Why I was never a Blockbuster Video kid
By Christopher West
Like any good Midwest parent in the late 1980s and early 1990s, my family went to our local video store for weekend entertainment. My experience as a kid was eerily similar to that of Homer Simpson and family in the episode Saturdays of Thunder.
The video store was a way for parents to get some time alone and send the kids downstairs to the Nintendo or the crappier VCR. Like Homer, my stepdad was an idiot. He was the guy renting Dorf on Golf, Ray Stevens Comedy Classics and ooh Navy Seals. We would also get a family film of some sort that I was forced to watch before playing whatever NES game I rented until 3 a.m.
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This was how I spent a lot of my weekends in my boring little town. You may ask, “Hey jackass. Why didn’t you go to the movie theatre” Well, even though our theatre only had one screen that was one more screen than we could afford.
We were drive-in folk. In layman’s terms that means less than. Where else could a child watch first run classics like Ernest Goes to Jail then fall asleep in the backseat after the opening credits of Joe Versus the Volcano. I never did find out if he beat that damn volcano.
Blockbuster Video was like a distant unattainable dream living in small town America. Nickelodeon would constantly tease and torture me with ads from Universal Studios, Toys R Us, Chuck E Cheese, and Blockbuster Video.
The closest I was getting to Chuck E. Cheese was if the local pizza owner named Chuck served me a pizza in a rat mask.
Where I come from, you rented your videos from the same place you ordered pizza or bought your groceries. We didn’t have the fancy video stores seen in Scream or Ghost World. What we had was more akin to what was presented in Serial Mom or Clerks.
It wasn’t a chain, or colorful, or even that clean for that matter. The posters weren’t framed or in some spectacle of moving lights. They were hung up with scotch tape. The VHS tapes came in yellowing plastic cases that smelled like cigarettes. The porn smelled like fresh rubbing alcohol. There was probably an arcade cabinet, or at least there was one in the bowling alley the place was attached to. In other words, this was no Blockbuster Video.
Things weren’t bright and shiny. The customers weren’t happy. They weren’t dressed in cool neon and faded denim with the haircuts of those horrible brothers on Home Improvement. There wasn’t an entire wall of Gremlins 2: The New Batch. There was one copy so you better get there when they opened or it was Curly Sue for you again.
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The Micro Machines guy wasn’t doing the voice over for the cheap local commercial that your store shot. Where was this video store I saw in the Blockbuster commercials that was straight out of a Noxzema ad or an episode of Saved by the Bell?
For me, it never existed. As a naive kid, I would see Blockbuster commercials on TV and wish I could go to what appeared to be the greatest place ever. I didn't live anywhere near one and would be 19 years old before I rented a video there.
When I moved Dayton in 2001, renting from Blockbuster was a big deal. It was still this mythical beast that I had yet to slay. Funny enough, they would start closing and downsizing around that time.
I had come too late. Most of the stores around here weren’t that big. Not like the ones I saw as a kid on TV.
Video stores were on their last leg. DVDs and TV box sets would be the swan song for most video stores. Netflix wasn’t here yet, but media was changing at a dramatic rate. We saw the complete decimation of the music industry to technological advances and the film industry was soon to follow.
Everything I dreamed of having as a kid video games, music, and films would soon be available at any moment. I grew up in the last generation of kids who actually paid for media. If you wanted something that wasn’t on the top of the charts or some classic film that meant ordering it and waiting a few weeks. Today none of us have the attention span for that.
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Between over-pricing and technological advances, the childhood I knew was gone. It’s hard to even imagine a world where media holds any value anymore. Can you imagine paying more than $20 for a CD at Sam Goody, $100 back in the day for a VHS, or a TV box set costing $200 or more?
As I wax poetic about the good old days it was probably better I didn’t have a Blockbuster full of thousands of movies. I had to actually take the time to find books and magazines or talk to the cool local store owner to find all the music and films that I would love as I branched out from my little village and cultivated my knowledge of pop culture.
P.S. Hollywood Video was better.
