RIP VCR: As Cassette Players Go the Way of the Dodo, a Rewind of Memories Good and Bad

— -- Don’t adjust your monitor -- you’re reading this right: the VCR is dead. Or, it’s soon to be.

For those of you who may have fond -- or not-so-fond -- memories of the video cassette recorder, today is a day to feel old and wallow in VCR nostalgia that younger generations will only experience through stories of the device that changed TV viewing habits for those who had been at the mercy of broadcast schedules.

First a bit of background.

The last VCR is set to be produced in Japan by the end of the month, according to the BBC. A company called Funai Electric -- which has been producing VCRs for 33 years -- will cease production, the BBC reported, citing the Japanese newspaper Nikkei.

VCRs were the way videos were watched at home before DVDs and streaming video services reigned supreme.

Funai produced only 750,000 units last year, which sounds like a lot, but when compared to the 15 million units per year that it reportedly sold at the technology’s peak popularity, isn’t all that much.

While few -- if any -- people will be nostalgic about the picture quality that VCRs produced, here are a few experiences that will ring nostalgic, if not be missed.

Going to the video rental store, only to find your film was rented out

This may come as a shock to those under the age of, say, 20, but before we could dial up a full-HD video in a matter of seconds, videos had to be acquired in physical form.

For many, this involved convincing your parents or an older friend with a car to drive you to stores where you paid to borrow a video.

The abject disappointment of spending hours convincing someone to drive you to the store, only to find out that the film you were dying to see was rented out is a soul-crushing experience that today’s teenagers -- with their smart TVs and streaming movie accounts -- will never know.

Tracking, cleaning tapes, and misaligned stickers

Unlike digital media -- like DVDs and streaming video -- analog media wasn’t always the sharpest.

A common issue with older tapes was a sort of distorted picture that required you to manually adjust your VCR’s “tracking” -- usually done by turning a knob on the front of the device.

Tracking knob wasn’t doing much to improve the picture quality? You might have needed a cleaning tape. Dust and other grime collecting in a VCR could distort playback, requiring users to purchase a special tape that wiped clean the play heads -- the components that read the tape.

Finally, another common complaint -- especially among the perfectionists among us -- was the bad placement of stickers on the cover of cassettes. Misaligned cover art could drive some people absolutely crazy.

Rewinding tapes and skipping warnings

One experience that likely won’t be missed is the necessity of rewinding tapes. When films were finished they must be rewound.

Not rewinding was bad form, sort of like spitting gum on the sidewalk or leaving the toilet seat up. You probably didn’t want to date anyone who habitually didn’t rewind their tapes.

The aforementioned video brick-and-mortar rental shops often placed stickers on their cassettes that read: “Be Kind, Rewind." They were often misaligned.

Some VCR models automatically rewound the tape when the feature was over.

Perhaps there is one thing that analog media did better than digital, though. Back then, you could skip the FBI anti-piracy warnings and previews and there was nothing stopping you.

Whether it’s a DVD or a streaming video, advertising and warnings against piracy are often unskippable now.

Thinking that Betamax was better, and laserdisc was the future

Do you, in 2016, have a hipster friend who insists that vinyl “is just so much better than [insert streaming/download service of choice here]”?

This is not a new archetype. These people have existed for quite a while, and they used to be into something called “Betamax."

Betamax was a competing format that ultimately lost out to VHS as the dominant way of watching home video -- that and the fact that some people never got over the “format war” are all you really need to know about it.

These Betamax fans were closely related to another group of people: “Laserdisc” evangelists.

Laserdiscs looked quite a lot like DVDs but were about 12 inches in diameter, and many people were happy to tell you why they were the future.

Well, the future is now, and while laserdiscs may be passe, their progeny are flourishing in the form of DVDs and Blu-ray.

ABC News’ Matt Williams contributed to this report.