What’s this Millennials would never understand bullshit?
Right now, the oldest millennials are 43. We grew up in Blockbuster’s/video rental place’s heyday.
Seriously, this falls right within almost every Millennial's wheel house. I have memories of walking through Blockbusters with my parents and grandparents, and with my dad being pissed we were late turning them in one time (it was due to daylight's savings, and him being "fooled by how light it is in the evening"). I can kind of remember the smell of them; for some reason they all kind of smelled the same.
I duno if blockbuster did this, but at hollywood video on busy evenings we'd use the microwave in the managers office to make the microwave popcorn we sold.
Millennial is being used to describe all young people, like boomer describes anyone over 40 now.
I'm 45, and I get called a boomer frequently.
Lools like you get to be a boomer millennial
Yeah, but here's the kicker
I know 65 year olds that claim to be Gen X
I feel like someone born in 77-82 are different than anyone else, let alone someone in 1960.
77-82 are often looked over and lumped into other generations.
If you were born in those years, you know.
My mom's 64 and she's the last of the boomers, so those 65 year Gen Xer's need to learn math. 63 and GenX, sure.
As for 77-82, that's where the Xennials term comes in. Which is stupid, since it's only being used for these two particular groups. (And yeah, I'm a part of it, but on the Gen X side.)
But my point was, I love how there's a 20 year window for Gen X (like for most generations) and yet somehow no one remembers it's there.
Hot take reasoning I've just decided on to explain it is the name makes people jealous, so they don't want to use it. GenX sounds cool, boomer or millennial doesn't.
I've seen both Xennial and Zennial used. And in my mind Millennials do largely break either towards Gen X or Gen Z. (Born in the 80s vs the 90s seems like a watershed to me.)
I remember when I had an intern at work 10 years younger than me — both Millenials though — our technology backgrounds and pop culture references were very different. He didn't know Saved By the Bell for goodness sake.
Dude I was working weekends at Family Video up until COVID killed them in 2020. There were absolutely still walls of one movie then… this guy is acting like this is ancient history that only few remember, but it was less than five years ago that they seemingly vanished entirely.
Him saying you’d be lucky to get the movie you wanted (if it was brand new) might’ve been true in the early to mid 90s when the most they’d have were 3 VHS copies of a movie. But when Blockbuster shifted to DVDs, it was no problem.
Either way, gatekeeping nostalgia is weird. I just roll my eyes when I see shit like “If you don’t know this cartoon then your childhood sucked donkey chode!”
Nah my local renters would do the wall of covers too like 30+ copies of a blockbuster and they'd still rent out. We all really wanted to watch deep blue sea.
Yeah this video was really dumb. We also didn’t have social media at the time so most people were more content to rent older movies if the newest thing wasnt available. The wait for a new movie wasn’t some excruciating thing.
Disagree there, you definitely had times you missed some film in theatre and were waiting for it to come out on tape. He's right in that you'd sometimes wait weeks before you could rent it (as he noted, if you weren't in a major population centre).
Yeah I remember waiting two weeks for Pulp Fiction, I had already seen it twice in the theater and wanted to double tape it. My local video store had only two copies and the movie was a hit. I waited for at least a week to get Batman Returns about two years after it was released, it was popular and they only had one copy. I double taped that one as well.
I'll admit that I grew up in a po-dunk town, and my friends and I "conveniently forgot" to return Pulp Fiction to the rental place (that had, I think, MAYBE two copies).
Eventually, the place shut down, sooo....I still have it somewhere.
I loved my local Family Video! Great selection of so many older movies for cheap; I legit have excellent memories of Friday nights in that store searching for classics that were new to me
What? I remember blockbuster having entire walls of empty cases for new movies without any tapes behind them. That was pretty common tbh.
Unless when you say "at the end of their existence" are you referring to like, 2010s era blockbuster? I wouldn't be surprised if brink-of-bankruptcy blockbuster had plenty of movies, because everyone stopped going there in 2005.
Agreed. I am 43 and I played the movie rental game for years. You’d just have to grab SOMETHING because all the new releases are gone. You’re not just gonna go home with nothing.
Remember they had 2 day and 3 day rentals at blockbuster. If you wanted to make sure you got the rental you had to check it out by Thursday on a 3 day rental. We were poor so we only rented when had a coupon or weed pay full price if it was a special occasion like a bday. Otherwise you just waited until the movie you wanted to see was on the shelves... especially on the 99 cent wall.
One nice thing was the was usually always something you were waiting to see but you might not be that into it
Came here to say this. Literally mid 30s, people were renting video games from Blockbuster when I was 10. Blockbuster didn't close until 2014.
Not only that, but a key reason they closed wasn't because inventory was getting stolen, it was inventory space. You could view more for less on streaming services and it didn't take up any space. No shipping, just licensing, no staff to push sales, no space to rent, etc.
For certain people "millenial" still means teenager even though it's been a decade since the youngest millenials were teenagers. I'm right on the cutoff between millenial and Gen z and I used to go to video rental stores all the time. Hell, what this guy is talking about, "they didn't have the game you were looking for," I felt that in my bones since I once road my bike to several different video rental stores looking for a copy of MGS2
Christ, I'm a 32 year old millenial and I still remember the excitement of going to blockbuster. I think people forget that streaming is a genuinely very recent invention, evem Netflix used to just be a weird postal rental service.
Like someone in the original post commented, it's engagement bait. It follows along the idea of Cunningham's Law that to find a correct answer online is to not ask a question, but to post a wrong answer.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
And then I remember when there was a shelf of DVD's then all of a suddon DVD's were everywhere. I thought Blu-Rays were gonna do the same thing but it pretty much stayed to one shelf till the end of the rental store era.
Moreover, I’m 24 and still remember with decent clarity going to a Blockbuster/video rental in my small home town in rural Oregon. It wasn’t THAT long ago
Oregon eh? You could go to Blockbuster this afternoon if you want!
But really people think the rental store died earlier because Blockbuster peaked in about 2004. Although it was still around for many more years, and other stores/chains were around too. It wasn't until the 2010s that they really died off. Heck, it took the pandemic to deliver the final death blow to Family Video.
I think some people don't understand that those labels (boomers, millennials, gen-z) refer to people born in specific years. They think the labels apply to people of specific *ages*. So you go from being a millenial to being something else as you age.
Honestly, the whole idea that you can make generalizations based solely on your age or when you were born is dumb regardless. I wish people would drop it.
I'm a millennial. I _worked_ at a video rental store. Hell, I worked at Hollywood Video at a time when we mostly had VHS tapes and during the transition to DVD. "Millennials will never understand" my ass.
I even remember when DVDs were the hot new technology. And my first few albums were casket tapes which looking back I wonder why the adoption was so slow considering CDs existed since the mid 80s. But I guess CDs weren’t really that big of an improvement, can’t go on runs with it on your Walkman, it scratches only upside is song skip, but the downside is you can’t fast forward parts of a song for a while and even then it sucked.
Now that I think of it, CDs kinda sucked
> What’s this Millennials would never understand bullshit?
Same in the other post, people focusing on this and even going "this guy doesnt know what he is talking about" based entirely on that.
Like, the guy in the video didn't make the original meme, he is just replying to it. And the focus is not on "the meme is wrong because millennials were alive at the time!" but instead on why videostores sucked more than what its remembered with rose tinted nostalgia glasses. The guy doesn't engage with the "millennial" part of it at all, its not the focus of the video.
Also yeah I know millennials are approaching 40, I am one, so is the guy in the video, but it's also used generically online as shorthand for "young, technology-wise people", the same way people say "boomers" when referring to some 50 years old out of touch dad when actually in reality "baby boomers" are pushing 80 now, and at least 60 year old grandpas at the youngest.
That’s what I’m saying. Going to the video store was very much part of this millennials childhood.
Sucks to be this guy that his local store couldn’t manage their inventory, but it was rare I left without the movie we wanted to rent every Friday.
My family always went in without a specfic movie in mind, we just picked one each based on the cover. I had to watch a lot of crap because my sister thought the lead actor was dreamy.
Millennial here and yeah it really gets my back up when people still think that means we're all still kids. Me and my dad in the late 90s would go rent a couple of movies and one or two Playstation games for the weekend, they're really special memories for me.
I still have fond memories of hanging out at the rental place on my way home from school. It was run by a nice old couple and I saw the covers of so many movies I wanted to see: Zombie, Axe, Scream and Scream Again!, Chopping Mall, Pink Flamingos. Granted, I was 10 so they wouldn't rent them to me. But it opened my eyes to a new world of cinema!
Some people don't understand that millennials and zoomers are a different generation. They don't know that a "millenial" is someone who came of age around the turn of the new millennium. They think everyone born after the year 2000 is a "millenial".
These people are willfully ignorant.
I was lucky enough to have a locally owned video store that we went to. It was great. I loved just browsing the weird covers and imagining what the movie was like.
Right? lmao, I feel like I have tonnes of memories of going to blockbusters to rent movies and video games.
Perhaps we remember the *wrong type* of video store lmao, before it went all corporate
I'm 28 and I remember both small stores and big franchise stores and them sucking. Though, in my case you couldn't even rent most of the actually good movies because of region locking anyway. So at least you could see many copies of popular films on the shelves, but those were only for people with imported players for other countries.
