Indiana State Fair 2026 Photos, Part 2: The Year in VHS

Simulated video rental store with shelves devoted to the 1990s Disney VHS releases in the white cases. Movie candy lines the bottom shelf.

Remember when Disney released its movies on home video in those oversized white cases that were incompatible with VHS racks?

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover:

It’s that time again! The Indiana State Fair is an annual celebration of Hoosier pride, farming, food, and 4-H, with amusement park rides, cooking demos, concerts by musicians either nearly or formerly popular, and farm animals competing for cash prizes without their knowledge. My wife Anne and I attend each year as a date-day to seek new forms of creativity and imagination within a local context…

…and once again the most interesting exhibit was hosted in the Harvest Pavilion: “Rewind: A VHS Revival”. Same as last year’s tribute to LP cover art, the curators started with a simple premise — in this case, “Remember movies on videotape? Those were awesome!” — and didn’t tailor everything to Indiana specifically, so much as it hearkened toward ye olde American entertainment monoculture. They assembled a collection of simulated video-rental store shelves, videotape boxes, movie posters, painted recreations of posters and iconic images, a few educational sections about filmmaking, and so on. Their contributors offered some offbeat choices, so it wasn’t all just Spielberg and Star Wars.

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“Die Hard” in a Dolby Cinema

That scene in "Die Hard' where John McClane jumps off an exploding skyscraper roof with a fire hose tied around his chest.

David Addison takes time off from breaking the fourth wall to have fun breaking the other three.

I dug through my archives and checked: somehow this blog has existed for eleven years and I’ve never mentioned the original Die Hard is my all-time favorite movie. Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover, against my better judgment I subjected myself to the fifth, final, worst entry in the series. Later that same year I tried a new angle on an exhausted joke by presenting my argument that Die Hard 2 is a Christmas movie — in some respects more Christmassy than the first one. But I’ve never simply devoted an entry to the one that started it all and begat an entire subgenre: “Action Films That Are Die Hard on/in a Something”.

At long last I have an excuse to bring it up: two weeks ago the powers-that-be at Fox put it back in theaters just in time for the Christmas season, presumably to celebrate its 35½th birthday in January. I almost never attend repertory showings of films that I could rent or buy. Not counting Disney re-releases during my childhood, my complete Every Repertory Showing Ever adulthood list is short: Aliens, My Fair Lady, Hitchcock’s Mr. and Mrs. Smith, North by Northwest, and Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. Also, I attended all of those in the 20th century. Now I can add an old film this century: DIE HARD.

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