The Golden Age of Video Stores

A fine warm day today -- pushing 70° F., which I'm told we'll actually hit tomorrow. I re-acquainted myself with the backyard deck for a short while. It can't possibly stay like this until summer comes along, though. I'm excepting a 20- or 30-degree rollback soon.

My college and post-college friend Victor once said, many years after we'd finished school, that he was glad that at no time during our college days did anyone say among friends, "Let's go rent a video." I'm with Victor on that one.

Video rental was in its extreme infancy in those days, and no one we knew had a machine -- except for a wealthy fellow I met in the summer of '81 who had a Betamax, but we didn't go to school with him. We found enough ways to entertain ourselves without videos.

It occurred to me in the dying video store late week that I might be making my last visit ever to a retail store devoted solely to videos and games. I couldn't remember when I first visited one, though by 1989 I was renting items from a Blockbuster (?) on the corner of Broadway and Berwyn in Chicago some Fridays on my way to my then-girlfriend's apartment, because she had a TV and VCR and I didn't. That store was the only one I ever saw with a section called Le Bad Cinema. It included what you'd expect: Plan 9 From Outer Space, Surf Nazis Must Die, etc.

Facets Multi-Media on Fullerton had a much better selection in those days, and I hope it still does, but was a fair amount of trouble to get to.

My favorite video store anywhere was in Osaka in the early '90s, a place simply called Cinema (using roman letters). It was on the way home from my subway exit. It didn't have a vast selection, but a large enough one that I often found things I wanted to see -- usually movies I'd never gotten around to before. Two days' rental was (I think) ¥250, a little over $2 in those days, and most of the tapes (all VHS) were subtitled in Japanese.

One day I noticed that Cinema was selling off old stock for ¥500 a tape. I found one I still have, a Japanese-subtitled Dr. Strangelove (on the left). If I'd seen it on DVD last week, I would have bought that version of it too. It's one of those watch-every-two-or-three-year movies.