From Make A Date to Manson TV: The weirdest new uploads to the Internet Archive's VHS Vault

By Randall Colburn | March 5, 2020 | 9:55pm

Aux Features VHS Vault

From Make A Date to Manson TV: The weirdest new uploads to the Internet Archive's VHS Vault

Photo: Koron

You probably know about the Internet Archive, an online library stuffed with digitized versions of old books, software, MS-DOS games, and more. It also has an epic catalog of movies, commercials, TV shows, and educational videos in its VHS Vault, which just ballooned thanks to a mysterious organization called the Vista Group. Vice first alerted us to this new deluge of ’80s and ’90s-era finds—now totaling nearly 500—and these new additions stack up well to the hub’s existing treasure trove of content, making it a true goldmine.

The VHS Vault, to be clear, already contained more than 20,000 ripped VHS recordings. That includes full seasons of old, relatively hard-to-watch relics like Salute Your Shorts, The Tom Green Show, That’s My Bush!, I’m With Busey, and the Sega Star Kids Challenge, as well as completely random shit like the the 1993 Royal Rumble, the first four Phantasm movies, Project ALF, a bunch of commercials from December of 1987, and, our personal favorite, Volcano: Fire On The Mountain, an ABC TV movie from 1997 starring Dan Cortese. What gifts!

What follows is the weirdest, funniest, most genuinely nostalgic stuff we found in the latest wave of uploads, which contains everything from exercise videos and PSAs to audio recordings, Cops compilations, and, weirdly, lots of Mormon content. No matter how strange it gets, latchkey kids who lived through the ’90s will no doubt feel the warmth that comes with that quiet hiss beginning each and every rip. It’s a sound we don’t hear much anymore, one that belongs to a bygone era.

Anyways, let’s not get too wistful, for what you’re about to see is some real garbage. Here are eight of our favorites.

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Manson TV (1998)

Speaking of which: The youth of today will never understand just how controversial Marilyn Manson was in the ’90s. Thankfully, this “heated half-hour” of the MTV special Manson TV—which host Carson Daly says will be a “battle of beliefs” between “believers and detractors”—helps illustrate just how strange and pearl-clutching the discourse was around the shock-rocker. The special also speaks to a few of the hilarious rumors about Manson at the time, such as him removing a rib so he could give himself a blowjob and throwing “bags full of drugs” into the crowds at his shows. Sadly, both are false.They really should’ve addressed the one about Manson on .