I Am Cartrivision

This was the Cartrivision System demo, on cartridge video tape. Not sure it came with the Cartrivision home video system, introduced in 1972. I believe it did come with a taped user manual. The Cartrivision system is 100% made in the USA, brilliantly designed, and flopped horribly when brought to market. The design is brilliant if you are a student of Rube Goldberg! Note that the controls are at floor level. The prototype machines were all designed on a work bench. The engineers did not have to bend over to operate the deck. Department stores, like Wards and Sears, put the VTRs in the TV department and the tapes in the record section, usually on another floor. They were too cheap to have a demo tape with the VTR, because they were terrified of copyright infringement. (This was unknown territory back then) Enjoy America's first home VCR that never was!

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• +Cartridge
• +Television
• +Cartrivision
• +VCR
• +VTR
• +video
• +tape
• +recorder
• +Betamax
• +VHS
• +1972

[videolabguy]

Can you imagine the size of the Cartrivision Camcorder?

[eyeh8nbc]

Is this from the Sears owner's manual tape? I thought that one was different. I ran into one of those tapes in a thrift store about 17 years ago but stupidly didn't buy it since I couldn't play it. I now have 4 machines but can't get any of them to work. When I have some money I hope to pay someone to look at them.

I'd love to find the production music they used on this- the tune at 2:21 also appeared in an Electric Company segment.

[videolabguy]

I mis-spoke . This is the demo tape of the system. I will fix the description.

[Metamusik]

That being said, that plug-in hand-held camera is retro-futuristic brilliance. Just look at the damn thing. But it's no wonder it failed; I'm guessing it was too expensive to have the tv-set in the same unit instead of having a stand alone player. Also, between the lines at 3:38 "Psst, I have Nazi-exploitation porn(!)"

[Metamusik]

I get the feeling Cartrivision is about to rape and/or eat me.

[wizard55]

@jeffcool78 There may be tons of tapes out there just rotting away with valuable television history on them. Such a shame more of this is not uncovered and archived, fast.

[ricarleite]

Well, you had to get ,married at home, by the TV!

[jeffcool78]

if you have any vintage games shows or tv shows back then the network people wiped the tapes clean and reuse them for a few messley dollars. now that are kissing ones ass to find the shows that are lost.

[video99couk]

In Europe we had the VCR system of course, introduced in 1972. Relatively few film rentals were available for it, but the system was reasonably reliable and didn't employ skip-field recording.  It was followed by VCR-LP and SVR, all using essentially the same tapes, which look remarkably similar to Cartrivision tapes.

It was still in general use until the early 1980's, and I have several working machines (models N1500 / N1502 / N1700, SVR4004 etc).

[eyeh8nbc]

The TV listings shown here are from a San Francisco paper, probably the Chronicle- the local stations are in black while the ones from Sacramento and other surrounding areas are in white. I didn't know channel 20 was already Spanish then- I first saw them in the later 70s and there's a local promo somewhere on here for a show in English dated October 1972.