m comfortable talking about it. This time, however, I’m just releasing this into the wild, with no knowledge of what I may or may not have. I attempted to find some information on this series, but short of a few amazon listings of the very same box set I have here, I’ve come up with nothing.
I believe that this production aired on television, possibly on PBS or something similar, however I have not been able to confirm that. The distribution company and any other companies affiliated with the show have long since closed up. I really am at a dead end.
What I do have for you, though is ten one-hour-long episodes of a pretty wonderful trip across America from the perspective of an RVer. There’s some wonderful interviews with locals and beautiful sights of the east and west coasts and everything in between. The host is interesting and the whole thing is pretty enjoyable to watch. It’s really the kind of thing I would have caught a few episodes on ABC early Saturday mornings before Popular Mechanics for Kids would come on.
So that’s the bad and the good, well where’s the ugly?
EP Mode (Extended Play or Super-Long Play Mode) has been something I’ve written about in the past so I’d like to not dwell on it too long, but I have to mention it here. The distributor of this box set made the decision to include ten cassettes, each an hour long, recorded in the lowest quality mode possible. It irks me, and the footage suffers because of this.
I did my best to capture these tapes in the highest quality I could, but there’s just no escaping the unstable and erratic footage. I will say, likely due to being played fewer times, tapes 3-10 look much much cleaner, so if you find that you do enjoy the series and stick with watching it, the quality does increase somewhat after a few episodes.
Anyways, lastly I’d just like to ask you, dear reader, have you heard of this show? Do you recognize any people or logos within? I’d love to find out more about the production of this show, but I have to pass it off you y’all because I can’t find anything at all. There will be links below, as well as a comments section where you can find me, if you do have some information! Anything at all would help tremendously!
Well, lets all climb back in to the old RV and hit the road!
If you’d like to check out my other archival work, please check out my Youtube playlists for video and audio archives.
Thanks so much for checking out this week’s edition of Diptych. As always, if you have any questions or comments you can get at me here or here or leave a comment below this post. If you haven’t subscribed to this newsletter yet (it’s free) please think about doing so.
See you soon.
—Forrest
So far this is great!