Originally published at: Here's the scene on Friday night at a video rental store in 1987 (VHS) | Boing Boing
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I have fond memories of browsing the aisles and getting into movie discussions with randoms. I don’t think I ever spent less than an hour in every video rental store I went to. Of course the best places were independant shops. The place I frequented offered a free Blockbuster card shredding service. Video rental stores were also the best proving grounds for relationships. Simpler times. sigh
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Horror/SciFi right next to Woody Allen…yep, that checks out!
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I remember wandering Blockbuster many times deciding what to rent. There was somewhat limited selection and a lot of it was dreck. I do like the near-instant gratification of streaming and not being limited to what’s on some physical store’s shelves.
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Haha! I just had a funny memory of the one time I went to my local rental shop and asked the girl behind the counter if they had the movie “Snatch”. She blushed and told me to check “the back”. I was soo embarassed and profusely explained it’s a Guy Ritchie movie with Brad Pitt and Jason Statham. 
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I managed a video store for five years. To this day it’s the most satisfying job I’ve ever had.
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Wait a sec…Aliens came out in 1986??
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I was 15 and trying to rent my way through the following books:
Back as a kid, I discovered the tiny section of the local library concerning books about films. Focusing mostly on the SF/Horror ones with the neat pictures then moving to other genres as I matured.
Danny Peary is the patron saint of pre-internet “mutant film” reviewers.
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It’s kind of amazing that an entire genre of retail business sprang into existence in the late 1970s and was all but extinct by 2015. I’m sure there are still a handful of stores around the country, but I’d bet there are fewer than 1,000 stores remaining in the US. The heyday of video rental stores lasted probably about 20 years. It has to be one of the shorter lived industries ever.
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ETA One of the best parts of seeing Spaceballs in the theater was this scene.
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I would declare this to be woefully underrated. I didn’t see it until around the time of the Great Recession, and it was absolutely current to that moment.
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Right? It has aged super well. By coincidence I just re-watched it last week. Even the slightly dated electronics fit perfectly with the industrial metal-core kind of aesthetic of the colonial marine hardware.
That movie is every bit the masterpiece that it was checks notes 37 years ago
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I was telling a friend about this insane Harvey Keitel movie I’d seen, like “you will not believe the shit that goes down in this movie, dude!” so he grabs a rental and brings it over and we get fairly trashed and as the tape plays I’m thinking “wait a minute, did I miss the part where he’s full frontal naked and howling? And, I distinctly remember some masturbation in that scene, have I lost my mind?”
I look at the VHS case and it says “Bad Lieutenant - Special Blockbuster Version”
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We’re old, man. It happened. Don’t bother adjusting your tracking.
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In the earliest days we didn’t yet own a player, so we rented one (along with a selection of utterly crap but well known porn) for a party. Boy, did we feel like kings. Crazy silly times.
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