Exactly. The same method I use to clean old sticky splice remains when improper tape was used for splicing. It happens in audio and video tapes, when instead of professional splicing tape consumer Scotch was used. And in other cases when spot cleaning is needed (jam on tape for example :) Better a bit damaged magnetic coating than sticky gunk on heads. But it is spot cleaning, not entire tape.

I've had to clean off many examples of gooey splice adhesive from reels of audio tape. To remove it without making matters worse can take a lot of time and patience. There are no shortcuts. You have to temporarily wet these spot areas. Everything is slowed down. Impatient types need not apply. But because it's localised you are only wetting a small area at a time and humidity leading to mold can be contained. Wetting in itself is only a problem if the tape remains wet or damp. But if tapes getting wet even for a very short time was a death sentence, flood disaster recovery would not be possible. Specs Bros and others prove that with quick response, expertise and the right equipment, many but not all flooded tapes can be saved.

Oxide coated tapes such as VHS and Betamax are much more likely to survive flooding than later Metal tapes because the oxide is already oxidised and relatively stable. Whereas pure metal tapes cannot survive water immersion for long because the special thin protective coating preventing metal oxidation cannot survive the water immersion for long. Also these tiny tapes can be very thin and even a little mold can act like glue which results in tearing the tape apart when played. MP and ME tapes can have special issues. As usual, prevention (good storage) is better. It really is worth reading the online Specs Bros articles.

http://www.specsbros.com/

I did end up posting the capture of that Gulliver's Travels EPK that had a ton of mold on it, reminder photos attached to this post. Parts 1 and 2 are actually from that same tape, but they had a set of color bars in between the parts, so I originally thought the content was over when first seeing those color bars.

Just as a reminder, the cleaning was done with isopropyl alcohol and a modified VHSisLife machine.

I didn't do any AVIsynth enhancement outside of deinterlace/crop/upscale in one step. This was a regular U-Matic tape (not SP), but I can't imagine how it could have looked much better on U-Matic SP which would have had a significant resolution boost spec-wise.

Here are the captures:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVv1fbj68VQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oW3GHi_7RFA

I don't have time to watch any of that, but from a cursory preview, you've done a great job at capturing and encoding.

:salute:

I wish more Youtube videos looked like that.

A bit of an update. I took them to be professionaly cleaned and the person there said that they fear they will rip during cleaning. Apparently beside the mold thre is a lot of smoke dirtiness too. So now I am at square one, I guess the only option to get anything off of this is to buy a sacrificial VHS and transfer video with that.