I smell this photo.
The ex Blockbuster employee in me hates the barcode on here.
It’s a rental so it should start with 33 not 39
It has no copy number either, would likely be 001, 101, or 601.
I have had this EXACT reaction to seeing this meme before.
I miss video stores, for sure. Blockbuster itself wasn’t great but it was so omnipresent in our lives that it has become shorthand for “video stores” the way Band-Aids are shorthand for adhesive medical strips. Often, when people reminisce about “Blockbuster,” it isn’t really about Blockbuster itself but just the culture of the rental store as it existed back then.
Getting out of the house in a time before I could drive, get some candy, one of the big hit movies, 2-3 of the old release movies.
Not paying for any of it.(This is the part where being a kid matters)
Actually physically interacting with stuff instead of just flipping on netflix.
We lost something as a species.
Imagine having the time and energy to drive over to a building, park, mosey on in and wander around looking at what you might want to spend another 3 hours engaging with.
We didn’t have endless-scroll dopamine machines in our pockets so we had to go out in the world and seek it out. Boredom bred creativity. It really was a better time in a lot of ways.
I go to the library to borrow movies, still fun.
Imo having film nerd employees to talk to and ask recommendations from was half the appeal of video stores. Yes, even Blockbuster.
Same, but I check out a lot of video games. It’s the same feel. I know it’s that I miss the pre-9/11 world. I don’t care. The library crowd is funny enough the dispensary crowd and the coffee shop crowd we all just kinda have the same haunts.
Huh, I should ask the dispo if they mind me busking while I sell tamales out front (I could go through a few hundred bucks of tamales real fast. Not like that I’m a shitty salesman I’m just hungry)
I legit think streaming sites have become worse than video rental places.
It seemed like a big advantage that you could have unlimited number movies on a streaming site while a video rental store had limited shelf space. But it turns you you have to scroll through endless pages of crap to try to find something you actually want to watch.
Also the shops would eventually have any movie you want to watch. With streaming sites many things will never appear there because the corporation that owns the movie owns their own streaming site and will keep it exclusive to them. In the past it wasn’t a thing where you’d have to keep track of which video rental shop had the rights to rent the movie you want to watch.
There was a time when it was just Netflix and pretty much anything would come on there eventually. That killed video rental. But it’s been a long time since you could find everything on one streaming site, and it’s gotten to be more expensive and time consuming to find a good movie to watch, so going to a video rental shop might actually make more sense now. But they’re all gone now.
Luckily there are websites with dubious legality you can find everything on. I’m willing to pay for a streaming site that’s actually convenient, but they don’t exist anymore, just like Blockbuster.
Could you imagine if, idk Paramount or whoever, started releasing exclusively through Blockbuster?
Ironically back when video stores existed, no major distributor would box themselves in like that. The only Blockbuater exclusive movies would be modestly-budgeted things released through one or two smaller studios with ties to Blockbuster itself.
This shit is cutting a little too deep tonight, homies.
Everything to do with nostalgia over Blockbuster is just comical. It was such a shit home movie rental store. The place was the McDonalds of video stores…
The entire appeal of McDonald’s is being predictable. It’s mediocre but you know what you’re getting and it’s appealing to a lot of people. In that way, Blockbuster being McDonald’s is true — but also explains why it’s preferable to streaming in some ways. They had a limited selection but that selection didn’t change and you knew pretty reliably what kind of movies they would be carrying.
I just remember it being really expensive. I think it was $4 to rent? Plus the looming potential late fees. Whatever it was, at the time it seemed like a fortune. So you couldn’t really fuck around and rent “Mansquito 2: Womansquito” just for laughs because it really was a huge ripoff when a movie sucked, or was damaged, or something. Also the popular movies were never in stock. They would put hundreds of empty boxes on the shelves to make it seem like it was there, but the actual tapes were always gone.
To continue your analogy, the place didn’t have the Mansquitos, it was nothing but the tent pole movies.
The mom and pop shops that Blockbuster drove out of business had all the unusual and hard to find stuff.
I was mad when they got rid of our local Video Zone. That place had the best ridiculous horror movies. Blockbuster had only the most middle of the road bullshit.
This was my experience. There was a local video rental place we used to go to that later sold out to Blockbuster, and everything just got far worse when they did.
