Blockbuster: A Love Letter
I was born in 1997. Too late to be considered a “90’s Kid”, but a little too early to be considered a “millennial.” I was born in an era of change and the ever-evolving technological landscape of our turn of the century country. I was born into a middle-class family — I went to a decent school system, I was fed and clothed, but I didn’t have access to as many things as a kid as my classmates did. For one, fast food was a big deal — something we had on vacation or maybe once every couple of months. My little brother harbored a little resentment towards me because half his clothes were hand-me-downs from clothes I grew out of.
My family’s relationship with cable TV was like an on-and-off girlfriend — we had it for a year when I was 6 or 7, then my Dad got the sports package for a summer when I was 10, and we didn’t fully commit to it until I was in high school. Cable TV and access to all the good cartoons and made-for-TV movies was something only accessible at my grandparent’s house (it was heaven on Earth; I got all the junk food, soda, pizza and cartoons I could ever want). Boomerang, Cartoon Network, and Nickelodeon were staples at the grandparent’s, and my brother and I never wanted to leave. My grandfather was kind enough to tape shows on VHS and give them to us for home use — it wasn’t uncommon to see tapes in our houses that read “4 hours of Cartoons — Tom & Jerry, Scooby Doo, Pink Panther” along with other G-rated films.
Picking a movie from the library was always a gamble because the DVDs were treated horribly by other people — scratches, fingerprint smudges and dirt caused many of the DVDs to skip during viewing, ruining the whole night by ending it a lot sooner than we expected. That being said, my primary forms of entertainment were my GameBoy Advance, my PlayStation 2, public TV (which was hit-or-miss) and DVD rentals from the two main movie rental places we had in my hometown — Blockbuster Video and Movie Gallery.
Blockbuster was something new and exciting I could look forward to as a kid. My mood would spike when my parents would suggest a movie night. I’d hop in the car with my brother and Dad and we’d head down to Blockbuster, a place of magic and wonder. Shelves upon shelves of movies, TV shows, entire seasons of cartoons, all available to explore and see what was there or popular at the time. There was movie memorabilia, posters, action figures, video game rentals, used video games for sale, and box sets for movie night adventures (who else remembers popcorn bowls shrink-wrapped in plastic with chocolate and DVDs in them?).
Picking a movie (or two) for the night always took an hour and a half or two hours, because my Dad would go off into his own sections of the store and my brother and I were allowed to look at all the different kinds of movies they had to offer. I loved picking up physical boxes of DVDs, turning them over, reading the backs and seeing what the R-rated film plot descriptions were. I remember receiving Blockbuster gift cards and movie night bundles of snacks for at least 3 of my birthdays from friends and family.
In 2010, Blockbuster and Movie Gallery filed for bankruptcy. I was 13 years old and devastated to hear the news. My local Blockbuster had a “going-out-of-business” sale, and my Dad, brother and I headed down one last time to see if we could pick up some good movies for cheap. I ended up buying a Jimi Hendrix wall canvas that still hangs in my room to this day. I saw the end coming about a year before when my Dad signed up for Netflix online. One of the first movies I remember seeing from Netflix that came straight from the mail was Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade. The two former sites of rental entertainment were replaced by an Auto Care business (Blockbuster) and an antique furniture store (Movie Gallery).
Like I said earlier, I was born in a transition period. Blockbuster and Movie Gallery came and went, to be replaced by streaming services and Redbox. I grew up in the transition period for many things of technology — there was one day my Dad came home, really excited because he had traded in his flip phone for a brand new BlackBerry, a phone that you could check your email on and respond on a teeny tiny little keyboard.
For Christmas when I was 10, I wanted a blue 2nd-generation iPod shuffle, a neat little device that could hold all my newly-discovered Beatles songs with a whopping 2 gigabytes of storage.
There was a time in my life where the best present you could get someone was an iTunes gift card — now, everyone has switched over to music streaming services (my first was Pandora in my freshman year of high school, and now I regularly use Spotify) and the two best gifts you can give are either an Amazon gift card (you can literally buy anything with it) or a Starbucks gift card. The introduction of Hulu was huge for me — I could now watch the latest episodes of The Simpsons with ads (at least, until they mandated a paid subscription). My first smartphone was an iPhone 4, and that was my personal entryway into the Smartphone Era we live in today.
In the transition period between physical stores and digital, there are certain feelings and experiences that are lost. The struggle of “so many channels on cable TV but nothing to watch” has been translated into streaming services today — I have access to HBO Go, Hulu with Ads, Netflix, and Amazon Prime, but most of the shows and movies are, frankly, garbage. Netflix, Hulu, and Prime Original series are hit or miss — for every Stranger Things or Mr. Robot or Handmaid’s Tale you get about 60+ other bad shows and movies greenlit by the entertainment companies. When the latest movie comes out, you’re not guaranteed to see it on any one of your streaming services because of licensing issues (I can view Shrek on Netflix, but I have to go to HBO Go to see Shrek 2). Amazon Prime shows you that they have access to all of these different movies, but you have to pay to rent them in addition to the Prime fee you’re already paying. The local Redbox is cool and pretty cheap, but it can only hold so many DVDs, and often times the movies advertised on the side of the kiosk are not actually available when you get there (Blockbuster had entire shelves dedicated to some movies; 30–40 copies were shelved so you always had a chance to pick up the latest thing).
Going into adulthood, I missed the feeling of going to movie rental stores, so much so that when I found out there was a Family Video near my college campus during my freshman year I wanted to do a backflip and scream. My then-girlfriend and I would go every couple of weeks to relive my childhood, exploring the shelves of new movies and TV shows, renting movies for dirt cheap and seeing staff picks and seasonal displays. Unfortunately, when I moved back in the following academic year, the Family Video was gone, shut down and replaced by a Chinese supermarket.
You never know what you have until it’s taken away from you. As technology advances, what’s “new” isn’t always what’s “improved.” Renting movies was a big part of my childhood, and Blockbuster Video will always have a place in my heart, just like the cholesterol from popcorn with way too much butter on it enjoyed while seeing a movie with my family.
