With a new Netflix sitcom mocking the demise of IRL video stores, Eliza Janssen is feeling nostalgic for a childhood among shelves of dusty old DVDs. Here’s what streaming audiences are missing out on.
The sheer shade and audacity of the world’s biggest streaming service to make a sitcom about the slow death of physical media! Blockbuster, a workplace comedy starring Randall Park and Brooklyn Nine-Nine’s Melissa Fumero, is set in America’s last Blockbuster video branch, with the show’s home Netflix casting themselves as a shadowy villainous force? I guess?
It’s weird to be old enough to see my childhood haunts being trotted out as nostalgia bait, but I can’t hold it against the Blockbuster too much, which is breezy and good-natured. The video store (or rather, DVD store, although we never called it that) was the earliest training ground for my growing film nerd brain, and this easy-going show got me feeling unexpectedly misty about the loss of my local Video Ezy. Here, in memoriam, is why the DVD rental experience deserves to be valorised. Be kind and rewind with me, won’t you?
A tangible education in film
Scrolling, dead-eyed, through Netflix trying to find a thumbnail or one-line synopsis that suits can’t compare to the IRL journey of walking through the aisles of a video store. Naturally I spent many years checking the kids section to see if they had Shrek 2 yet, days after I’d seen it in cinemas, and re-renting the same janky, annoying family films that my parents hated after many repeat viewings. But gradually, you venture: to see what’s New, what Popular titles grown-ups have clearly approved of. What films are considered Classic, and which can’t graduate from the ghetto of World/Foreign Language to more specific genre categorisations.
Arguably you learn much more about film marketing in a video store than any worthwhile film theory, but it’s still important. Seeing which film cases are nicked and peeling from the love of multiple viewers, and which are stuck behind better-known movies, only held and examined by one person—you—for perhaps months if not years. You could also count on returning in years to come and finding some of the greatest, most important films ever still on their old familiar perch. Not like on streaming, where Netflix has less than 50 movies from before 1970 can’t ensure that any of them will be there next month grumblegrumble…
The ever-changing displays and noisy advertising of my neighbourhood’s Video Ezy was a thrill to a young kid curious about the world of adults and what they considered special and important. Never checked out the Adult section, though. I was sure some kind of alarm would go off if I so much as peeked through the felt curtain separating it from us decent Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed renters.
A family team-building exercise
Picking what to watch when you’re not the only one in the audience can be a savage and demoralising exercise. That’s kind of the whole reason for this website existing—giving people help with finding what to watch.
It was tougher but also more rewarding back when my dad laid down the rules in the video store: we can only pick four DVDs, one new release at most because we’ve been hurt by late fines before, and you have to choose one thing your mum would like. A period costume drama or some shit. Suddenly me and my siblings were working as a team: haggling, compromising, sacrificing the Amanda Bynes movie my sister reeeeally needed to watch so that we could all enjoy Beetlejuice. As a unit. As a democracy.
Happily seated in the car with our hard-won selections, we’d be mystified at dad’s “grown-up” choices (probably Under The Tuscan Sun and a Denzel Washington movie). They weren’t for us, he’d say. Until they were. I still appreciate the thrill of watching edgy, intense, graphic movies like, um, Austin Powers: Goldmember with my parents for the first time. We’d officially come of age, allowed to hear famous celebs vaguely reference penises and say the word “shit”. It was exhilarating.
The majesty (and terror) of DVD box art
One of the biggest losses of the streaming age, though, has to be the depreciation of quality poster art. Much like with smaller CDs and Spotify negating the glorious space and physical presence of vinyl record artwork, streaming services will often choose the ugliest and least representative frame from a movie to try and sell it to users. (Side note: for algorithm reasons, the thumbnail is frequently of a film’s sexiest female character, regardless of how minor she is in the narrative.)
God I loved strolling through the Video Ezy and Blockbuster aisles, letting my eyes latch onto whatever airbrushed celebrity or CGI creation most attracted them. We used to have glamorous 8×10 inch masterpieces emblazoning each plastic case, promoting their film’s greatest qualities: the star power of Richard Gere and Julia Roberts or Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson leaned up against one another, Arnie’s guns lovingly oiled to catch the light…or my damnation, the monsters and red fonts of the Horror section.
Cowering before the illustrations of the Horror section is where I first felt the thrilling temptation of the genre. Two of the titles that particularly haunted me were James Wan and Leigh Whannell’s maligned Dead Silence, and the shitty Christmas horror Jack Frost (no, not the Michael Keaton Jack Frost, equally scary but not intentionally). Certain that their staring dummies and evil snowmen would “get” me from their shelves, I would duck to avoid the cases as if I were dodging lasers in a museum heist sequence.
But before too soon, I was addicted to learning more about these seemingly forbidden items. Reading the blurbs with a sense of tween transgression and gingerly submitting Feardotcom and 28 Days Later into the family selection pile. We probably got Mean Girls instead, for the sixth time, but still: it was a coming-of-age for me, and has led me to writing this piece for this publication today. Vale, the video store. You killed the radio star and then Netflix came for your scalp too.
