Video Store Memories

My earliest memory of a video store must have been from 1985 or not long after this. Back then, my family didn’t own a VCR, but we could rent one from the local “Video Paradise” video store. The VCR, I remember, was small and, I think, came in a briefcase-like contraption. Along with the VCR, we rented Back to the Future and this, incidentally, was the movie that taught me my first cuss. There’s a scene where Biff says, “I’m gonna get that sonafabitch,” and “sonafabitch” became my very first cuss. At three or four years old, I went around my house saying, “I’m gonna get that sonafabitch,” or maybe I only did it once and was promptly reprimanded by my mother. All I know is “sonafabitch” was my first cuss word ever. Incidentally, the S-word was my second cuss word and I also learned that one from a video rental, this time Like Father, Like Son with Kirk Cameron and Dudley Moore. I have no recollection of when I learned the F-word. It was likely from a video rental, though. I do remember when I learned “bastard” and that was from Die Hard.

Later into the 80s, my family purchased our own VCR machine, which was nice, because having to rent one every weekend was a real drag. The VCR was Toshiba-brand, very large, with many complex buttons, most of which were rarely used, or at least it seemed like that at the time. During this period—the late 1980s—pretty much all we rented at the video store were ACTION movies. In fact, I had no idea that there were any other choices. We would basically walk into Video Paradise and proceed immediately to the ACTION section, which was in the back, just to the right of the New Releases. Video box art was key and I would pretty much rent anything that looked action-packed. If it had fire-ball-like explosions and/or a greasy, jacked up Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover? Or Sylvester Stallone? It would be rented, no questions asked.

With one exception: Terminator.

Terminator was the one video we never, EVER rented. And this is because it was known as the only movie where Arnold Schwarzenegger was the “Bad guy”. And I guess, as a kid, I had no interest in watching a movie where Arnold was the bad guy. Only the good guy. So I treated Terminator kind of like how Pee-wee Herman treats the snakes when he’s saving all the animals from a pet store fire in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure. He keeps going back in to save animal after animal but sneers at the snakes each time. Finally, once there are no more animals left to save, he grabs the snakes and runs the hell out of there before the whole place burns down. To me, Terminator was the snake. I’d sneer at it every time I went into the ACTION section at the video store. But, eventually, I rented every single ACTION movie there was to rent and, soon, Terminator was all there was left, so I reluctantly rented it (and loved it).

By the way, you may be wondering…hmmm…I was five…six…seven years old…and able to watch rated-R ACTION movies? The answer to that question is YES, without a problem, actually. My parents had no issue with me watching Rambo, Commando, Cobra, Delta Force, Marked for Death, Predator, Running Man, Kickboxer, guns, explosions and everything violence. The only problem was when there was a sex scene, at which time I would have to close my eyes and my dad would fast-forward until the sex was over. So sex was a no-no, but violence? Well, the more, the merrier!

How did I turn out? Well, I can’t say I’m a model citizen, but I’m not violent, that’s for sure…at least…not yet muahahahahahahahahaha aaaaaaaaa-hahahahahahahahahahaha ooooooo-hoooooohoooooohooooooo eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-heeeeeeeeeeeee-heeeeeeeeee-eeeeeeeeeeeee!

Sorry.

Out of all the ACTION movies I rented, Rambo First Blood Part 2 was probably both my favorite and the one I rented the most. In fact, I was damn-near obsessed with the movie, so much that I fantasized I was John Rambo on almost a daily basis. I got the Rambo action figures from Kay Bee Toys, the red bandana, even a plastic toy version of his bad-ass knife (which, if I remember correctly, I purchased at a Christmas Tree Shop down on Cape Cod). In the schoolyard, I made machine gun noises with my mouth, ran around and pretended I was doing Rambo missions. I preferred doing this over playing with other kids. Today, teachers probably would have thought I was “on the spectrum,” but autism wasn’t as big of a thing back in the 1980s, so I somehow got away with this, at least for a little while. I did eventually get a bad conduct grade on my 1^st grade report card, for “not playing well with others.” This was mainly because I preferred playing in my imaginary world of Rambo.

Once the 1990s came around, I expanded my horizons and rented movies that weren’t ACTION. At this time, I rode my Giant “Attraction” mountain bike down to Video Paradise all during summer vacation and rented movies like Ransom, True Lies, Conair, Face Off, Bad Boys etc. I would then stay up late, watch these movies, and feel like I was accomplishing something with my life. By nature, I seem to have an obsessive-compulsive personality, so I got it into my head that I needed to watch pretty much every New Release that came out. I thought this would somehow make me a better or smarter person, kind of like how you think when you’re trying to beat a video game. You know, you convince yourself that beating Mario Bros. actually matters. What you realize in the end is that you haven’t really accomplished anything, nor have you improved yourself in any way. I probably would have been better off reading a book. But, alas, I digress.

