Walkerdine's ‘Video Replay’ paper analysing a working-class family's reactions to watching a video of Rocky II was pathbreaking: it underlined power relations implicit in participant observation, challenged the differential between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture and developed a framework for understanding viewers' engagement with film. The paper also makes a transcript of the video-viewing available for subsequent analysis. This commentary rereads the transcript in the light of the contemporary context and my affective responses to the material. The reading draws attention to identifications at play among family members, film characters and researcher, as well as to the ways this family's establishing a harmonious domestic scene allowed violent material to be viewed in relative safety. Fantasy is perceived as having constitutive effects. This reading moderates some of the deterministic implications of focusing primarily on signification.