(Theme: reminiscing about things from my past)

B is for Blockbuster Video

I know that nostalgia is big right now; everywhere I go on the internet, I see people capitalizing on “remember when…?”, especially on Facebook. Then again, I am in quite a few 80s groups. So this one is a pretty big part of having lived in the 80s and 90s, when Blockbuster was a staple.

There really was nothing like the feeling of walking into that store: the smell, the atmosphere, the potential excitement at actually finding the movie you wanted to see behind the empty box. And if you couldn’t find any new stuff, you perused those middle aisles and hoped for something interesting in the various genres. Sometimes you had to resign yourself to something old you’d seen but wouldn’t mind watching again or the unexpected chance that an old movie you’d never seen turned out to be decent.

Every now and then my parents would splurge on the expensive at-the-counter popcorn tubs, even though they were cheap and usually made popcorn at home in a pan the old way. If I had a friend spending the night, we could actually get TWO movies if we wanted, which was definitely not the norm. I remember in middle school, my friends and I got really into renting concerts. I specifically remember watching Madonna and Michael Jackson, which is funny because we were more hard rock fans. But the spectacle was something else.

It’s too bad that this company didn’t read the tea leaves and they went the way of the dodo. I watched a documentary about it once and they needed to adapt with the times; things were going in the direction of Netflix and RedBox and if they’d just gone with the march of time, they’d probably still be in business today, albeit streaming. But if we are being honest with ourselves, entertainment has changed far too much to dwell on this model. Now we have “content” and the honest-to-God movie star is a dying breed, methinks. Hollywood is eating its own and because just about anyone can film anything at any time, the magic of movieland is definitely not the exciting thing it once was.