VHS Collectors Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett Tour with 15,000 Tapes Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett have spent 22 years touring with their VHS collection of over 15,000 tapes, bringing obscure videos and their stars to the stage. Nick Prueher and Joe Pickett have spent decades watching old VHS tapes, searching for the outrageous and strange human stories hiding inside. In 1991, while working at a McDonald’s in high school, Nick Prueher walked in on his buddy in the break room watching a video. His friend was training to become a manager and, as such, was required to watch dozens of training tapes. This one, for McDonald’s janitors, was called In it, a new janitorial trainee named Chris buffs windows and sees McC, an ambiguous entity, or perhaps a state of being, that is never explained. Delighted by the earnest acting and bizarre mythology of McC, Prueher stole the tape and, that evening, showed it to his best bud since he was 10, Joe Pickett. That tape marked the beginning of a Friday night routine. Prueher and Pickett would invite friends into their parents’ living rooms and provide running commentary and jokes on the weird, esoteric VHS tapes they found at thrift stores. Eventually, the two friends would take this guided comedy tour of their favorite VHS moments out of the living room and into a New York theater. Turns out, people were ready to look back at the VHS era and laugh. And 22 years later, the pair remain co-hosts, touring the country with highlights from their VHS collection, which now numbers more than 15,000 tapes.Often, they track down the stars of the video, feature them in mini-documentaries, and bring them on stage to do bits. They also create other projects inspired by the tapes, such as their weekly YouTube show. In Prueher’s words, the weekly show is a more casual, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants version of their touring show, featuring whatever new videos they find on their shelves that week.The Enduring Appeal of Analog VideoAccording to Prueher, the fascination stems from the particular moment in technological history the tapes represent, a time when video equipment had become cheap and accessible enough that regular folks no longer needed to be a Hollywood studio, or even particularly competent, to record. It led people to experiment with the new technology, seemingly with little concern for whether anyone beyond their immediate audience would ever see their tapes.Which brings us back to the McDonald’s training video. It had no credits, so Prueher and Pickett couldn’t track down the actors. But when a fan recognized Chris the janitor in a movie trailer, the pair went to the movie to confirm, checked the credits, and reached out. It turns out the janitor, whose real name is Carson, had been running a candy factory about five blocks from their Brooklyn office for two decades. When we finally met him during the pandemic, I was actually wiping away tears, Prueher said. It was this completely full-circle moment.Gizmodo spoke with Prueher about the enduring appeal of analog video, the disappearance of physical media, and the unearthed old gems that they feel deserve an audience. My buddy Joe and I have been friends since we were 10, and we started collecting VHS tapes and doing running commentary to entertain ourselves. What was showing up in thrift stores in the early ’90s wasn’t movies. It was potty-training tapes for parents, Hair Club for Men videos, or a Mr. T educational video. In 2004, we making a documentary and ran out of money, so we thought: What if we took our favorite VHS moments out of the living room and into a theater? For 22 years now, that’s been our job: touring the country doing a guided comedy tour of our favorite moments from special-interest VHS tapes.Inside the VHS Tape Hunting ProcessOne thing we don’t like to do is manipulate the videos too much, because they’re funny on their own. It’s more about the context we put them in, how we set them up, and what we observe. I’ll go through and digitize a tape and just watch it. I try not to fast-forward because you might miss something. Maybe somebody smacks their lips a lot, and suddenly you think, What if I put together all the lip smacks? There are things I gravitate toward. Anytime there’s a celebrity, anytime they’re rapping and shouldn’t be. I’m partial to puppets.Yeah, and we get our hands dirty. We don’t take any videos from the internet. We’re at thrift stores while we’re on the road or at estate sales, finding VHS tapes we’ve never seen before. When we’re touring, we spend our days doing that, and at night we do the show in Boise or Cincinnati or wherever. When I’m home, I’ll go to an estate sale occasionally or take a little road trip to look for tapes.David Cross once gave us a tape from 1985 of mostly men in sweaters doing 90-second pitches to potential mates for a video-dating service. It had very low distribution, and we always wondered if there was a version with women seeking men. We researched the credits and found the guy who made it living in Burbank.