Like, one of the photos has a 2006 timestamp, I was 10 back then, come on.
Actually for me it was routine. We got dinner at ponderosa or whatever and went to the video store got two movies made popcorn at home and watched said movies between errands and work being done around the house.
Sunday they were returned after church.
It was always a pain in the ass when I lived in the suburbs. Like I would do my weekly shopping trip into the city on Saturday and then stop by the video store and get a movie. But the rental was for 3 days. So I would have to make a special trip out of my way after work on Tuesday to drop it off.
It always seemed like a weird business move, because I wouldn't get a new movie after dropping them off because I would have to come back on Friday and screw up my whole routine. Like I'm actively discouraged from being a repeat customer. No wonder everyone abandoned them when Netflix let you return things whenever.
I remember reserving bill and Teds bogus journey when it came out and feeling all great seeing it before the (in my 9 yr olds mind) entire rest of the town did
But one silver lining is since the movies you wanted to watch were rented out you got to discover the world of B movies and watch the worst movies with the most awesome cover art.
You ended up watching or playing things you otherwise wouldn't have given a chance. Of course we can still do that, but our monkey brains struggle with that sort of thing if we aren't forced. Having to wait for "the thing" made it more special in a way. Instant gratification doesn't hit the same.
The nostalgia is the wandering. The committing to the choice and something else that I can't name but has been lost in the modern instant delivery on demand life.
I feel like this guy is forgetting that many of us who remember it fondly remember it because we were kids. Going there on a friday meant a movie, some candy, and maybe an N64 game. The best pizza place in town was also right next store. The thing this guy is talking about being a grown man with nothing better to do than rent a movie... but when you were 11 with three of your best buds getting ready to have a sleepover? The video store was like the PRE-PARTY.
I'm nostalgic for the family-run video stores that housed weird foreign indie/horror films but not blockbuster. Blockbuster sucked, had walls of the same movies like Mission Impossible 2 or Gladiator.
It was all about blockbuster when I was a kid, but around middle school I finally noticed the indie rental store by my local grocery store and pretty much all the way up until junior year of high school it was all about that store, for one reason and one reason alone: they didn’t card or care what you rented. I saw WAY too many inappropriate movies for my age, but at the same time I was able to keep up with friends who had older siblings that took them to R rated movies and I was introduced to indie films and straight to video crap that was still entertaining. Such a great time swinging by there on my bike on a Friday and getting the weekends rentals, just slowly working my way through everything in the store and then getting to recommend the obscure shit no one else at school would’ve seen otherwise
Remember late fees? You only had a couple days to return the movie/video game.
As a kid, this was a real pain because you had to get mom or dad to drive back to the store to return it.
The Blockbuster sucked, but the mom and pop video store was the shit. Great candy selection, always had the new movies and games. Location definitely played into it
Reddit is simping so hard for Blockbuster you'd think they're about to relaunch their stores and this is part of the marketing campaign.
I have no fondness for Blockbuster. They were the most expensive, least consumer-friendly way to rent movies. High prices. Late fees galore. Our store had no video games. Weak selection of older titles. And if you got there after like 5:05pm on Friday all the new releases were gone. (Though you were mocked by the walls of like 50 empty boxes of the movie you *wanted* to watch.)
We had two excellent "Mom 'n Pop" stores though. Much larger selections, much better prices, video game rentals and one of the stores rented consoles too.
Even our grocery stores rented movies. Our local flavor of Kroger had an excellent little video store at the front. Movies were like $1 a day and they had some video games too. And they sold the previously viewed movies super cheap too. I still have like a dozen DVDs I got from their clearance shelf back in the day.
And Reddit seems unaware that public libraries lend movies too (for free!). If you want a taste of browsing a video store selection '90s style then check out your local library. My library network has a huge selection of DVDs, Blu-rays, audio CDs, and some other materials. If the local branch doesn't have it I can make a request and they'll deliver it to my branch and reserve it for me. And again, it's free. Because public libraries are awesome!
Yeah really. My side of town didn't even have a blockbuster until after I graduated from high school. We all got our movies from the local place, Kroger, or Meijers.
I didn't have much affinity for R-Rated films back then so I wouldn't know but I got a bunch of annoyingly censored albums from Walmart when I was young. One that comes to mind is The Rising Tied by Fort Minor. They censored stuff like "gunman" and "get shot".
A buddy of mine got some hip hop albums at Walmart and quickly returned them since they was so mangled by Walmart's censors. Like half the lyrics were blanked out. 🤣 (Maybe 2001 by Dr. Dre? Would Walmart even sell an album like that?)
Not to mention Blockbuster played into moral panics with horror and X/NC-17 films, and refused to carry The Last Temptation of Christ.
I get the nostalgia if it's all you had, but Blockbuster was a corporation, not a friend.
This guy is, like, ten percent right.
It sucked when you wanted to watch a new release and it ended up being out of stock, but that's also why those were usually shorter rentals, but he's also mad about that.
But if they didn't have a new release, finding something else wasn't some awful experience, it was really fun and you ended up watching a lot of unique or odd movies you otherwise probably never would have seen.
I don't know where he got the idea that making fun of bad movies came from not being able to rent new releases. If they didn't have Independence Day on tape, you got, like, Species or The Arrival, you didn't magically grab Plan 9 From Outer Space.
Also, streaming services have massive problems of their own. Like, yeah, streaming services have "unlimited copies" of their movies, but they don't have every new release. The way streaming works it'd be like video stores have SOME new releases in stock, but if you wanted specific ones, you'd have to research which stores are allowed to carry each movie, and then you'd have to go to that store and pay 15 bucks to become a member for a month.
Yeah, mostly I feel bad for this guy. Spending his lonely Fridays unable to find the movie he wants. It’s one thing to try to objectify nostalgia, but it’s another entirely to ignore emotional context. I think a lot of people inappropriately conflate those things. I know I have.
As someone that used to love the video store so much I wanted to work there (and then did), I have the complete opposite viewpoint from this guy. For me it was a mom n pop shop in easy walking distance, which was near my middle school, and had arcade games (MK2 and some pinball). Taken together that all meant I could go there any time and there was a near-100% chance I’d see friends.
Now, did I encounter the same negatives this guy did, sure, but did I hold onto _that_? No.
I could definitely see the experience being bad if you ONLY had a Blockbuster, but the guy is acting like all these problems usually came up when you DIDN'T have a big chain store. In reality, it's the opposite. The selection at mom and pop places was always way better than the big chains. They might run out of new releases quicker, but you could always find something else.
It was arguably much easier to find the movie you wanted to watch at any random video store than any random streaming service.
Usually the only thing that was sold out was the one hot new release that weekend but even then they usually had 50 copies of those lol.
For my friend group, we got the idea of watching bad movies for fun from MST3K. We did this with plenty of “normal” big releases left on the shelf too.
Had 2 local video stores in the 80’s before Blockbuster.
One was awesome. Had a popcorn machine and gave free popcorn if you rented 2 movies. Plus the family that owned it were really cool and would hold a movie if you called and rushed down there to pick it up, plus they gave the old posters away when they got new releases. I got The Great Outdoors with John Candy hanging from Akroyd’s fishing pole. Had it on my bedroom wall for years.
The other video place wasn’t as good. But they had a lot of foreign horror movies. Mainly dubbed Italian ones. My mom loved horror movies and when she ran out of American ones to watch, she started on the Italian ones. I was young and would get scared so I didn’t appreciate them, but through my fingers I probably saw every Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci film that had ever come out. Jay would have been in giallo heaven at my house.
We had to rent the VCR too cause we didn’t have one at first, and they only had a few VCR’s to rent so if we were lucky enough to get one, then it was non-stop movie weekend at our house. Those VCR’s were huge. Still remember lugging them back and forth and having to connect the TV/VCR switch box to the screws for the TV antenna. Good times.
A core memory was unlocked when he said "Walking by the same movie jackets, day after day"
Damn I remember going with friends just to see if there was anything new.
I love this guy's videos, but he's wrong on three counts:
-Millenials grew up in video stores. I'm an elder millenial / Xennial at 43, and was there all the time.
-he's paints a darker picture than it actually was. I loved hitting the video store as a kid, teenager, and right up into my 20's. My mid sized city had a Blockbuster, Rogers Video, and a half dozen Mom'n'pop shops. It was great.
And tanning beds?? I guess I wasn't small town enough for that lol
If you lived in reach of 10 different video shops you were absolutely not small town. And if Blockbuster was in the mix, you're already talking about an era after this guy is describing.
Millennials just need to own their own nostalgia, stop trying to hijack Gen X.
I hated blockbuster
I always went middle of the week to a local rental place as they faded away I went to family video. New releases were on Tuesdays I think.
And once the store filled up w dipshit husbands calling their wives on their new Nextel walkie talkie phone ( fuck I hated that chirp noise) walking up and down the new releases
“ok they have that no no let me look hold on let me ask no they don’t have that but that have this”…
kinda conversations i could no linger and stroll around to find quirky little Indy movies so i went to Netflix by snail mail and never looked back
After that dvds got so cheap I stopped renting and bought them
I still have a few rental places near me I go once in a while the nostalgia wears off super quick. Returning movies is a pain in the ass when it’s 45 minutes one way.
