My bootleg shelf hit 500 tapes on Saturday and I sat on the floor for an hour just staring at it

Henry Roberts · 2026-09-24T08:25:04.465009+00:00

So I finally counted everything on Saturday afternoon because my girlfriend kept joking that the wire rack in the garage was gonna collapse. Turns out I crossed 500 VHS and DVD-R rips sometime in the spring and never even noticed. The one that pushed me over was a flea market find in Bakersfield, a Chinese dub of Escape From New York where Snake's voice is this weird nasally guy who sounds nothing like Kurt Russell. I started collecting around 2016 with a cam rip of The Matrix a dude at work burned for me, and I honestly thought I'd stop at like 50. What got me was flipping through the shelf and seeing how many are garbage I'll never watch again, like three separate copies of the same Spanish-subtitled Batman tape. My rule used to be only weird dubs, but somewhere along the way I started grabbing anything with a handwritten label. I'm now at the point where I need to either get a bigger shelf or start trading some off. Do you guys have a cutoff number where a collection stops being fun and starts being a hoarding problem?

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My bootleg shelf hit 500 tapes on Saturday and I sat on the floor for an hour just staring at it | Bootleg Movie Nights - Talk Freely