“For some, it’s reliving their childhood. “For some people, it’s just to collect,” Haug said. Why not just let the analog format fade into the dustbin of history? (Though VHS tapes do look better on cathode-ray tube TVs than you might remember.) After beating Betamax in the format wars, VHS was succeeded by multiple mediums: DVD, Blu-ray, 4K, streaming. Unlike with vinyl, no one can make a serious case that VHS has any superior technical qualities to its digital successors. Now collectors like Haug hunt for the best of them, amassing collections of hard-to-find titles, the Omaha World-Herald reported. (An search of “VHS movies” yielded more than 100,000 results.) VHS had a 20-year reign as the dominant home-video medium, and it left behind a lot of cassettes, the detritus of which is still washing up on the shores of thrift stores, record shops, garage sales, dumpsters, Craigslist, eBay. VHS is of course long past the point of its decline - in 2006, “A History of Violence” became the last major Hollywood film released on the format. People will pay a lot of money for those. The ultimate embodiment of this nostalgia, Haug said, will be when Disney decides to release its reboots of “Aladdin,” ″The Lion King” and “Dumbo” on home video in VHS clamshell packaging, a recreation of the objects that defined millions of childhoods. Netflix’s collector’s-edition DVD of the series “Stranger Things” looks like a VHS tape, complete with faded box art, disintegrating stickers and digitally imposed wear and tear - a tribute to physical media from the company that did the most to kill it. Walmart sells DVDs that come in the retro packaging of a VHS slipcase. Urban Outfitters isn’t the only one banking on the goldmine of nostalgic millennials. “They’re learning to pay high-dollar just because it’s vintage.”

“This newer generation is going to fork over way too much money for the stuff I’m paying pennies for,” said the 37-year-old.

Vhs clamshell template