As some of you may remember, my family and I go to San Diego Comic-Con every year. This past year, Mr. Rosie and I were walking the Exhibit Hall floor when we came across a booth that was selling sealed VHS tapes. My husband is big into collecting sh-t and has picked up VHS tapes in good condition from flea markets and swap meets over the years. A few years ago, he bought one of those gazillion pound TV/VHS combos from the 1980s for like $25 on Facebook Marketplace, so he tries to get full use out of it. So, yeah, some of the prices for the VHS tapes at that booth were absolutely bonkers: I’m talking FOUR FIGURES for sealed copies of Back to the Future and Ghostbusters. I learned that day that just like you grade a coin or a comic book, you can also grade a VHS tape nowadays to figure out how much it’s worth.
All of this preamble brings us to Pete Davidson. Pete appeared on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon earlier this week to promote his upcoming SNL hosting gig this weekend. (Side note – and I ask this with all sincerity – but Pete was great on SNL in small doses. Do we really need an entire episode hosted by him being in every sketch?) Anyway, at the beginning of the interview, Jimmy asked Pete about one of his hobbies, which is probably the only thing that he and Mr. Rosie somewhat have in common: collecting VHS tapes.
It turns out that about three years ago, Davidson began collecting sealed VHS tapes, stemming from an instance when he was “really high one night,” and he began buying them up. But he does have a somewhat valid reason behind it.
“In 2026 it’ll be 20 years since the last VHS was made, right, so 20 years goes by, that’s enough time for people to be like, ‘Oh, that was cool, remember?’ like vinyl. So I bought all the sealed ones that exist. Like three to five thousand tapes.”
The crowd chuckled when Davidson mentioned his amount of tapes, so he said, “You guys sound like my mom, no one believes in me. No one believes in me!”
After Fallon showed some pictures of many, many packages arriving at Davidson’s assistant’s house (much to the chagrin of his assistant’s girlfriend), Davidson expanded on his plan, mentioning that sealed VHS tapes are now going for like $20,000 to $30,000 a pop.
He pointed to a recent sale of an original Rocky trilogy in sealed VHS tape form that went for a combined $53,750 at auction, with Rocky leading the way by pulling in $27,500.
“It’s my GameStop,” Davidson said excitedly. “Dude, I own all of them. No one believed in me.”
Although with any big investment there are some risks, in this case one being that only a select few of those 3,000-5,000 titles will actually be worth any money. If that does happen, Davidson has a much less enthusiastic plan C as well.
“If it doesn’t work, I’m gonna be on the road forever dude,” he said.
Look, some people invest in cars and houses, while others put their money in stocks and mutual funds. But, there is another huge community of nerds aficionados who invest in collectibles. It’s what Beanie Babies (whomp whomp) promised us, only it’s with old action figures, playsets, comic books, and now, VHS tapes, apparently. Trust me. I’ve seen people buy and sell these collectibles for an insane amount of money with my own eyes. It’s a thing. Pete’s just doing his Pete Thang, walking to the beat of his own drum with the VHS collecting. In a way, he’s more relatable to those of us who know nothing about investing in the stock market (but want to!). I can totally believe that he’s sitting on VHS tapes that are pretty valuable. If something is deemed to be “worth something,” there are no shortage of people who want to pay for it. Valuable nostalgia is a helluva drug.
Photos credit: Jennifer Graylock/INSTARimages, Darla Khazei/Avalon, screenshots from YouTube
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