I loved blockbuster but I was definitely a child who probably didn’t know better
I really hated going there
blockbuster = 1) be excited going to blockbuster for an awesome movie; 2) spend 45 minutes looking for an awesome movie; 3) getting fed up and settling for something that doesn’t look quite as stupid as everything else
So basically same as Netflix, except now there’s no excitement and you can stay safe and depressed in your house instead of going outside
Netflix doesn’t even have anything to settle on these days. I canceled my sub years ago and I’ve missed absolutely nothing.
And each extra person along increased the time it took by 20 minutes
Blockbuster was meh. I missed my local movie rental joint that was next to a Chinese take-out.
Used to be a ritual every other Friday for the spouse and I to order food than walk around the video store well we waited. We used to walk past the weird obscure tapes and come up with fake silly stories about what they were about and look at the goofy covers. Most times we’d rent something unexpectedly good, typically not from the new releases. I never really watch TV sitcoms, so I consumed most of my media this way. The magic was that multi-million dollar media companies didn’t pick what was available on their stream. The selection at the video store was more eclectic and not some sterile selection of just money makers. So I got to see some really good, not so popular, films.
Also they still had VHS when Blockbuster converted DVD and fairly sure they bought all the old VHS tapes from that conversion. DVDs were still fairly new, so I only had a VCR. Yes, I rewound the tapes.
I don’t know if it’s different in the US but in Germany the local movie rental joints were usually split into a family and an adult section. I was always interested in horror and violent movies but to get to them you also had to go through all the really nasty porn movie shelves with the weird old dudes browsing them. I mean I like porn as well but these stores had really disgusting stuff…
That’s weird. In America all the porn stuff was hidden behind a black curtain in a dark room in the back lol.
While your country seems very tense with nudity and alcohol, Germany was very tense with violence and weapons.
Eg there were usually special German versions of video games where blood and gore are removed. E.g. the special forces in Half Life are robots in the German version. The pedestrians in Carmageddon are also robots. I believe BioShock has certain animations removed. Wolfenstein has the Nazi symbols removed and at computer markets they only showed the Christmas edition where you fought against snowmen.
Movies also exist in a German cut where e.g. RoboCop has like 15 minutes removed.
Many movies where also “forbidden” and could not be advertised and I believe only sold if explicitly asked for by a customer.
The whole situation has relaxed lately, I believe shortly after it was easy to obtain international version via the Internet.
I’m glad Germany realized censoring fictional violence is lame
Yes, the 1980s/90s me misses Blockbuster. But not today’s me. I don’t need to make another stop before the grocery store to pay $20 in today’s money to borrow 2-3 movies to watch, only to have to return them tomorrow or pay a late or not rewound fee, then argue with the kids about overpriced candy.
We were so starved for things to do pre-internet, pre-cable, pre-netflix, video rental was like crack.
If you opened up a new one today where you could just take your phone around to a movie and scan a QR code to have it beamed to your streaming stick when you go home, no one would want it.
Recommendations used to be better. There was a sweet spot for a few years where Netflix had everything and I could talk to the rental clerk about what we were watching, and I miss that. But video stores were too pricy to miss
Blockbuster had gotten so monopolistic and predatory by the time Netflix was mailing DVDs that I was thrilled to end my membership with them.
The latter for me. I remember thinking as a kid that things would just keep getting better. That the best time to be a kid was always the future. Now I’m glad I was a kid when I was and I wish kids today had it better than they do. I’m sure that’s at least 50% old guy viewpoint but I really think some lines have been crossed that truly make childhood in the 2020s harder than it used to be.
I do miss renting games, but in hindsight those games often kind of sucked specifically because they were still on the arcade model of difficulty 🤷♂️
Wait, what? The video game rentals had a set level of difficulty that couldn’t be changed in the menu or something?
No, the difficulty of games of that era was just a function of necessity.
Not only did you have hardware limitations, games were deliberately designed to take longer that a typical rental period to beat, the goal being to get kids to either rent it again or have their parents buy it.
So while an arcade game is designed to eat quarters, the console games of the 80’s and 90’s were designed not to be fun so much as they were designed to be too difficult to beat in a weekend.
That’s one thing when it’s a game like Donkey Kong Country, it’s another thing when a platformer is designed to cause a bunch of deaths and game overs with required leaps of faith or whatever.
No. Almost all of them were normal, unmodified retail copies.