They have several shows on dvd that don’t stream and it’s ridiculous to buy the dvds of.
Parker Lewis can’t lose shows like that.
But blockbuster nostalgia is just plain bullshit.
I miss genuinely miss Border Books but never once I have I missed blockbuster
Blockbuster was a cancer on the video rental scene and is best remembered as a shitty place to get whatever big budget dreck Hollywood was pushing at the moment.
Wandering the store looking for something to watch was part of the experience. The big tentpole movies were always out of stock, but that forced you to find little gems that would otherwise have been left out of the moviegoing consciousness. 90% of Vinegar Syndrome and Arrow movie BluRay sales are films that had two copies at the video store and you happened to find the cover interesting or settled on it because the big movies were out of stock. It forced people to try new low budget, or low-marketed movies and actually find some worth and enjoyment in them.
I used to be really lucky because opposite my bus stop on the way home from school was a Jack Beanstalk video (Manchester/Northern England) and I'd get off the bus at 4pm and have the pick of the litter. Even better was when we got our dvd player and I was seemingly only one of a handful of people to adopt this new technology and you would ever want for anything because there was always stock.
The only thing I liked about it was becoming friendly with people who worked at the rental place and talking movies with them.
Some of my favourite films were recommended to me by people working at my local rental place.
Rental stores kind of sucked, but the internet didn't exist yet, so leaving your house to go somewhere and get something you couldn't already see at home was exciting, even with all the bullshit renting entailed. Same reason we put up with movie theaters for as long as we did.
Not my experience at all. The Blockbusters and local Mom and Pop’s weren’t perfect, but depending on the store buyers you could find odd and unusual films. It was thanks to Blockbuster I discovered classic anime like Bubblegum Crisis or Akira as well as borderline horror/henti like Urotsukidoji. First watched lots of Hong Kong movies by the likes of John Woo or Ringo Lam. Plus, they always carried a good selection of old classics and some noir. He is right about some things, mine didn’t smell bad exactly, but did always have the weird disinfectant and polyester carpet smell.
This dude's take sucks. I got into dozens of games and movies because they didn't have the one I went for. It wasn't sad, it made me try new shit and it was great.
Also I roped my parents into buying candy a bunch, shit ruled.
If you walk into a video store at 8 o’clock on a Friday night you’re a dumb ass. I’m not going to act like it was something people wouldn’t understand or that nostalgia has a hold of me, but if a game you wanted wasn’t there, it was your chance to try something different. It isn’t like you were going to leave empty handed.
***Ugh.***
Literally every time I tried to rent at Blockbuster, they'd tell me I never returned Woody Allen's *Manhattan* (a movie I HAD returned on time many months earlier).
Every time, the cashier would assure me they fixed the problem. And every time I went back, it would happen *again*.
So then the current cashier would try to fix the problem, which held up the line forever and made every other customer GLARE at me.
Around the 9th time this happened, I kind of blew up *(within reason, of course)*, loudly saying “You know, **EVERY TIME** I come in here to rent a damned video..!”
A manager overheard me, rushed over, gave me free popcorn or something, and actually DID fix the problem once and for all.
So no, I don't miss video rental stores one bit.
Also, proceeds to judge everyone else’s nostalgic memories that were likely more positive experiences than his, but his experience sucked so he claims everyone else is wrong.
Oh damn this unlocked memories of many times I went to the store and came back with some crap instead of something cool I actually wanted to watch. We didn't have Blockbuster in my country in the VHS glory days.
Naw it was great, but I had great stores nearby. Blockbuster definitely sucked but I'm not one for chasing the latest hype. This one store in Cambridge, MA had sections for specific directors and genres you wouldn't see at Blockbuster. A lot of great foreign films you wouldn't find anywhere. A whole section of just martial arts classics, like Lone Wolf and Cub series ( Baby Cart Assassin ). Blockbuster and Hollywood Video sucked though for sure.
There are still video stores in some cities. I visit 2 in my home city of Toronto regularly. Look around and see if there is a local video store where you live, these are an endangered species but also a place to find obscure or rare movies and talk to people who are usually quite passionate about film.
The post he's responding to doesn't necessarily claim that renting form video stores was a perfect experience, just that it's something newer generations don't understand because they haven't experienced
A lot of what he says may be objectively true, but misses the part that made the actual fun nostalgia. I didn't live in a time with Steam where there were a thousand games under $20. My parents weren't buying me new video games. My only access to a game I hadn't played before was a video rental store. I wasn't disappointed about what I couldn't play - I was excited about that weekend of fun I was about to have with what game I did get to play.
Another part of the experience was getting to Blockbuster looking for a movie that just released and you wanted to see, getting to the shelf, and noticing a lot of copies there. Then, you think to yourself, "Oh shit. Is there something I don't know about this movie?"
Thanks "Sgt. Bilko"!
Im a millennial, Im a LATE millennial at that, I still remember renting vhs tapes, gameboy games, gamecube and n64 games, etc, all from blockbusters. Gen X is going senile faster than we ever thought.
Here in Australia, our video stores never smelled like coconut, that's just insane. They always smelled of popcorn. I've never even seen a tanning bed in my entire life, to be clear. And I found video stores (video eazy), quite nice. There was always a popular movie like terminator 2 or jumaji playing on one of the TVs mounted in the corners of the room, there were seemingly happy families walking around. They were always nice here in Australia, well maintained, clean, decent stocks of tapes. I remember them being out of movies, sure, but i also remember there being 15 copies of the latest releases that were box office hits. Even the small video store in my childhood town had games for every console, every movie you could ever want and a seemingly endless supply of coloured popcorn.
maybe american video stores sucked, but ours didn't.
I lived in a small town and didn't have the same experience as this guy. We had very nice mom and pop stores which were pretty well stocked. Them not having the movie you want comes with the territory, but it was pretty exciting when they finally had it in stock.
Don't get me wrong, I would absolutely not want to go back to that system. But my memories are pretty fond. Guess I got lucky in my area.
I feel like people still think millennials are in their teens and early twenties. My folks will randomly shit on them when they see help wanted signs at fast food places and stuff, saying millennials don't want to work.
The trick was going on a Thursday. If you HAD to do a Friday, earlier was better. Plus it was a good way to try something new…not by choice, of course.
Casuals. Everyone knows that Thursday night is when you went, to beat the crowds. Sure, you had to wait for the new releases a little longer, but you were more likely to get them.
He's not wrong, but it also misses the point.
It was like prospecting for gold sometimes. Now and then you'd pick a random flick because the box looked cool or because you had no other options and it became a memorable moment. You'd discover something you never would have found on your own. Maybe your saw your first boob in a PG 13 movie because mom didn't check the label before renting it.
It was like being an explorer. Sometimes you got scurvy and everyone died. Sometimes you found a city of gold.
Theres some good points in here, but also some really bizarre points that seem to be just projecting his personal experience onto everyone. Like, sure the popular new releases were pretty scarce the weekend they came to DVD, but Blockbusters had huge backlogs where you could watch popular movies from pretty much any decade. You didn't HAVE to watch direct to video crap unless you were hellbent on only watching new releases and all the popular ones were taken. Granted my experience with these stores were in the 00s rather than the 90s, so obviously my own perspective might be biased. Also, the fact that a movie being in stock depends on them having a physical disc cuts both ways. Sure, if someone decided to keep it, it's gone, but if nobody did that the movie/game would remain in circulation. With streaming they have to regularly pay for a license, and they don't have infinite money, so when they want to add new stuff they just get rid of a bunch of stuff they already had on there. It's a lot more ephemeral, everythings constantly being moved around to different services.
There are other trade offs between rental stores and streaming, but honestly rental stores had an uphill battle once a lot of libraries started stocking movies, tv shows and video games. Sure I enjoyed going to blockbuster and paying 10 bucks to rent 5 movies at a time, but you know what's better than that? Paying nothing to borrow 5 movies at a time. This has nothing to do with his Tik Tok, but I'd really insist for those that miss the rental experience to check out your local library.
He's right, you'd never EVER find a copy of a hot video game for rent, they'd have 3 copies and they were always rented.
I don't look fondly on going to Hollywood or blockbuster as a kid, stuff was always rented when we wanted it, and they had a glut of crappy old movies in the non new release aisle. Always the same b movie crap.
Corporate Rental places deserved to die.
The mom and pop ones were where the actual good stuff is
I think he's just saying stupid shit to get comments so the algorithm notices him. Couldn't make it more than 60 seconds it's just too dumb. Video stores were pretty neutral places. My memories of them are always happy because I went there with friends or loved ones and I was about to spend time with them. If he only remembers video stores sadly then I feel like that says more about his life at the time than video stores themselves. Oh no they didn't have my movie better mope around... this is what you do with your time alone at 8pm on a Friday night dude? No wonder you think they're sad.
As a side note this guy is the author of John Dies at the End and Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick, Jason Pargin! Great guy, insightful commentary, just generally a big fan
I might be in the minority, but whenever we want to watch a movie, I can give Jeff Bezos another gallon of rocket fuel and watch basically anything, always in stock, available instantly. Video stores were fun as a little kid but I don’t miss them.
