Headcanons - Retro Technology
Amongst Chase's most valuable possessions, something he's carried with him since he first arrived in Los Angeles - a small collection of cassette tapes. He has no way to play them now, but they're remnants from his teenage years in the late 90s and early 2000s, all recorded by himself on a tape deck. They're monologues from plays (or, sometimes, dialogues, playing both parts), Shakespearean soliloquies, film scenes, poems, excerpts from favourite books, even a few songs from musicals. They're potential audition pieces, or ways to practice voice and character, or just beloved scenes that stuck with him; they're a remnant of the optimism of youth.
Chase was born in the mid-80s. An older millennial, he grew up with VHS and has distinct memories of DVDs being introduced for the first time (he even remembers watching a few films on LaserDisc!). There's a lovely nostalgia to them, the quality of the image, the sensory memory of opening the old clamshell packaging, the weird nostalgia for the advertising when he recorded movies off TV to watch later, and while he doesn't have a VCR, his parents still have one, and a decent-sized VHS collection.
Vinny is mostly… deeply bemused by them. Born in 1998 after the very first introduction of DVDs in the US a year earlier, VHS was something he mostly considered to be an outdated format, and even DVDs took a quick back seat to Blu-rays (which were introduced in 2006, when he was eight). Even now, though, he's starting to find that DVDs and Blu-rays are becoming somewhat nostalgic, and he sorely misses the extras that used to come with DVDs and that have been largely dropped with the advent of streaming. They're odd and contrasting types of nostalgia the two of them have (and Chase tends to really feel that thirteen-year age difference when Vinny says he has no idea how to use a VCR!), both marked by the times they grew up in.
One of Vinny's great nostalgic loves, however, far older than VHS, is for the old celluloid reels. Al has a big collection of historic films, carefully and lovingly preserved to protect them to the best of his ability from the menaces of sunlight and moisture, and kept in a fireproof (celluloid is extremely flammable!) and climate-controlled room in Al's mansion. Vinny used to love it in there; when he was younger, Al would carefully introduce him to the reels, show him how to handle them properly and safely, both for his own protection and to protect the reels. Once, when Al is overseas, Vinny dares to bring Chase over; they spend an afternoon lovingly exploring the archives, the weight of Hollywood history made tangible.
