The writing’s been on the wall for a long time now. Physical media is going away. It happened nearly 10 years ago with music. MP3’s drove a stake into the heart of CD’s. It took a while for movies to catch up. DVD’s held so much more information than a song track and bandwidth wasn’t fast enough to transfer the size of files a digital movie required. All of that’s changed now.
This past month, we witnessed a major step towards the end of all physical media. Blockbuster video, the oftentimes despised nationwide video rental chain has closed their doors forever. Judging by the reactions on social media, it was a joyous occasion for most. The endless late fees, coupled with poor customer service and an anemic video selection of mass market titles made it obvious years ago that Blockbuster’s days were numbered.
What Video Rental Stores Used to be Like
My memories of renting videos are much different from the experience a big rental store like Blockbuster (or Hollywood video – remember them?) offered. As a kid, we didn’t own a VCR. If we did well on our grades or for other special occasions, we would go to the corner video store and each get to pick out a VHS movie (we thankfully missed the early Beta craze). Along with our video rentals, we would also rent a VHS player to be able to watch them on our TV back at home. Not having gone to a lot of movies in the theater, home video seemed miraculous back then. Just being able to watch The Empire Strikes Back after it had left the theaters was worth it alone.
Later in High School, DVD’s hit and the back catalogs of older films became easier to find. We spent a summer watching nearly all 100 films from the AFI’s Top 100 Best Films of All Time list. We owned a DVD player by then and even had surround sound installed (a big deal at the time). It was almost like being in the theater.
But the best thing of all was going to the video store to find something to rent. We’d walk the aisles for hours, uncovering all kinds of bizarre films we didn’t even know existed. The pulpy DVD covers of the late 70’s and early 80’s were magical. You could get lost on the horror aisle where every cover promised a night of terror and dismemberment. Every science fiction cover showed a new unexplored world, with many of the covers actually being more interesting than the film itself.
A Bittersweet Goodbye
So why am I not joining in the shouts of joy over Blockbuster’s demise? On the one hand, we now have many great films available on demand and in HD to be played whenever you want. On the other hand, we’ve lost access to a lot of great films that were only available on VHS or DVD. For all the great things about Netflix, its streaming catalog is still shallow.
I think about an amazing independent video store like Scarecrow Video in Seattle who is on the verge of going out of business and I worry about all of the great undiscovered titles that we won’t have access to anymore. Unless you’re looking for a movie less than 6 months old and very mainstream, Redbox won’t have it either.
I wouldn’t know about some of my all-time favorite movies if it weren’t for video rental stores. So it’s a bittersweet goodbye, not because I loved Blockbuster but because it represents an end of a memory. Will we be able to access all of these old and hard-to-find titles one day on-demand? I hope so, but for now, Blockbuster was one of the last places where you could discover something you’d never heard of before and actually hold it in your hands.