One of my favorite things about movies is how they can elicit such nostalgia, something I value more and more as I get older. It is obviously more convenient now, and Netflix revolutionized the film and TV industry for the better, but I've been chasing the heroin-like high of smelling popcorn and finding the last copy of the most in-demand movie that week for rental since I was 12 years old. When technology eventually allows us to relive our memories, going to Blockbuster on a Friday night will definitely be on the list. What are your favorite movie memories like this?
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We went to Blockbuster sometimes, Tom Lapke, but we mainly went to a local video rental store called Movie Time. We loved going to both stores and renting videos, especially on new release day.
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Your title of this post made me laugh out loud, Tom Lapke. I startled my dog. LOL!
I used to LOVE going to Blockbuster as a kid. I grew up in a really small town, but we had two movie rental stores- a Blockbuster and a Family Video. My dad would drive us to Blockbuster every Friday night to pick out movies or video games for the weekend and next week. But when I wanted to get something in between, I would throw on my rollerblades and go over to Family Video which was closer to my house. They would lecture me about not skating down the aisles, but never actually kicked me out. =)
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I was fortunate to grow up on the UWS of NYC and there was a duplex (that soon became a 4-plex) on Broadway and 84th street. It was one of the places my parents let me go by myself when I was 10 (it was a different time :). So for me, it was buying a matinee ticket to one movie and sneaking into the other after for a double feature - 9to5 into Caddychack for $3.50. Heaven.
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Ashley Renee Smith I am here to help AND entertain :-) We also had a local video store in our neighborhood that didn't open until I was a teenager. I have said before that my high school years were spent in that video store because a lot of my friends worked there and it was in the "downtown" area. It was straight out of a Kevin Smith movie at that point in my life. Tha t is another memory I would revisit.
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Sam Sokolow Oh man, the stuff I would do as a kid would get me taken by CPS from my parents nowadays. I remember being 7 or 8 and walking to the deli to buy my mom cigarettes with a note from her saying it was ok to sell them to me. Different times man.
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Tom Lapke for real!
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I feel like those nostalgic for Blockbuster must be younger than me. In my experience, Blockbuster was the evil empire, crowding out mom ‘n pop shops, enforcing edits to objectionable films, reducing the cult selection in favor of 50 copies of the latest tent pole like Armageddon. Corporate culture, bright lights, uniforms, insipid promos on repeat on the in-house monitors.
My favorite video store had thousands of tapes, with a phone book sized catalog to leaf through when you were looking for that Robert Altman film you’d heard about but never seen.
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For me growing up it was going to my father's on the weekends and we would always go to George's, it was a local movie store. Horror movies in the back, if you zig when you should've zagged, you would run into the porn section lol. During the week we would rent movies and video games from a movie store called Dee's. Those were the days man..I keep the tradition alive with my sons watching movies during the week together. However looking for movies online is far from the experience of going to the movie stores and making a choice.
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For losing direct to video/DVD I am not to happy about Netflix and other streamers. And in the end its basically a TV channel, pay per view as you like or with a subscription model. I had my work distributed to cinema by Universal and on DVD but never got in contact with Netflix over the past few years, probably a different crowd. In 1996 I saw Space Odyssey on 70mm in Amsterdam. I then realised movie making could be a major inspirational tool for audiences, including myself. The best memory of movie making I have.
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And my favorite movie memory is seeing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze in theaters, Tom Lapke. My dad bought me a Tokka action figure before we went to the movie.
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Mike Boas That is all definitely true. But I was too young to have any of that on my radar, so it is just happy memories for me.
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Me too, Tom Lapke! Our town only ever had the two chain video rental stores. It was a really small midwest town that was so excited to have two shops like that, one on each "side" of town. Before they came to town, locals had to drive 40 minutes to the Indianapolis area to find something similar.