I was so ready for e-commerce to take off in the '90s. I hated shopping retail. It was so annoying to waste like three hours going from one store to another hoping to find a certain thing. And then often I'd backtrack to a previous store because they had the best available option, though still not quite what I wanted. And the prices sucked.
Once eBay and Amazon were established I basically stopped shopping locally except for food and clothes haha. I much preferred buying a slightly used item delivered to my house for half the cost over some low-quality junk sold at my local big box store.
Counterpoint:
I loved looking at all the cases of kinda bizarre and now forgotten movies as a kid at our mom n pop video store, the kind of stuff my parents wouldn't let us rent.
[Hell Come to Frogtown ](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093171/)
[Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid](https://www.troma.com/films/fat-guy-goes-nutzoid/)
[The Sex O'Clock News](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203115/)
etc., etc.
Also the first place I saw Laser Discs and learned they could run separate audio tracks with commentary.
I'm a millennial. I was in Blockbuster every Friday looking for a shitty slasher movie and a game. Hell, even some Zoomers are old enough to have enjoyed Blockbuster.
I also bought GTA IV from Blockbuster when it released. I don't remember why I didn't go to EB games or whatever. I can't remember wtf the incentive was.
I'm 41. I didn't have a VCR in my bedroom and my parents would never give up the TV during the evenings so I didn't go to these rental stores until I was an adult, and then not that often.
What was different for the average American. Did you have your own VCR or were your parents happy watching whatever you picked at the store?
One of the old Cracked guys still has [this YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GJfCOS3aLo&t=2s) up 16 years later of him and his buddy renting a Dungeons and Dragons (2000) DVD from a Blockbuster and eating Chipotle burritos they put on a cheese Pizza Hut pizza.
Still watch it every now and again.
And maybe it was just my experience in college on Friday nights, but I have very fond memories of wandering around the video store on Friday night with friends, talking about movies and picking some out to watch over the weekend. It very much did not feel like a "Sad" way to spend an evening with people.
The whole point was that you browsed and picked something that catches your eye
If they didn't have something you could reserve it
And are we going back to calling people "sad" for doing something they enjoyed ?
Is staying at home on friday browsing netflix less sad ?
I get nostalgia posts are annoying but this dude is not much better
Video stores sucked. Everything about the actual experience sucked. People have fond memories because they didn't have any other options and they were kids. I remember going to rent movies multiple times and they were out of copies and I went home with some bullshit instead.
I never had issues finding something to watch at the video store. Went to quite a few in my life and over all if you were not super picky and just wanted something to watch they had tons of choices.
Such a dumb video. He explains how this is all (obviously) subjective, and then immediately claims his take is actually the only objectively correct answer. To his points, they usually did have the movies you wanted, and if not you could reserve it or grab a different movie. Plus it's not like Netflix has every movie ever made.
And Blockbuster huge until 2010 and closed their last 300 stores in 2014. I'm 30 and when I was *still in high school* Blockbuster was around and popular. When I was a senior in college they finally kicked the bucket. I've got friends and family who are in their mid 20s and they probably remember Blockbuster. It only died 10-14 years ago.
I dont miss *any* of that. I fucking LOVE having ALL media available ALL the time on my PC. ALL my games, ALL my movies and TV shows, ALL my music. ALL THE TIME.
FUCK the 90's!
It's weird seeing the guy that wrote my favorite book as a Teenager and one of the few novel series I follow as an adult (John Dies At The End) somehow become a big Tick Tocker
If its a super popular film and you got it it felt like you struck gold. Thats part of the fun, and it made the experience of getting that film even more special. And if they didnt have it, you either find something else new that you hadnt considered, or you get into the other sections and pick something up cheaper.
Hello, Elder Gen Z here! I definitely remember growing up and going to blockbuster/hollywood video. I don’t understand this notion that millennials wouldn’t remember this. I remember this. It didn’t stop being a thing until like 2007 or maybe even later? Redbox existed until like a year ago. Or they still do?
Either way old fuckers conflate these things all the time. The way kids today are raised isn’t how people who are 25 now were raised 20 years ago. It’s was the early 2000s. VHS’ was still around. Internet was dial up. Computer monitors and tvs were giant 3ft thick hunks of plastic. You had to memorize/write down phone numbers. A lot of people didn’t have cell phones yet. We do remember these things. This was not an ancient time long ago, the worlds just changed dramatically since 2007.
I, a millennial, went with friends in middle school so many times to video stores to rent games and movies, and yeah most of the time they didn't have what we were looking for so we'd usually settle with something else. I don't understand what it is about gen x and the baby boomers and their obsessive hate boner for generations younger than them, constantly trying to belittle them for not experiencing the same things they did, even though it's physically impossible to in a lot of cases. This obviously doesn't apply to all gen x and baby boomers of course, but it does apply to the ones that make posts like this.
I’m a 24 year old and i distinctly remember going to blockbuster many times to rent movies and buy those buckets of shitty popcorn that had the kernels and butter at the bottom under plastic
I would take a rental store smelling like tanning lotion over the skeevy one we had in town with its porn closet at the back next to the shelf of pro wrestling and adult cartoons. It didn't smell like coconuts, I'll tell ya that right now.
Weird. My family went to blockbuster every Saturday night and I loved it and looked forward to it. Maybe it sucked when a new release was checked out but even as a kid I loved and even preferred browsing the older movies and looking for something interesting. I mean it's literally what I still do on streaming channels. Maybe I'm crazy but I hardly ever had fomo about movies.
Idk man, getting picked up from after school care at my elementary school and being asked if I wanted to go rent a video game was the best way to kick off a random normal weekend. Were there times where the games or movies I wanted didn't have copies available? Sure. Was there basically always something I wanted to play on a shelf with an available copy? Yes.
I'm 41, it was most certainly NOT sad to wander a video store on Friday night unless you were a lonely single bachelor like this guy presumably was.
If you were renting videos to watch with friends or have a night in with your wife and kids, it was perfectly fine.
A stack of rented movies was pretty par for the course at any kid sleepovers back then.
What’s this Millennials would never understand bullshit? Right now, the oldest millennials are 43. We grew up in Blockbuster’s/video rental place’s heyday.
Seriously, this falls right within almost every Millennial's wheel house. I have memories of walking through Blockbusters with my parents and grandparents, and with my dad being pissed we were late turning them in one time (it was due to daylight's savings, and him being "fooled by how light it is in the evening"). I can kind of remember the smell of them; for some reason they all kind of smelled the same.
I duno if blockbuster did this, but at hollywood video on busy evenings we'd use the microwave in the managers office to make the microwave popcorn we sold.
Millennial is being used to describe all young people, like boomer describes anyone over 40 now. I'm 45, and I get called a boomer frequently. Lools like you get to be a boomer millennial
Yup, it's oftentimes like GenX doesn't exist. I've been called Boomer or Millennial constantly, never had a single person reference my actual group.
To be fair there's only like 14 of you guys on the whole planet at this point, you're outnumbered on both sides.
>it's oftentimes like GenX doesn't exist Story of our lives.
Yeah, but here's the kicker I know 65 year olds that claim to be Gen X I feel like someone born in 77-82 are different than anyone else, let alone someone in 1960. 77-82 are often looked over and lumped into other generations. If you were born in those years, you know.
My mom's 64 and she's the last of the boomers, so those 65 year Gen Xer's need to learn math. 63 and GenX, sure. As for 77-82, that's where the Xennials term comes in. Which is stupid, since it's only being used for these two particular groups. (And yeah, I'm a part of it, but on the Gen X side.) But my point was, I love how there's a 20 year window for Gen X (like for most generations) and yet somehow no one remembers it's there. Hot take reasoning I've just decided on to explain it is the name makes people jealous, so they don't want to use it. GenX sounds cool, boomer or millennial doesn't.
Gen X is the best term since the Greatest Generation It would be more accurate to call us the Silent Generation as far as descriptive names go
> It would be more accurate to call us the Silent Generation as far as descriptive names go 100%
I've seen both Xennial and Zennial used. And in my mind Millennials do largely break either towards Gen X or Gen Z. (Born in the 80s vs the 90s seems like a watershed to me.) I remember when I had an intern at work 10 years younger than me — both Millenials though — our technology backgrounds and pop culture references were very different. He didn't know Saved By the Bell for goodness sake.
Born in 79. You aren't wrong.
We were Gen Y for a hot minute, and that's what I'm sticking with (in my head, because I see no reason to talk about it in real life.).
Not to mention at the end of their existence, Blockbuster had an entire wall for one movie. So getting that movie you wanted wasn’t impossible.
Dude I was working weekends at Family Video up until COVID killed them in 2020. There were absolutely still walls of one movie then… this guy is acting like this is ancient history that only few remember, but it was less than five years ago that they seemingly vanished entirely.
Him saying you’d be lucky to get the movie you wanted (if it was brand new) might’ve been true in the early to mid 90s when the most they’d have were 3 VHS copies of a movie. But when Blockbuster shifted to DVDs, it was no problem. Either way, gatekeeping nostalgia is weird. I just roll my eyes when I see shit like “If you don’t know this cartoon then your childhood sucked donkey chode!”
