Blockbuster Wasn’t All That

I am old enough to remember getting our first VCR, though I’m also young enough to not remember where we rented our first movies. There weren’t a lot of rental places available yet. I know we rented The Black Stallion and something for my parents. I know it wasn’t from Blockbuster, because Blockbuster didn’t exist yet—and their first location didn’t move into my hometown until shortly before I graduated from high school anyway. Which meant we had more interesting options.

There’s a lot of nostalgia for Blockbuster. And I won’t deny the pleasure of browsing a video rental place, looking first at the new releases and then moving into the older movies. The delight of finding a title you’ve never heard of that sounds interesting or an older movie you’ve always vaguely meant to get around to and rarely considered as an option. It was an iconic part of the weekend for a lot of us. You cruise the shelves for longer than my kids would probably think possible and come away with however many movies you’d decided to rent—we usually did two or three—and make your way to the counter. It’s a pleasure my kids will never know.

But Blockbuster wasn’t the best place to do it. It’s not even that I generally preferred Hollywood Video, which wasn’t as brightly lit and which I remember as having more unusual options—and I once spent an exhausting week doing inventory at a Hollywood Video whose manager played The Princess Diaries pretty much the whole time. It’s that Blockbuster wasn’t as good as the smaller local stores that it not infrequently drove out of business. The best of my nostalgia for renting movies was at one of two places, one Webster’s of sainted memory in Altadena, California, and one I only went to a couple of times in Tacoma, Washington.

When I was growing up, before we got a Blockbuster, there was Webster’s, to the extent that, the last vacation I took home, I had half a dozen people tell me they didn’t rent movies anymore and wasn’t it a shame? And that was in 2011. I’m not sure what that room was used for before it was the video rental place. It wasn’t connected to the rest of the store. It wasn’t a terribly large room, and it was crammed with shelves. There was also, and this is strong nostalgia for a lot of us, The Closet With The Beaded Curtain for quite a few years.

Blockbuster corporate policy meant their stores didn’t have The Closet With The Beaded Curtain. They didn’t have NC-17 movies, much less porn. Granted there aren’t a ton of NC-17 movies for a lot of other reasons, but one of them for quite a few years was indeed that you couldn’t get into the major rental places. Without theatrical releases in the big chains or rental options in the big chains, that really put a damper on what movies were willing to accept the rating. It’s indirect censorship, but it is censorship.

I won’t say that all employees at the smaller stores were movies buffs or that no movie buffs ever worked at Blockbuster. That’s not true in either direction. But you did at least get more interesting recommendations from the employees of smaller stores, simply because they weren’t as hampered by corporate policy about what they were able to play on the TVs. You spend that much time alone in the store, you get as curious as anyone else and start watching the stuff that catches your eye, I suspect. I’ll never forget the guy at the place in Tacoma—I can’t remember what it was called; it was near Stadium High School, where 10 Things I Hate About You was filmed—trying to get me and my sister to rent Ishtar.

It also wasn’t that there were no foreign films at Blockbuster or that Webster’s had a ton of them. But I think smaller stores were more inclined to get weird stuff because it caught the eye of whoever was doing ordering for the store. You also got stores that were owned, at least, by people who were in it for the love of movies instead of because it made better money than selling software to oil companies, the actual origin story of Blockbuster. Yes, we got new releases at Webster’s. But we also got Doing Time on Planet Earth and A Boy and His Dog and all sorts of other strange movies I never saw at a chain store.

I can’t help thinking that half the reason Blockbuster failed when Netflix came into existence was not just the convenience of renting by mail but because you could simply get a wider variety of things from Netflix. I rented episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and silent movies and movies from countries that weren’t English-speaking, France, Germany, or Italy. That was hard to do at a corporate store. Yes, it was more convenient to get them in my mailbox and drop them back the same way, and the “no late fees” was definitely a selling point, but most of what I wanted was there, if it was in print.

In the end, I’m still going to think more of that guy trying to make us watch Ishtar or the small room crammed with shelves where I can still, in my memory, taste the air conditioning. (My mom rented stupid comedies for summer weekends.) There’s a reason so many people told me about Webster’s no longer renting movies in 2011 when everyone else had as well. It’s not just the time my family rented a movie and you could actually see Webster’s in the background, though that was a moment of sheer delight.

I will always miss Webster’s even though I’m now more than a thousand miles away and have multiple streaming services just a click of a remote away. It’s not the same. Even though it involved putting on outside clothes and braving the miserable LA summer heat and dealing with other humans and all the things we don’t miss about renting movies from a physical location. Streaming won for a reason. But it will never be quite the same, and some of those ways were better, especially if you rented local.