Later into the 1990s, I made the switch from Video Paradise to Massive Video as my go-to video rental place. This was partly because Video Paradise went out of business (at this time, the evil franchise known as Blockbuster Video was killing off the mom and pop video stores left and right) but also because Massive Video had better deals. You could literally rent two non-new-releases for just a dollar. As for new releases, you could rent one for a few dollars and then get a non-new-release absolutely free. Bottom line: you could rent A LOT of videos from Massive for not a whole lot of money.

I had my driver’s license by this point in my life, so I hit up Massive all the time, especially during the summer when there was no school. I had also acquired a small 13” Sylvania television with the VCR built right into it and that became my own personal “home movie theater” for several years. I was particularly drawn to movies made by Miramax during this time because they were making all the unique indies. Movies like Trainspotting come to mind. Pulp Fiction as well. Say what you will about Harvey Weinstein, but he was responsible for many good movies in the mid-to-late 90s. Artisan was releasing a lot of great movies, too (like Blair Witch Project).

Massive Video also notoriously had the “adult video” closet that was commonplace in mom and pop video stores of that era. There was rarely anybody in this closet, but I do remember two occasions when there was a “john” (for lack of a better word) perusing the adult videos. On one occasion, there was a 50-year-old gentleman in the closet who eventually exited and then, upon checking out at the front desk, another customer (a woman) was walking into the store and she recognized him. It turns out he was the coach of her son’s soccer team! The poor guy was hoping to rent a couple adult vids with discretion and anonymity, but fate had other ideas. Boy how embarrassed he was!

On another occasion, my friends were in the store and I think we may have even been shooting the breeze with the video store clerk. I have no recollection of what we were talking about, but, whatever the subject matter was, we suddenly hear a noise and a guy comes out of the adult video closet, looking very rascally in the face. Then, he says to us, with incredible enthusiasm, “Yeah, that was in this month’s MAXIM!” The magazine, that is. So, whatever it was we were talking about, was apparently discussed or featured in the most recent issue of Maxim magazine. That guy would know, apparently.

By 2004, mom and pop video stores were a dying breed, as Blockbuster had officially monopolized the video rental market. Sadly, the mom and pops all began closing, one after the other. Before they closed, however, they had crazy liquidation sales. Like a bunch of jackals, my friends and I hit up many of these stores and walked away with dozens of videos that we acquired for pennies on the dollar. I personally walked away with a very eclectic collection of videos, including Todd Solondz’s From the Dollhouse, Charlie Chaplin’s Limelight, Bob Fosse’s All that Jazz, the hilarious Airplane 2, an indie film called Chuck and Buck (one of the most uncomfortable movies of all time), Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the first and best 1990 version) and even the French Film The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

 

A photo I took of Massive Video, right before it closed forever.

Only a few years after Blockbuster became king, Netflix rose to power. This not only marked the end of Blockbuster but it also marked the end of the video store era in general. A few video stores do exist here and there, mostly as ironic establishments in hipster neighborhoods, but for the most part, video stores are extinct and it’s unlikely that they will ever experience a revival. Streaming is probably here to stay for the unforeseeable future and it’s hard to imagine anything better unless mankind experiences some sort of apocalyptic disruption to the power grid, like a solar storm, where we lose Internet capabilities and are forced to go analog again. But, wait, if the power grid were to fry out on us, we wouldn’t even have the power to run the analog devices, right? Unless we used gasoline-powered generators. Yes, that would be the only way. Hmmm…

Anyway, yes, the video store era is likely a bygone era. But, before it gets forgotten forever, I wanted to memorialize it somehow. My novel WEIRD MONSTER, originally written as a screenplay back in 2007 and later turned into a novel (or what-I-call a “screen novel”) ten years later, is my attempt to memorialize it. The book is, among other things, a long love letter to the video store era, the VHS era, and the VCR era. It captures everything from the smell of video stores (plastic cases and, occasionally, stale popcorn) to the excitement of a new release coming out (after waiting forever for it to come out on video), to the magnetic-tape-sensing-security-gate-thingy that welcomed you when you entered the video store (or whatever the name of that thing was), to the movies playing on multiple TVs throughout the store…the buzzing fluorescent lights on the ceiling…the puke-colored, bubble-gum-stained carpeting…the clamshell video cases...and, yes, even the adult video closets.