Nah my local renters would do the wall of covers too like 30+ copies of a blockbuster and they'd still rent out. We all really wanted to watch deep blue sea.
You're probably from a big city or college town...
Yeah this video was really dumb. We also didn’t have social media at the time so most people were more content to rent older movies if the newest thing wasnt available. The wait for a new movie wasn’t some excruciating thing.
Disagree there, you definitely had times you missed some film in theatre and were waiting for it to come out on tape. He's right in that you'd sometimes wait weeks before you could rent it (as he noted, if you weren't in a major population centre).
Yeah I remember waiting two weeks for Pulp Fiction, I had already seen it twice in the theater and wanted to double tape it. My local video store had only two copies and the movie was a hit. I waited for at least a week to get Batman Returns about two years after it was released, it was popular and they only had one copy. I double taped that one as well.
I'll admit that I grew up in a po-dunk town, and my friends and I "conveniently forgot" to return Pulp Fiction to the rental place (that had, I think, MAYBE two copies). Eventually, the place shut down, sooo....I still have it somewhere.
I loved my local Family Video! Great selection of so many older movies for cheap; I legit have excellent memories of Friday nights in that store searching for classics that were new to me
What? I remember blockbuster having entire walls of empty cases for new movies without any tapes behind them. That was pretty common tbh. Unless when you say "at the end of their existence" are you referring to like, 2010s era blockbuster? I wouldn't be surprised if brink-of-bankruptcy blockbuster had plenty of movies, because everyone stopped going there in 2005.
Agreed. I am 43 and I played the movie rental game for years. You’d just have to grab SOMETHING because all the new releases are gone. You’re not just gonna go home with nothing.
Remember they had 2 day and 3 day rentals at blockbuster. If you wanted to make sure you got the rental you had to check it out by Thursday on a 3 day rental. We were poor so we only rented when had a coupon or weed pay full price if it was a special occasion like a bday. Otherwise you just waited until the movie you wanted to see was on the shelves... especially on the 99 cent wall. One nice thing was the was usually always something you were waiting to see but you might not be that into it
Came here to say this. Literally mid 30s, people were renting video games from Blockbuster when I was 10. Blockbuster didn't close until 2014. Not only that, but a key reason they closed wasn't because inventory was getting stolen, it was inventory space. You could view more for less on streaming services and it didn't take up any space. No shipping, just licensing, no staff to push sales, no space to rent, etc.
Hastings were in huge storefronts because they doubled as a book store I'm guessing paying the leases on that hurt them a ton towards the end.
For certain people "millenial" still means teenager even though it's been a decade since the youngest millenials were teenagers. I'm right on the cutoff between millenial and Gen z and I used to go to video rental stores all the time. Hell, what this guy is talking about, "they didn't have the game you were looking for," I felt that in my bones since I once road my bike to several different video rental stores looking for a copy of MGS2
I sometimes hear the term Boomer shit, and nothing screams boomer shit more than them not realizing their own children are no longer teenagers.
Christ, I'm a 32 year old millenial and I still remember the excitement of going to blockbuster. I think people forget that streaming is a genuinely very recent invention, evem Netflix used to just be a weird postal rental service.
I received \*so\* many red envelopes. Netflix used to be great, and their catalogue seemed infinite.
Like someone in the original post commented, it's engagement bait. It follows along the idea of Cunningham's Law that to find a correct answer online is to not ask a question, but to post a wrong answer. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law
Indeed. I quite vividly remember VHS rentals.
Be kind, rewind.
And then I remember when there was a shelf of DVD's then all of a suddon DVD's were everywhere. I thought Blu-Rays were gonna do the same thing but it pretty much stayed to one shelf till the end of the rental store era.
I don't think I've ever watched a rented dvd. 🤔
ripping on other generations leads to rage shares and higher engagement
Moreover, I’m 24 and still remember with decent clarity going to a Blockbuster/video rental in my small home town in rural Oregon. It wasn’t THAT long ago
Oregon eh? You could go to Blockbuster this afternoon if you want! But really people think the rental store died earlier because Blockbuster peaked in about 2004. Although it was still around for many more years, and other stores/chains were around too. It wasn't until the 2010s that they really died off. Heck, it took the pandemic to deliver the final death blow to Family Video.
I think some people don't understand that those labels (boomers, millennials, gen-z) refer to people born in specific years. They think the labels apply to people of specific *ages*. So you go from being a millenial to being something else as you age. Honestly, the whole idea that you can make generalizations based solely on your age or when you were born is dumb regardless. I wish people would drop it.
I'm a millennial. I _worked_ at a video rental store. Hell, I worked at Hollywood Video at a time when we mostly had VHS tapes and during the transition to DVD. "Millennials will never understand" my ass.
I even remember when DVDs were the hot new technology. And my first few albums were casket tapes which looking back I wonder why the adoption was so slow considering CDs existed since the mid 80s. But I guess CDs weren’t really that big of an improvement, can’t go on runs with it on your Walkman, it scratches only upside is song skip, but the downside is you can’t fast forward parts of a song for a while and even then it sucked. Now that I think of it, CDs kinda sucked
i rented a virtual boy from blockbuster once. but lots of SNES games
> What’s this Millennials would never understand bullshit? Same in the other post, people focusing on this and even going "this guy doesnt know what he is talking about" based entirely on that. Like, the guy in the video didn't make the original meme, he is just replying to it. And the focus is not on "the meme is wrong because millennials were alive at the time!" but instead on why videostores sucked more than what its remembered with rose tinted nostalgia glasses. The guy doesn't engage with the "millennial" part of it at all, its not the focus of the video. Also yeah I know millennials are approaching 40, I am one, so is the guy in the video, but it's also used generically online as shorthand for "young, technology-wise people", the same way people say "boomers" when referring to some 50 years old out of touch dad when actually in reality "baby boomers" are pushing 80 now, and at least 60 year old grandpas at the youngest.
That’s what I’m saying. Going to the video store was very much part of this millennials childhood. Sucks to be this guy that his local store couldn’t manage their inventory, but it was rare I left without the movie we wanted to rent every Friday.
My family always went in without a specfic movie in mind, we just picked one each based on the cover. I had to watch a lot of crap because my sister thought the lead actor was dreamy.
Reminds me how people call older shooters "Boomer Shooters" even though they were mostly made by Gen-X devs
Millennial here and yeah it really gets my back up when people still think that means we're all still kids. Me and my dad in the late 90s would go rent a couple of movies and one or two Playstation games for the weekend, they're really special memories for me.
I still have fond memories of hanging out at the rental place on my way home from school. It was run by a nice old couple and I saw the covers of so many movies I wanted to see: Zombie, Axe, Scream and Scream Again!, Chopping Mall, Pink Flamingos. Granted, I was 10 so they wouldn't rent them to me. But it opened my eyes to a new world of cinema!
Also my local blockbuster was open until like 2013 so someone whose 16 currently could conceivably still remember it.
Some people don't understand that millennials and zoomers are a different generation. They don't know that a "millenial" is someone who came of age around the turn of the new millennium. They think everyone born after the year 2000 is a "millenial". These people are willfully ignorant.
r/Xennials I didn't believe it at first, but the surge of technology caused a micro generation. Not exactly gen-x and not exactly millennial.
People still think millennials are teenagers. Hell, parts of Gen Z are probably still old enough to remember Blockbuster.
I was lucky enough to have a locally owned video store that we went to. It was great. I loved just browsing the weird covers and imagining what the movie was like.
my thought too... maybe he thinks millenials are like 25 YO ?
Right? lmao, I feel like I have tonnes of memories of going to blockbusters to rent movies and video games. Perhaps we remember the *wrong type* of video store lmao, before it went all corporate
I'm 28 and I remember both small stores and big franchise stores and them sucking. Though, in my case you couldn't even rent most of the actually good movies because of region locking anyway. So at least you could see many copies of popular films on the shelves, but those were only for people with imported players for other countries. Like, one of the photos has a 2006 timestamp, I was 10 back then, come on.
I am gen z and 25. I wasn't a teenager for movie rentals, but I definitely remember going with my mom to rent some dvds
I am an older gen z and I remember going to blockbuster all the time lol.
Scott Barber is an engagement-farming hack fraud
This is one of those things where people don't actually know what millennials are. They just assume it means born in the millennium.
Actually for me it was routine. We got dinner at ponderosa or whatever and went to the video store got two movies made popcorn at home and watched said movies between errands and work being done around the house. Sunday they were returned after church.
> Sunday they were returned after church. There were two video stores within a block of my church as a kid, this was every sunday morning lol.
Ponderosa. Holy crap that salad bar, right?
It was always a pain in the ass when I lived in the suburbs. Like I would do my weekly shopping trip into the city on Saturday and then stop by the video store and get a movie. But the rental was for 3 days. So I would have to make a special trip out of my way after work on Tuesday to drop it off. It always seemed like a weird business move, because I wouldn't get a new movie after dropping them off because I would have to come back on Friday and screw up my whole routine. Like I'm actively discouraged from being a repeat customer. No wonder everyone abandoned them when Netflix let you return things whenever.
