In Praise Of “Clue,” the VHS Savior

Will Leitch
·Editor

%photo13% Over at Movieline, writer Dixon Gaines gives a little love to "Clue," which was released 25 years ago today. "Clue" might seem a strange movie to celebrate, but we're totally with him: "Clue" is a silly little movie whose influence is often understated, if not completely forgotten.

Now, we're not ready to go as far as Mr. Gaines, who calls it "one of my favorite movies of all time." (Somebody get that guy a Red Box subscription.) But a few years ago, we were talking with a friend of ours about movies that we watched incessently when we were kids. "Superman II." "The Empire Strikes Back." "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." And: "Clue." When we said, "Clue," our friend jumped. "I thought I was the only one who watched that movie all the time. I think I wore out our VCR with that." Curious, we went around and asked as many people in our age group -- generally, 28-38 -- as we could find and were stunned to discover just how many people watched "Clue" over and over and over on VHS. It's one of those stealth seminal movies.

The movie is fun, if not particularly good; Tim Curry has a grand time as the butler, but everyone else is pretty much vamping and camping around. (Though Lesley Ann Warren might have been our first movie crush.) The movie was most well-known in theaters for having three alternate endings, with different ones for each print; it is possible that Topeka moviegoers saw a different film than those in Albuquerque. Most people never saw it that way, because the film was a disappointment at the box office. But on VHS, which had all three endings, it found new life.

We have a theory about this. We think it went big on VHS -- and lives on today -- because it was one of the first movies that was sold on VHS for less than the ridiculous $99.99 price. (Remember when VHS movies used to cost that much? And here we are, worried about Netflix Streaming.) But because "Clue" was such a flop in theaters, it was discounted down to $19.99, which is why our parents owned it and why, we suspect, so many parents across the country owned it. This was still early on in the VCR process, and "Clue" became the "hey, I have a VCR, I should own a movie!" movie. This, strangely, kind of made it do for the VCR what "The Matrix" did for DVDs: It became the movie that helped mainstream a new technology.

This is just a theory, but we believe it to be a sound one. So happy 25th birthday, "Clue." Below, one ambitious YouTube denizen's top 25 moments from "Clue."

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Flames On The Side Of My Face: Clue Celebrates Its 25th Anniversary [Movieline]