Those born after a certain date aren’t likely to understand why The Last Blockbuster trailer is so important to a lot of us since they either don’t remember or just don’t know what it was like to walk the floor of the video store, roaming the shelves to see whatever might catch your eye. If you showed up too late on a Friday or Saturday night then all the best selections might have been taken and you’d be stuck with Ernest Goes to….wherever the hell Ernest was going to, no offense to any Jim Varney fans. But the point is that video stores were the places you went when it was raining out and there was nothing good in the theater, or if you were waiting on that new release you’d been wanting to see for a while and were eager to get it before anyone else. From the faded, scuffed floors and the various smells that could be detected in such places, sometimes candy, sometimes popcorn, sometimes even cleaning solvents since hey, they had to keep the place clean, the video store was an experience that a lot of us remember. To think that the number of Blockbuster stores, the absolute biggest chain that a lot of people can remember, went from 9,000 to just one in fifteen years isn’t hard to believe, but it is kind of saddening for a generation that remembers what it was like to get excited about renting a video.
A lot of people would love to blame streaming sites for this lack of interest but the sad truth is that while they might be able to shoulder some of the blame it’s not fair to dump it all on them since things were changing regardless. To hear that Blockbuster could have purchased Netflix at one point is intriguing but it’s still not enough to say that it could have saved the stores, since things have been evolving in a way throughout the years and thinking that the old ways are going to stick around forever and remain dominant is kind of naive. There are only a few practices in humanity among the many that have stuck around for a long period of time, and even those have evolved from one generation to another. The video store was just another in a long line of casualties that was bound to go the way of the dinosaur, especially since there’s not a lot of ways to compete with streaming services that come directly into a person’s home. When you think about it, getting those movies back to the store on time to avoid late fees was kind of a pain in the ass that no one wanted, but a lot of people got slapped with. And then think back to the VHS days, if you didn’t rewind then you were hit with another charge since the mandate was to rewind the videos before they were dropped in the box. There were just as many irritating points to a video store as there were benefits, but a lot of us still look back fondly and wonder ‘how did this change so quickly?’. Tiffany Hsu of The New York Times has more to say about this matter.
It’s kind of funny to think that it didn’t really change that quickly considering that it’s taken us over a decade to really notice, but those that once worked for Blockbuster and the few that still do surely felt the pinch early on and saw that it wasn’t going to get any better. Just imagine how unnerving it had to be to hear how many stores were closing on a regular basis, how many people were losing their jobs, and to think that your store could be the next on the chopping block. Having worked for the now-defunct Linens N’ Things it’s easy to relate to that idea since hearing that stores across the nation are closing, that people are out of a job, that there’s no more need for this store and so on and so forth, is pretty scary for a lot of people since it means that life is moving on and unless a person wants to be left behind they’re going to have to keep moving as well. It’s very easy to look at this trailer and remember the good times and the reason why the movie store was seen as so important for so long since those of us that grew up with them in our lives can remember them with a smile and a very pleasant number of memories that take us back when we recall roaming the shelves to find that one movie that spoke to us at the moment, no matter if if was a new release that we’d been waiting to see or an older movie that just happened to look appealing. At one point and time, the movie store was a bastion of American entertainment, and to see that one of them has still survived is enough to put a smile on a lot of faces. Alex Horton of The Washington Post has more to offer on this.
Follow Us