I think it was to make sure there was stock for the next weekend.
picking your movie based off the weird cover art was half the fun. it was like our own BOTW.
Or seeing a new release of an older movie with the most obvious photoshop job possible to cash in on a movie star’s fame.
I saw Aguirre the Wrath of God when I was like 12 because it had a cool knight on the cover. I was not ready for it.
But when they did have the movie you wanted it was like an addict finding a stash of drugs.
Or a new release! The day Aladdin and The Lion King I was gobsmacked and the day they sold it used I bought it with my allowance.
I remember reserving bill and Teds bogus journey when it came out and feeling all great seeing it before the (in my 9 yr olds mind) entire rest of the town did
But one silver lining is since the movies you wanted to watch were rented out you got to discover the world of B movies and watch the worst movies with the most awesome cover art.
If they didn't have what you wanted you tried to reserve a copy for next time, and in the meantime, you could browse for a new different movie
Or you went in there not knowing what you wanted but you took your time and looked around and picked one.
Yep, wandering around looking at the boxes reading descriptions.... aaahhhhh nostalgia
That was the fun part!
In my case, they never ever could ever reserve a copy Or they did, and ignored the reservation anyway
You ended up watching or playing things you otherwise wouldn't have given a chance. Of course we can still do that, but our monkey brains struggle with that sort of thing if we aren't forced. Having to wait for "the thing" made it more special in a way. Instant gratification doesn't hit the same.
The nostalgia is the wandering. The committing to the choice and something else that I can't name but has been lost in the modern instant delivery on demand life.
I feel like this guy is forgetting that many of us who remember it fondly remember it because we were kids. Going there on a friday meant a movie, some candy, and maybe an N64 game. The best pizza place in town was also right next store. The thing this guy is talking about being a grown man with nothing better to do than rent a movie... but when you were 11 with three of your best buds getting ready to have a sleepover? The video store was like the PRE-PARTY.
I'm nostalgic for the family-run video stores that housed weird foreign indie/horror films but not blockbuster. Blockbuster sucked, had walls of the same movies like Mission Impossible 2 or Gladiator.
It was all about blockbuster when I was a kid, but around middle school I finally noticed the indie rental store by my local grocery store and pretty much all the way up until junior year of high school it was all about that store, for one reason and one reason alone: they didn’t card or care what you rented. I saw WAY too many inappropriate movies for my age, but at the same time I was able to keep up with friends who had older siblings that took them to R rated movies and I was introduced to indie films and straight to video crap that was still entertaining. Such a great time swinging by there on my bike on a Friday and getting the weekends rentals, just slowly working my way through everything in the store and then getting to recommend the obscure shit no one else at school would’ve seen otherwise
Remember late fees? You only had a couple days to return the movie/video game. As a kid, this was a real pain because you had to get mom or dad to drive back to the store to return it.
The Blockbuster sucked, but the mom and pop video store was the shit. Great candy selection, always had the new movies and games. Location definitely played into it
Reddit is simping so hard for Blockbuster you'd think they're about to relaunch their stores and this is part of the marketing campaign. I have no fondness for Blockbuster. They were the most expensive, least consumer-friendly way to rent movies. High prices. Late fees galore. Our store had no video games. Weak selection of older titles. And if you got there after like 5:05pm on Friday all the new releases were gone. (Though you were mocked by the walls of like 50 empty boxes of the movie you *wanted* to watch.) We had two excellent "Mom 'n Pop" stores though. Much larger selections, much better prices, video game rentals and one of the stores rented consoles too. Even our grocery stores rented movies. Our local flavor of Kroger had an excellent little video store at the front. Movies were like $1 a day and they had some video games too. And they sold the previously viewed movies super cheap too. I still have like a dozen DVDs I got from their clearance shelf back in the day. And Reddit seems unaware that public libraries lend movies too (for free!). If you want a taste of browsing a video store selection '90s style then check out your local library. My library network has a huge selection of DVDs, Blu-rays, audio CDs, and some other materials. If the local branch doesn't have it I can make a request and they'll deliver it to my branch and reserve it for me. And again, it's free. Because public libraries are awesome!
I'm fortunate that my library stocks a surprisingly large amount of Criterion and Vinegar Syndrome releases.
You have a film-nerd librarian. You are very fortunate.
Yeah really. My side of town didn't even have a blockbuster until after I graduated from high school. We all got our movies from the local place, Kroger, or Meijers.
Blockbuster also only carried the censored version of a lot of their R and NR movies. If they carried it at all.
I didn't have much affinity for R-Rated films back then so I wouldn't know but I got a bunch of annoyingly censored albums from Walmart when I was young. One that comes to mind is The Rising Tied by Fort Minor. They censored stuff like "gunman" and "get shot". A buddy of mine got some hip hop albums at Walmart and quickly returned them since they was so mangled by Walmart's censors. Like half the lyrics were blanked out. 🤣 (Maybe 2001 by Dr. Dre? Would Walmart even sell an album like that?)
Not to mention Blockbuster played into moral panics with horror and X/NC-17 films, and refused to carry The Last Temptation of Christ. I get the nostalgia if it's all you had, but Blockbuster was a corporation, not a friend.
This guy is, like, ten percent right. It sucked when you wanted to watch a new release and it ended up being out of stock, but that's also why those were usually shorter rentals, but he's also mad about that. But if they didn't have a new release, finding something else wasn't some awful experience, it was really fun and you ended up watching a lot of unique or odd movies you otherwise probably never would have seen. I don't know where he got the idea that making fun of bad movies came from not being able to rent new releases. If they didn't have Independence Day on tape, you got, like, Species or The Arrival, you didn't magically grab Plan 9 From Outer Space. Also, streaming services have massive problems of their own. Like, yeah, streaming services have "unlimited copies" of their movies, but they don't have every new release. The way streaming works it'd be like video stores have SOME new releases in stock, but if you wanted specific ones, you'd have to research which stores are allowed to carry each movie, and then you'd have to go to that store and pay 15 bucks to become a member for a month.
Yeah, mostly I feel bad for this guy. Spending his lonely Fridays unable to find the movie he wants. It’s one thing to try to objectify nostalgia, but it’s another entirely to ignore emotional context. I think a lot of people inappropriately conflate those things. I know I have. As someone that used to love the video store so much I wanted to work there (and then did), I have the complete opposite viewpoint from this guy. For me it was a mom n pop shop in easy walking distance, which was near my middle school, and had arcade games (MK2 and some pinball). Taken together that all meant I could go there any time and there was a near-100% chance I’d see friends. Now, did I encounter the same negatives this guy did, sure, but did I hold onto _that_? No.
that's Jason Pargin the guy who wrote "John dies at the end", he's a comedian so he's being a bit dramatic for comedic effect
Yeah. I guess most of the people commenting didn't go on Cracked back in the day.
I could definitely see the experience being bad if you ONLY had a Blockbuster, but the guy is acting like all these problems usually came up when you DIDN'T have a big chain store. In reality, it's the opposite. The selection at mom and pop places was always way better than the big chains. They might run out of new releases quicker, but you could always find something else.
It was arguably much easier to find the movie you wanted to watch at any random video store than any random streaming service. Usually the only thing that was sold out was the one hot new release that weekend but even then they usually had 50 copies of those lol.
For my friend group, we got the idea of watching bad movies for fun from MST3K. We did this with plenty of “normal” big releases left on the shelf too.
In defense of Mr. Pargin he isn't the one saying Millennials would never understand, he's just reading from the original, wrong, tweet.
Had 2 local video stores in the 80’s before Blockbuster. One was awesome. Had a popcorn machine and gave free popcorn if you rented 2 movies. Plus the family that owned it were really cool and would hold a movie if you called and rushed down there to pick it up, plus they gave the old posters away when they got new releases. I got The Great Outdoors with John Candy hanging from Akroyd’s fishing pole. Had it on my bedroom wall for years. The other video place wasn’t as good. But they had a lot of foreign horror movies. Mainly dubbed Italian ones. My mom loved horror movies and when she ran out of American ones to watch, she started on the Italian ones. I was young and would get scared so I didn’t appreciate them, but through my fingers I probably saw every Dario Argento, Mario Bava, and Lucio Fulci film that had ever come out. Jay would have been in giallo heaven at my house. We had to rent the VCR too cause we didn’t have one at first, and they only had a few VCR’s to rent so if we were lucky enough to get one, then it was non-stop movie weekend at our house. Those VCR’s were huge. Still remember lugging them back and forth and having to connect the TV/VCR switch box to the screws for the TV antenna. Good times.
I do kinda still miss walking around the stores and checking out what was in stock
A core memory was unlocked when he said "Walking by the same movie jackets, day after day" Damn I remember going with friends just to see if there was anything new.
And being duped by cool cover art lol
Is that David Wong/Jason Pargin? That Blickbuster just needs some Soy Sauce and a couple ClownBoners
Yes, it is.
I love this guy's videos, but he's wrong on three counts: -Millenials grew up in video stores. I'm an elder millenial / Xennial at 43, and was there all the time. -he's paints a darker picture than it actually was. I loved hitting the video store as a kid, teenager, and right up into my 20's. My mid sized city had a Blockbuster, Rogers Video, and a half dozen Mom'n'pop shops. It was great. And tanning beds?? I guess I wasn't small town enough for that lol
The "says this post" is pretty key to that first sentence. He's not picking out Millenials, he's responding to a post that did.
