Graded Houdini (1953) VHS, because I'm a nut

Some of you may be aware that there is currently a wild collectors market for sealed and graded VHS tapes. A sealed and graded Back To The Future made headlines when it sold for $75,000 at auction in 2022. I recently took a deep dive into the 1991 release of Houdini (1953) on VHS. This was inspired by my buying a still-sealed copy on eBay. I paid $9.00, less than it cost in 1991.

On a whim, I decided to have my Houdini VHS professionally graded by CGC. Here's the result:

Not a bad grade! If you're wondering why this didn't grade even higher, know that companies downgrade for stickers that obscure the cover art. Removing all stickers will get you a better grade. But, for me, the stickers are what tell this story. Houdini was part of Paramount Home Video's 1991 wave of sell-through releases at $14.95. The stickers show this copy is from that first wave. If the idea is to freeze a VHS in time, you gotta freeze the stickers as well!

Now, I am under no illusions that this is valuable or will ever become valuable. In fact, any deal I got on eBay is now out the window. But I love this movie and I thought this was a fun way to honor it and make it as important as any other tape from the VHS era. Maybe it's worthless, but the movie is priceless. And it displays well.

I highly recommend watching this video from one of my favorite YouTube channels, Red Letter Media. It's all about the VHS grading and the collecting phenomena and their own very funny experiment.

By the way, their Nukie ended up selling for $80,600. Now that's wild!

Related:

• When Houdini (1953) came home
• When The Man From Beyond came home
• The Great Houdinis at home