NeverarGreat said:

The fade-to-black doesn't actually fade to black on VLC for me. It just crosscuts with a green haze or skips some frames altogether. That's the unstable video I guess. But any other point where the frame is mostly black, such as the end of the title crawl, the image suddenly lightens to white. Why would that be?

The transfer from film to VHS way back in 77-78 was accomplished by a method that looks very much like time-compression. A good analogy would be transferring 24p film to 59.94i video by projecting the film on a wall at 24 frames per second and recording it with an NTSC video camera at 59.94 fields per second.

This process results in each and every frame being an average of several of its temporal neighbors.

In consequence, bright->dark shot-changes are blown-out and dark->bright shot-changes are crushed for the first few frames until the "average" events out to the overall brightness of the shot. Rinse, repeat.

Does this make any sense?

EDIT: Also, some shot-changes just go crazy. I imagine that this is due to the automatic gain circuitry in the VCR used to make the copy (remember: this tape is 2nd gen) from the master.