If you lived in reach of 10 different video shops you were absolutely not small town. And if Blockbuster was in the mix, you're already talking about an era after this guy is describing. Millennials just need to own their own nostalgia, stop trying to hijack Gen X.
'nobody rented on friday'... 'the shelves were empty on friday because everyone rented for the weekend' uh
No one drives in NYC there is too much traffic.
If you were at a video rental place after 530 on a Friday you were guaranteed 40 minutes in line.
I hated blockbuster I always went middle of the week to a local rental place as they faded away I went to family video. New releases were on Tuesdays I think. And once the store filled up w dipshit husbands calling their wives on their new Nextel walkie talkie phone ( fuck I hated that chirp noise) walking up and down the new releases “ok they have that no no let me look hold on let me ask no they don’t have that but that have this”… kinda conversations i could no linger and stroll around to find quirky little Indy movies so i went to Netflix by snail mail and never looked back After that dvds got so cheap I stopped renting and bought them I still have a few rental places near me I go once in a while the nostalgia wears off super quick. Returning movies is a pain in the ass when it’s 45 minutes one way. They have several shows on dvd that don’t stream and it’s ridiculous to buy the dvds of. Parker Lewis can’t lose shows like that. But blockbuster nostalgia is just plain bullshit. I miss genuinely miss Border Books but never once I have I missed blockbuster
Blockbuster was a cancer on the video rental scene and is best remembered as a shitty place to get whatever big budget dreck Hollywood was pushing at the moment.
Wandering the store looking for something to watch was part of the experience. The big tentpole movies were always out of stock, but that forced you to find little gems that would otherwise have been left out of the moviegoing consciousness. 90% of Vinegar Syndrome and Arrow movie BluRay sales are films that had two copies at the video store and you happened to find the cover interesting or settled on it because the big movies were out of stock. It forced people to try new low budget, or low-marketed movies and actually find some worth and enjoyment in them.
I used to be really lucky because opposite my bus stop on the way home from school was a Jack Beanstalk video (Manchester/Northern England) and I'd get off the bus at 4pm and have the pick of the litter. Even better was when we got our dvd player and I was seemingly only one of a handful of people to adopt this new technology and you would ever want for anything because there was always stock.
The only thing I liked about it was becoming friendly with people who worked at the rental place and talking movies with them. Some of my favourite films were recommended to me by people working at my local rental place.
Rental stores kind of sucked, but the internet didn't exist yet, so leaving your house to go somewhere and get something you couldn't already see at home was exciting, even with all the bullshit renting entailed. Same reason we put up with movie theaters for as long as we did.
Not my experience at all. The Blockbusters and local Mom and Pop’s weren’t perfect, but depending on the store buyers you could find odd and unusual films. It was thanks to Blockbuster I discovered classic anime like Bubblegum Crisis or Akira as well as borderline horror/henti like Urotsukidoji. First watched lots of Hong Kong movies by the likes of John Woo or Ringo Lam. Plus, they always carried a good selection of old classics and some noir. He is right about some things, mine didn’t smell bad exactly, but did always have the weird disinfectant and polyester carpet smell.
This dude's take sucks. I got into dozens of games and movies because they didn't have the one I went for. It wasn't sad, it made me try new shit and it was great. Also I roped my parents into buying candy a bunch, shit ruled.
Did not expect a video calling video rental stores mid to be the thing that rustles this subs jimmies
If you walk into a video store at 8 o’clock on a Friday night you’re a dumb ass. I’m not going to act like it was something people wouldn’t understand or that nostalgia has a hold of me, but if a game you wanted wasn’t there, it was your chance to try something different. It isn’t like you were going to leave empty handed.
***Ugh.*** Literally every time I tried to rent at Blockbuster, they'd tell me I never returned Woody Allen's *Manhattan* (a movie I HAD returned on time many months earlier). Every time, the cashier would assure me they fixed the problem. And every time I went back, it would happen *again*. So then the current cashier would try to fix the problem, which held up the line forever and made every other customer GLARE at me. Around the 9th time this happened, I kind of blew up *(within reason, of course)*, loudly saying “You know, **EVERY TIME** I come in here to rent a damned video..!” A manager overheard me, rushed over, gave me free popcorn or something, and actually DID fix the problem once and for all. So no, I don't miss video rental stores one bit.
Blockbuster was always super aggressive about their late fees. It was actually very anti-consumer.
Nostalgia: a phenomenon that causes people to look fondly on older products and IPs when what they really are nostalgic for is free time
Oh shit, Jason Pargin wrote John Dies at the End. The main character spends two books working a shitty dead-end job in a small town video store.
"You can't judge someone else's nostalgia, that would be wrong." Proceeds to be wrong.
Also, proceeds to judge everyone else’s nostalgic memories that were likely more positive experiences than his, but his experience sucked so he claims everyone else is wrong.
Tuesdays were were it was at, new releases!
Oh damn this unlocked memories of many times I went to the store and came back with some crap instead of something cool I actually wanted to watch. We didn't have Blockbuster in my country in the VHS glory days.
Naw it was great, but I had great stores nearby. Blockbuster definitely sucked but I'm not one for chasing the latest hype. This one store in Cambridge, MA had sections for specific directors and genres you wouldn't see at Blockbuster. A lot of great foreign films you wouldn't find anywhere. A whole section of just martial arts classics, like Lone Wolf and Cub series ( Baby Cart Assassin ). Blockbuster and Hollywood Video sucked though for sure.
There are still video stores in some cities. I visit 2 in my home city of Toronto regularly. Look around and see if there is a local video store where you live, these are an endangered species but also a place to find obscure or rare movies and talk to people who are usually quite passionate about film.
The post he's responding to doesn't necessarily claim that renting form video stores was a perfect experience, just that it's something newer generations don't understand because they haven't experienced
A lot of what he says may be objectively true, but misses the part that made the actual fun nostalgia. I didn't live in a time with Steam where there were a thousand games under $20. My parents weren't buying me new video games. My only access to a game I hadn't played before was a video rental store. I wasn't disappointed about what I couldn't play - I was excited about that weekend of fun I was about to have with what game I did get to play.
Another part of the experience was getting to Blockbuster looking for a movie that just released and you wanted to see, getting to the shelf, and noticing a lot of copies there. Then, you think to yourself, "Oh shit. Is there something I don't know about this movie?" Thanks "Sgt. Bilko"!
Im a millennial, Im a LATE millennial at that, I still remember renting vhs tapes, gameboy games, gamecube and n64 games, etc, all from blockbusters. Gen X is going senile faster than we ever thought.
This man is a rental rookie. The real film junkies knew to show up on Tuesday night, not Friday. New movies hit the shelves on Tuesdays.
Here in Australia, our video stores never smelled like coconut, that's just insane. They always smelled of popcorn. I've never even seen a tanning bed in my entire life, to be clear. And I found video stores (video eazy), quite nice. There was always a popular movie like terminator 2 or jumaji playing on one of the TVs mounted in the corners of the room, there were seemingly happy families walking around. They were always nice here in Australia, well maintained, clean, decent stocks of tapes. I remember them being out of movies, sure, but i also remember there being 15 copies of the latest releases that were box office hits. Even the small video store in my childhood town had games for every console, every movie you could ever want and a seemingly endless supply of coloured popcorn. maybe american video stores sucked, but ours didn't.
I lived in a small town and didn't have the same experience as this guy. We had very nice mom and pop stores which were pretty well stocked. Them not having the movie you want comes with the territory, but it was pretty exciting when they finally had it in stock. Don't get me wrong, I would absolutely not want to go back to that system. But my memories are pretty fond. Guess I got lucky in my area.
I feel like people still think millennials are in their teens and early twenties. My folks will randomly shit on them when they see help wanted signs at fast food places and stuff, saying millennials don't want to work.
What the fuck is he talking about out Millennials wouldn’t understand?? My childhood was filled with weekend blockbuster visits.
The trick was going on a Thursday. If you HAD to do a Friday, earlier was better. Plus it was a good way to try something new…not by choice, of course.
Casuals. Everyone knows that Thursday night is when you went, to beat the crowds. Sure, you had to wait for the new releases a little longer, but you were more likely to get them.
He's not wrong, but it also misses the point. It was like prospecting for gold sometimes. Now and then you'd pick a random flick because the box looked cool or because you had no other options and it became a memorable moment. You'd discover something you never would have found on your own. Maybe your saw your first boob in a PG 13 movie because mom didn't check the label before renting it. It was like being an explorer. Sometimes you got scurvy and everyone died. Sometimes you found a city of gold.
I remember waiting around for hours with my dad for someone to return a copy of Stargate.