Video stores were like a little fantasy land you could escape to at the end of your rough week of reality. They were warm in the winters. Cool in the summers. An all-around fun time. They will be so very missed.

…

WEIRD MONSTER is now available to read on Amazon. Find this book (and many others) at Matt Burns’ Amazon author page HERE.

VHS Time Capsule

VHS. The video medium that time forgot. Well, it's not exactly forgotten. I mean, if I were to bring up VHS in a conversation, people would know what I was talking about. So it's not completely forgotten but it sounds more dramatic saying "time forgot it" even though it's not exactly true. Know what, let's just start this blog over again, ok?

VHS. The video medium that time didn't quite forget because most people still remember it and some people may even have dusty VCRs in their attics or garages.

There. That's better.

Remember how friggin' fun VHS was? You could record programs off your television and make your own VHS tapes filled with your favorite shows, cartoons and MTV music videos, kind of like making a mix tape only with TV shows. Then you could put stickers on these tapes, label them in any way you wanted, with colorful hearts or menacing skulls. Then there were other stickers that had all sorts of boxes that said LP, SP, Mono, Stereo, and you would check all the boxes even though you had no idea what any of them meant. So much fun! 

If you were skilled enough, you could press pause during commercials and you would end up with a full two hours of your favorite shows, commercial-free. 

If you were even more skilled, you could program your VCR to start taping at certain hours of the day, when you were at school or when you were sleeping or when you had to do homework.

And, if you were the most skilled VCR operator in the world, you could program your VCR to tape shows that were on a different channel from the one you were currently watching. This meant you could watch Alf on NBC and tape You Can't Do That on Television on Nickelodeon. What a fantastic piece of technology!

It should be noted that I personally never graduated to the upper skill levels of VCR operation. I could pause during the commercials just fine, no problem there. But as far as programing the VCR to start taping at different times of the day or taping on a different channel from what I was watching? Never happened. I tried but I failed. It never worked. I mean, I was young during the VCR era so give me a friggin' break.

In fact, now that I look back on it, I don't think I was ever really successful in taping anything that required much skill. I was lucky to get an episode of Saved By the Bell on half-inch (half-inch is your in-the-know term for VHS tape). As far as a mix tape or, to use a more sophisticated term, a collection went? I don't think I ever successfully created a self-made VHS collection of shows, unless maybe one year when there was a Mr. Bean marathon on PBS but that doesn't really count since it was a marathon all on one channel. All I had to do was pop a tape in, press record and then I just didn't touch the freggen VCR for the next two hours.

My brother, however, was a much more skilled VCR operator than I was (he was five years older than me) and, exactly 30 years ago, in the special year of 1988, he created the ultimate VCR mix tape...collection...whatever you would like to call it. It was a Christmas-special collection featuring all the best XMAS specials you could possibly find on television. Each special was from a different channel, at different times, on different nights...in other words, the creation of this tape wasn't a simple matter of just popping a tape into the deck and pressing record. This required skill and he possessed this skill.

Actual VHS from 1988

The VHS had all the XMAS-special greats. We're talking The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. We're talking Frosty the Snowman. How about a little Mickey's Christmas Carol? Yep. It was on there. Or how about Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer? Of course that was there. But you're probably saying right now that there's no way A Very Brady Christmas was on there, right? Wrong. It was. The two-hour 1988 Brady Bunch reunion special was there in all its glory. 

The VHS even had the most classic of all classic XMAS specials. Obviously I'm referring to none other than A Merry Mirthworm Christmas.

Wait, what?

Yes, A Merry Mirthworm Christmas. It's a little known XMAS special about a clumsy Earthworm named Burt who has just moved to the town of Wormingham and he's having difficulty making friends. He tries to make friends at the Town Hall where he helps decorate for the upcoming Wormingham Christmas party but he knocks over a table of ornaments and everything's broken. The town chairworm Wormaline Wiggler tells him to leave and get lost. Burt's heart is broken because he has no friends but (spoiler alert) he's eventually invited back in time for the party and all is well for Burt. Merry Christmas.

No? Not ringing a bell? Well, you're missing out if you haven't seen that one.

The full Merry Mirthworm Christmas Special

Now, you would think my brother would've cut the commercials on this XMAS-special VHS tape since he was so skilled in the ways of the VCR. Nope. The commercials were left in, clearly because he knew that this tape wouldn't just be a collection of XMAS-specials but would actually function as a time capsule, capturing the late-1980s in its rawest form. What foresight.

