The author, John Marek, is executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
I watched an excellent little movie called “Freaks” on Netflix the other night. It was a sci-fi/horror mashup about a little girl who is locked up in a dilapidated house by her seemingly crazy father. It’s the sort of movie I always enjoyed “discovering” on a dusty shelf back in the days when I had to leave the house and drive all the way to Blockbuster to rent a movie. These days, anyone with a smartphone has access to virtually every movie ever made at the touch of a button. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe it’s not. The volume of programming on services such as Netflix and Hulu is so vast I often waste an inordinate amount of time parsing the options and don’t get around to watching any of them.
All this got me thinking about olden times when a trip to the video store was a social event, and the watchwords of the day were “Be Kind, Rewind.”
My first exposure to the idea of home video was in the early ’80s. I’m not sure of the exact year, but I remember that I was home from college on break, and my mother was watching one of her afternoon soaps. The plotline involved a date in which the characters stayed in and watched “Casablanca” on their home VCR. “Sheesh,” I thought. “Like anybody could ever do that in real life.”
A few years later, I was working an internship in the town of Norwalk, Ohio, and a new video store opened with great fanfare. I stopped in to check it out and was amazed to find that they had HUNDREDS of movies available to rent. Of course, you had to have a player, which I did not, but they had a special deal where you could rent the player and three movies for the weekend for $10. Now, a 10-spot was a pretty fair chunk of change for a lowly intern in 1985, but I treated myself to a weekend film fest featuring “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” “The Flamingo Kid” and “The Funhouse.” The fact that I remember those titles 35 years later should indicate how big a deal it was.
My first video player was a clearance Betamax which, for those of you a little less “seasoned,” was a failed competitor to the more familiar VHS tape format. By that point, Beta had pretty much lost the battle and pre-recorded tapes in that format were hard to find, but that was okay since I wanted it to record my favorite TV shows and watch them when my erratic work schedule allowed.
The ’90s were the golden age of video stores, from shoestring mom-and-pop startups with maybe a hundred titles to behemoth chain stores that featured 1,000 options or more. The granddaddy of the latter was Blockbuster, and for a few years around the turn of the century, it seemed like there was one on every corner. Friday night was traditionally movie night, and I would stop almost every week and pick up a tape – later a DVD – and a pizza at the Dominos next door.
By the end of the decade, though, Netflix’s video-by-mail service, Redbox’s video kiosks and a nascent streaming economy had driven all but a handful of Blockbusters out of business. Today, the only store remaining – in Bend, Ore. – is as much a tourist attraction as a functioning video outlet.
Like our other cherished memories, we tend to remember the good things about video stores – the sense of discovery, the community hangout, the feeling of accomplishment when you got the movie you came for – but forget long lines, picked-over selection, late fees and, yes, rewinding. All things being equal, I prefer Netflix, but that doesn’t mean I can’t wax nostalgic about carrying around a stack of tapes the size of pavers and plopping my hard currency down on that blue and yellow counter.