Back in the day before hard drives were abundant, tapes meant something. Now you can get one terabyte of space that's the size of your pinky finger. It wasn't easy dealing with tapes. Tapes cost money and didn't hold much data. We didn't even call it data back then. We called it "stuff." We were uncivilized back then. We've advanced a lot since those pre-dvr tdays.
Tapes were constantly getting taped over. Think about your hard drive. You've kept videos and then deleted them once you were sick of them. That's how it was. I just don't know how common it was for people to destroy their precious moments. If you're going to do it, at least hide the evidence. Redo the entire label or something. This poor kid is going to find that one day and realize the truth: he is unloved.