I gently rubbed the head of the unit with a cotton swab, which then transferred black residue onto the cotton-clearly it was doing something. I went with a tall bottle of Blue Thunder 150 'video head cleaner' that I initially christened on a trip to Palm Springs. I have an old VCR in storage (for emergencies!), so I followed a simple YouTube tutorial on how to open and clean its heads with rubbing alcohol. I don't recall my father ever prying open our VCR with a screwdriver and treating the mechanisms with a bottle of Locker Room-I'm pretty sure there was a simple cassette cleaner you could pop in and let it automatically run a short cycle-but with every other poppers brand sold as 'VCR cleaner,' hell, it's gotta be good.
One of the most common aliases for poppers is 'video head cleaner,' for some reason.