To heck with history books. The best way to study a certain time period is by watching a TV-recorded VHS tape from the year you want to study. The recorded shows and cartoons and music videos say a lot about the era but it's the COMMERCIAL BREAKS that say the most about the time. The COMMERCIALS capture reality in its purest form. 

So Christmas 1988. What was happening?

Well, McDonalds still used Ronald McDonald as its commercial mascot (he's rarely used today because focus groups determined that McDonalds' key demographic had "coulrophobia", a fear of clowns). McDonalds also had a licensing deal with Disney for its new movie Oliver and Company.





Cheese had a commercial all its own. No specific brand. Just cheese. Paid for by the American dairy farmers. It was part of the "Don't forget the cheese" campaign.




A new hot TV show called TV101 was all the buzz. This show had several recognizable faces, including a young Matt LeBlanc (Joey from Friends).





Campbell's soup was heavily marketed to children.





The Swedish Chef had a new cereal called "Croonchy Stars".





The Halls of Medicine was the best place to go to cure your pesky cough.




The only cool way to brush your teeth was by using new Colgate Junior Superstar Toothpaste.




"Northwest Airlines" was the first commercial airline to prohibit smoking on all flights. Also, Northwest Airlines existed.




Pizza Hut was a favorite restaurant for kids and had a licensing deal with Universal Pictures for their new hot animated movie Land Before Time.




Huggies diapers kept your babies the driest.




Dinosaurs were big in the late-80s and Playskool dinosaurs were what all the kids wanted.




Playskool was cool if you were, like, a Toddler, but all the older kids wanted toys made by Tyco. Like these Radio control Turbo Trucks.

Lego's new mascot Zak the Lego Maniac gave the Lego brand more of a badass edge.

The new "Footnotes" toy capitalized on the success of Big, the hit movie of the previous summer.

Kids liked their pizza pie; they also liked their macaroni. But what they really wanted was their first Sony...Walkman and stereo, that is.

Dino-Riders was both a hit animated TV series AND a hit toy brand. By the way, these were the days when the toy commercials took place on the sickest-looking sets (i.e. miniature jungle or desert models etc.) that were definitely NOT included with the toys.

The New England Telephone company made it easy to call Dad on a landline, even if he didn't approve of your boyfriend Jeff.

Thanks to New England Telephone, you could also call a 900 number and get your horoscope read to you by self-proclaimed psychic Jeane Dixon. All it cost was 95 cents a minute.




Pat Petersen (best known from Knot's Landing) was doing anti-drinking PSA's for CBS. Be smart. Don't start.

There was still much confusion surrounding the relatively new Aids virus.

Sprite was the favorite soda of snowmen.




And the "Win by a Nose" board game was released but apparently not very popular because it's practically erased from existence. No commercial for it can be found on YouTube. Sorry.

RIP Win by a Nose Game

Of course, I could go on and on but I think you get a pretty good idea of what was happening in 1988 by now.

Unfortunately, with the VHS medium now obsolete, we will never have accurate time capsules ever again unless we make the conscious effort to make time capsules but nobody ever does and, even if they do, they won't be as accurate. Self-made VHS tapes were unintentional time capsules and were, thus, a much more accurate record of a time period than an intentional time capsule where people carefully pick and choose what they include, therefore manipulating the history of the time in a way that they desire. 

Who knew that Video Cassette Recorders (VCRs) would become the ultimate recorders of history? DVDs can't do this kind of thing. Nor can Blu-rays. Or DVRs on our cable boxes. YouTube is nice to look up random commercials and all sorts of nonsense but there is no context to what you're looking at. It's just a big, cluttered virtual dimension filled with every video from every time period, all at once. What a mess. 

With a VHS tape, you literally captured a moment in time and froze it forever...or at least until the tape withered away into snow. This is why I propose that a movement should be started to keep the VHS medium alive. Once we respect the fact that it serves as the ultimate time capsule, we will understand that it's imperative for the medium to live on forever.

As for me, I don't plan on making much of an effort to start this "VHS awareness" movement. But I think somebody else should get on this immediately.

...

MATT BURNS is the author of several eBooks on Amazon, including such nostalgic greats as I USED TO BE A GAMER: THE 8-BIT NINTENDO YEARS and I DREAM OF DREAM MACHINE. Also, his new "screen novel" WEIRD MONSTER is a fun love letter to the 1980s VHS era. Find more of his books at his Amazon Author Page: amazon.com/author/mattburns.