VHS, VCDs, and Laserdiscs in Southeast Asia

You can buy a vhs cleaner that accepts some alcohol and then fast forwards and rewinds through the tape. The alcohol would soak into a sponge bit and wipe the tape.

At least this is my recollection.

Memory unlocked, incredible. I just clearly remembered doing this to re-record some stuff.

At the VHS dub house I worked, each of the recorders would be taken down once a month to have all of the rollers, head drum, and other parts of the tape path that made contact with the tape cleaned by hand by the engineering department. In the head end where the masters were played, we'd do the same thing on the master playback equipment at the beginning of each shift and possibly more frequently if the masters were of less quality or really old. The 1" machines were easy to clean, but the cassette formats were more difficult in having to pull the units out of the racks, remove the cover, blah blah.

At least this is my recollection. <shivers/> the really bad ol' days

Memory partially valid.

An important part of using a head cleaning tape was to use play mode, not FF or RW. Only play (or record) modes would have the tape wrapped around the head while FF/RW would disengage the tape completely from the head. This is done to save head wear, and to help prevent magnetizing the head.

(Except on examples like this weird, late-model Sony deck I have: On it, the tape is always engaged with the head from the time it is inserted to the time it is ejected. And the head itself is "self-cleaning.")

They are talking about a winder that cleans a tape, not a tape that cleans a player.

I guess I see that now. I didn't have any idea that such a thing existed.

Why would someone want to clean a VHS tape? It's full of data, and it's deliberately lubricated.

The same reason you may need to clean anything. A tape may get dirty any number of ways. It's a physical object that can get dust and dirt inside if it's ever exposed to a dirty environment. And you don't want to put a dirty tape into a player.