Who wants in? We can talk about what is was like to write a letter to your grandma or having no other way to ask someone out other than by calling them on the phone. Or checking out movies at Blockbuster or whatever your national equivalent was (we usually checked out videos at the grocery store, actually).
We’re cool because we can actually remember the USSR and “East” Germany. Although not as cool, I can remember when homophobia and transphobia was so much more widely accepted and the “default” position for most Americans. Not as cool.
Going to the video store was a nice little weekly ritual. It’s objectively more convenient to have streaming services pumping everything into our eyeballs instantly, but the extra friction of a trip out and the slight chance that something might not be available made the movies and games themselves seem more valuable. Oh god I just read back through that and spontaneously dislocated my hip
I really hope I’m not being a boomer and remembering the past with rose-colored glasses, but there really was something to that weekend ritual of picking out movies at the video store versus just picking whatever from a streaming service. Of course, having all those options available now is incredible too, so not better just different.
I loved it so much! Hollywood Video and Blockbuster ruled. I think being able to pick up the box and look at the cover art and stuff is it’s own special dopamine hit
The social aspect of suggestions and such.
Man, I loved the video store so much I actually ended up working at one for a few years.
Had a boss that robbed the place blind, on inventory days while the rest of us were scanning everything in the store, he just sat at the counter up front and manually entered all the UPC numbers of stuff he’d stolen.
We randomly got a copy of Attack of the Clones that was dubbed in Italian, despite a near complete absence of ethnic Italians in the area, and we would play it all the time because it made the film into a literal “space opera.” The film was much better when you couldn’t understand the wooden dialog delivered in stilted performances.
They didn’t have enough keys for every shift leader to get one, so I was taught how to jimmy open a lock with a credit card instead for when I had to open the store.
But of course, the real benefit was the rentals, watched so many director commentaries on DVDs because that was just the coolest thing. I still miss commentaries with streaming stuff these days.