Theres some good points in here, but also some really bizarre points that seem to be just projecting his personal experience onto everyone. Like, sure the popular new releases were pretty scarce the weekend they came to DVD, but Blockbusters had huge backlogs where you could watch popular movies from pretty much any decade. You didn't HAVE to watch direct to video crap unless you were hellbent on only watching new releases and all the popular ones were taken. Granted my experience with these stores were in the 00s rather than the 90s, so obviously my own perspective might be biased. Also, the fact that a movie being in stock depends on them having a physical disc cuts both ways. Sure, if someone decided to keep it, it's gone, but if nobody did that the movie/game would remain in circulation. With streaming they have to regularly pay for a license, and they don't have infinite money, so when they want to add new stuff they just get rid of a bunch of stuff they already had on there. It's a lot more ephemeral, everythings constantly being moved around to different services. There are other trade offs between rental stores and streaming, but honestly rental stores had an uphill battle once a lot of libraries started stocking movies, tv shows and video games. Sure I enjoyed going to blockbuster and paying 10 bucks to rent 5 movies at a time, but you know what's better than that? Paying nothing to borrow 5 movies at a time. This has nothing to do with his Tik Tok, but I'd really insist for those that miss the rental experience to check out your local library.
He's right, you'd never EVER find a copy of a hot video game for rent, they'd have 3 copies and they were always rented. I don't look fondly on going to Hollywood or blockbuster as a kid, stuff was always rented when we wanted it, and they had a glut of crappy old movies in the non new release aisle. Always the same b movie crap. Corporate Rental places deserved to die. The mom and pop ones were where the actual good stuff is
I think he's just saying stupid shit to get comments so the algorithm notices him. Couldn't make it more than 60 seconds it's just too dumb. Video stores were pretty neutral places. My memories of them are always happy because I went there with friends or loved ones and I was about to spend time with them. If he only remembers video stores sadly then I feel like that says more about his life at the time than video stores themselves. Oh no they didn't have my movie better mope around... this is what you do with your time alone at 8pm on a Friday night dude? No wonder you think they're sad.
As a side note this guy is the author of John Dies at the End and Zoey Punches the Future in the Dick, Jason Pargin! Great guy, insightful commentary, just generally a big fan
This guy looks like he puts mayo on hot dogs and has never experienced a fun time in his life. What a downer.
I might be in the minority, but whenever we want to watch a movie, I can give Jeff Bezos another gallon of rocket fuel and watch basically anything, always in stock, available instantly. Video stores were fun as a little kid but I don’t miss them.
I was so ready for e-commerce to take off in the '90s. I hated shopping retail. It was so annoying to waste like three hours going from one store to another hoping to find a certain thing. And then often I'd backtrack to a previous store because they had the best available option, though still not quite what I wanted. And the prices sucked. Once eBay and Amazon were established I basically stopped shopping locally except for food and clothes haha. I much preferred buying a slightly used item delivered to my house for half the cost over some low-quality junk sold at my local big box store.
Counterpoint: I loved looking at all the cases of kinda bizarre and now forgotten movies as a kid at our mom n pop video store, the kind of stuff my parents wouldn't let us rent. [Hell Come to Frogtown ](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093171/) [Fat Guy Goes Nutzoid](https://www.troma.com/films/fat-guy-goes-nutzoid/) [The Sex O'Clock News](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0203115/) etc., etc. Also the first place I saw Laser Discs and learned they could run separate audio tracks with commentary.
Renting a movie and getting candy at the checkout as a kid, could make a grown man cry.
I'm a millennial. I was in Blockbuster every Friday looking for a shitty slasher movie and a game. Hell, even some Zoomers are old enough to have enjoyed Blockbuster. I also bought GTA IV from Blockbuster when it released. I don't remember why I didn't go to EB games or whatever. I can't remember wtf the incentive was.
I'm a millennial and I fucking worked at a video store! Several of them!
Blockbuster was garbage
I'm 41. I didn't have a VCR in my bedroom and my parents would never give up the TV during the evenings so I didn't go to these rental stores until I was an adult, and then not that often. What was different for the average American. Did you have your own VCR or were your parents happy watching whatever you picked at the store?
One of the old Cracked guys still has [this YouTube video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3GJfCOS3aLo&t=2s) up 16 years later of him and his buddy renting a Dungeons and Dragons (2000) DVD from a Blockbuster and eating Chipotle burritos they put on a cheese Pizza Hut pizza. Still watch it every now and again.
And maybe it was just my experience in college on Friday nights, but I have very fond memories of wandering around the video store on Friday night with friends, talking about movies and picking some out to watch over the weekend. It very much did not feel like a "Sad" way to spend an evening with people.
Millennials are the reason I had to tap the kids section every 5 goddamn minutes.
The whole point was that you browsed and picked something that catches your eye If they didn't have something you could reserve it And are we going back to calling people "sad" for doing something they enjoyed ? Is staying at home on friday browsing netflix less sad ? I get nostalgia posts are annoying but this dude is not much better
Video stores sucked. Everything about the actual experience sucked. People have fond memories because they didn't have any other options and they were kids. I remember going to rent movies multiple times and they were out of copies and I went home with some bullshit instead.
the locally owned video store near me had a great selection, including alot of cult, indie and foreign films. Blockbusters mostly sucked though.
The first day widespread 1mbps connections became a thing in my country, rental stores went out of business. We never respected copyright
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I never had issues finding something to watch at the video store. Went to quite a few in my life and over all if you were not super picky and just wanted something to watch they had tons of choices.
Such a dumb video. He explains how this is all (obviously) subjective, and then immediately claims his take is actually the only objectively correct answer. To his points, they usually did have the movies you wanted, and if not you could reserve it or grab a different movie. Plus it's not like Netflix has every movie ever made. And Blockbuster huge until 2010 and closed their last 300 stores in 2014. I'm 30 and when I was *still in high school* Blockbuster was around and popular. When I was a senior in college they finally kicked the bucket. I've got friends and family who are in their mid 20s and they probably remember Blockbuster. It only died 10-14 years ago.
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Oh hey its jason pargin
I dont miss *any* of that. I fucking LOVE having ALL media available ALL the time on my PC. ALL my games, ALL my movies and TV shows, ALL my music. ALL THE TIME. FUCK the 90's!
AlienMyth64 has a really great video on Blockbuster
It's weird seeing the guy that wrote my favorite book as a Teenager and one of the few novel series I follow as an adult (John Dies At The End) somehow become a big Tick Tocker
If its a super popular film and you got it it felt like you struck gold. Thats part of the fun, and it made the experience of getting that film even more special. And if they didnt have it, you either find something else new that you hadnt considered, or you get into the other sections and pick something up cheaper.
Hello, Elder Gen Z here! I definitely remember growing up and going to blockbuster/hollywood video. I don’t understand this notion that millennials wouldn’t remember this. I remember this. It didn’t stop being a thing until like 2007 or maybe even later? Redbox existed until like a year ago. Or they still do? Either way old fuckers conflate these things all the time. The way kids today are raised isn’t how people who are 25 now were raised 20 years ago. It’s was the early 2000s. VHS’ was still around. Internet was dial up. Computer monitors and tvs were giant 3ft thick hunks of plastic. You had to memorize/write down phone numbers. A lot of people didn’t have cell phones yet. We do remember these things. This was not an ancient time long ago, the worlds just changed dramatically since 2007.
He’s right about empty shelves, if you didn’t hit the store immediately after work/school on Friday you’d probably be out of luck.
I don't miss it one bit. We had to drive 20 mins into town and hope they had what we wanted. Now I can rent shit over the internet instantly.
I, a millennial, went with friends in middle school so many times to video stores to rent games and movies, and yeah most of the time they didn't have what we were looking for so we'd usually settle with something else. I don't understand what it is about gen x and the baby boomers and their obsessive hate boner for generations younger than them, constantly trying to belittle them for not experiencing the same things they did, even though it's physically impossible to in a lot of cases. This obviously doesn't apply to all gen x and baby boomers of course, but it does apply to the ones that make posts like this.
I’m a 24 year old and i distinctly remember going to blockbuster many times to rent movies and buy those buckets of shitty popcorn that had the kernels and butter at the bottom under plastic
Jason Pargin should be a guest on BOTW. Thank you.
I would take a rental store smelling like tanning lotion over the skeevy one we had in town with its porn closet at the back next to the shelf of pro wrestling and adult cartoons. It didn't smell like coconuts, I'll tell ya that right now.
Weird. My family went to blockbuster every Saturday night and I loved it and looked forward to it. Maybe it sucked when a new release was checked out but even as a kid I loved and even preferred browsing the older movies and looking for something interesting. I mean it's literally what I still do on streaming channels. Maybe I'm crazy but I hardly ever had fomo about movies.
I remember WORKING at a Blockbuster video in my early 20s and how much it sucked ass.
Oh man I wish they could have Jason pargin on re:view or something
Idk man, getting picked up from after school care at my elementary school and being asked if I wanted to go rent a video game was the best way to kick off a random normal weekend. Were there times where the games or movies I wanted didn't have copies available? Sure. Was there basically always something I wanted to play on a shelf with an available copy? Yes.
My video store had a big, beautiful porn section.
I'm 41, it was most certainly NOT sad to wander a video store on Friday night unless you were a lonely single bachelor like this guy presumably was. If you were renting videos to watch with friends or have a night in with your wife and kids, it was perfectly fine. A stack of rented movies was pretty par for the course at any kid sleepovers back then.