Dead media is alive and well in my house.

My husband, Brian, and I have an affinity for various types of discontinued and outdated media from the 1970s and 1980s. It’s everything from 8-tracks and LaserDiscs to VHS tapes and retro video game consoles.

There’s something fun about revisiting old media from your childhood or experimenting with now-obsolete technology that was popular before you were born.

I want to highlight some of my old media as a way to celebrate Dead Media Day, which is October 12 at Ann Arbor District Library’s downtown location.

The inaugural event pays homage to retro media, entertainment, and ephemera, and features vendors selling vintage and rare items.

It will also have exhibits, hands-on demonstrations, and crafts for fans who want to step back in time and honor all things old and once forgotten.

Here’s a look at five types of dead media that continue to thrive in the Stratton household.

8-tracks

When I was a kid, my parents had an 8-track player on the top shelf of their bedroom closet. I always remember it being broken, so I didn’t hear music from an 8-track player until 2014.

That year, Brian bought me a red portable Panasonic "Swiss cheese" 8-track player and a few 8-tracks to play in it. I remember putting Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours into the player and hearing one of my favorite albums in a different format.

While it didn’t sound great, it was fascinating to experience the album in a new way and click through its four different tracks. After that, I scoured the 8-track bins at record stores and antique shops and assembled a small collection of them.

Every now and then, I’ll pull out an 8-track album by The Band, Billy Joel, Black Sabbath, John Denver, or Genesis and pretend I’m listening to it for the first time. There’s always a chance one of them won’t work, but most of them usually do.

LaserDiscs

I used to see LaserDiscs for sale at Musicland, Record Town, and Suncoast when I would go to Twelve Oaks Mall in Novi during the 1980s and 1990s. I jokingly called them "giant record-CDs" and wondered what it was like to watch a movie or concert that way.

I didn’t know anyone with a LaserDisc player back then and didn’t think much of it until 2014. I was looking for a physical copy of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk documentary on eBay, and all I could find was a LaserDisc version.

I could watch that documentary on YouTube, but I also wanted to get a physical copy since it hadn’t come out on VHS or DVD. I found a LaserDisc copy, but couldn’t use it since I didn’t have a player.

That Christmas, Brian gave me a LaserDisc player as a present, and I was finally able to watch the Tusk documentary. The disc still worked well, and I got a chuckle out of having to flip the disc to watch the other half of the show.

To me, LaserDiscs felt like a cross between a record and a CD. Once again, I visited local record stores for LaserDiscs and found several at the old Encore Records location on Liberty Street.

I picked up copies of The Band’s The Last Waltz, King Crimson’s Three of a Perfect Pair: Live in Japan, The Police’s Around the World, and First Knight. All of the LaserDiscs are in excellent shape and play well after all these years.

Plus, our LaserDisc player also plays CDs, so it’s fun to see that giant tray open and close once you put a CD in the middle of it.

VHS Tapes

The first VHS tape my family ever bought was Top Gun. My brother Steve was a fan of the film and wanted a copy to watch at home.

In the 1980s, VHS copies of “new” films cost $80 each and weren’t the most economical piece of media to buy. We watched our VHS copy of Top Gun a few times, but it mostly sat in our storage cabinet along with assorted BASF, Memorex, and TDK VHS tapes that had been rerecorded many times.

However, our rerecorded VHS tapes were like mixtapes in a way. They featured episodes of random TV shows, clips of artist interviews and performances, and movies recorded off of TV or cable. One tape might have an episode of Growing Pains, a Tiffany performance from American Bandstand, and a TV recording of Animal House.

The best part was putting an old VHS tape into the VCR and seeing what footage remained after the previous recordings had run out. Old videos from MTV’s Top 20 Video Countdown and random scenes from movies like Crocodile Dundee and Clue would appear.

The only VHS tapes I owned back then were Fleetwood Mac In Concert: Mirage Tour ’82, Stevie Nicks: I Can’t Wait video compilation, and Stevie: Live at Red Rocks. I didn’t buy my first VHS movie, Twister, until 1996. I had wanted to start a VHS movie collection back then, but never got there. Maybe it’s time to revisit starting that collection.

In the meantime, I still have several of those rerecorded VHS tapes in my basement and like to pull one out and watch it for nostalgic reasons.

Sega Genesis

We have a bunch of old game consoles in our house, ranging from the Atari 2600 to the Sega Genesis to the PlayStation.

I have fond memories of the Sega Genesis from childhood, especially because my brother Steve and I would play games like Ghouls ‘N Ghosts and Altered Beast.

I could never beat Ghouls ‘N Ghosts, or any video game for that matter, but I remember watching Steve and my dad get frustrated while playing it.

The game was a challenge because once your character died, you had to start over at the beginning. There wasn’t a way to save your progress and return to your prior spot in the game.

When we got the Sega Genesis in 1989, it felt like we were on the cutting edge of video game consoles. The interface and graphics were better than games for the NES or Atari 2600.

We continued to add other Sega Genesis games to our collection until the PlayStation came out in 1994. By that time, Steve and I were both in college, so most of the Sega Genesis video games remained at home.

Years later, Brian and I raided Steve’s old bedroom closet at my parents’ house and took several Sega Genesis games home. Luckily, Brian still has his Sega Genesis, and we sometimes play Ghouls ‘N Ghosts or Altered Beast for old times’ sake.

Capacitance Electronic Disc

In 2022, we visited an antique store in Manistee and found a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe on a capacitance electronic disc, or CED.

It was the second time we had found one of those CEDs, but we were still fascinated with it and bought it. The first CED we had purchased was a copy of a Mick Fleetwood documentary called The Visitor on eBay. I was searching for LaserDiscs, and coincidentally, discovered that particular CED.

The CED is an analog video disc playback system that RCA had developed and introduced in 1981 as SelectaVision. The video and audio can be played back on a TV using a special stylus and high-density groove system similar to records.

CEDs come in plastic caddies to protect them from moisture and dust. Any exposure to those elements causes the CED player’s stylus to jump back in a locked groove situation.

To play a CED, you load the plastic caddy into a CED player, so it can extract and play the disc using a stylus to decode the video and audio.

We don’t have a CED player, but I’d like to get one and try it out. This feels like a good time to start a new chapter with our dead media collection.

Lori Stratton is a library technician, writer for Pulp, and writer and editor of strattonsetlist.com.

Dead Media Day is at the Ann Arbor District Library, 343 South Fifth Avenue, Ann Arbor, on Sunday, October 12, from 11 am to 3 pm. Visit aadl.org/deadmediaday to see the lineup of events, vendors, and exhibits. The event is free.