Nothing made you feel more alive than wanting to rent a specific movie/video game and going into the store to see if there were any copies left behind the markers.
Was Hollywood Video or Blockbuster better? I come from a small town and we only had a couple mom and pop video rental places. I would ask my mom every single Friday when she picked me up from school if we could rent a movie and some times she would answer before I even got in the car. Good times.
Random video rental store story but in the mid to late 80s my Dad would get this movie for my brother who is autistic from this rental place in Manhattan Beach just about every week. It was a movie about flight, my brother was and still is obsessed with planes and such and it was some random like 20-30 min movie they showed at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum but was not distributed widely (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075333/). Anyway, after my dad got this for my brother 5-6 times the guy who was working there at the time said "I will just sell you this for a dollar, you already rented it way more than it would cost to buy it" so my dad gladly took the offer and thanked him. This happened before I was born and such and some years later my dad saw an interview with a director and he was like "Oh I know this guy, he sold us the 'To Fly' VHS'. It was Quentin Tarantino.
I remember a high school reggneck would rack up late fees at Blockbuster, dad would call and freeze account . Reggneck would be at blockbuster with a young lady trying to rent , they would have to call to get approval. Embarrassed
I think it was Hollywood video but I remember the first time I discovered they had an adult/porn section. Trying to peek in that “secret” room to catch a glimpse of a boob on a vhs cover was prime puberty. Kids these days don’t know how good they have it.
Scrambled cable channels. Watching the TV guide channel to see what channel Spice or Playboy TV was on. Having that remote with the alternate channel button ready to roll with the speed of a cheetah. Times used to be hard.
Nowadays these ungrateful kids just have Emily Ratajkowski and reddit girl throwing full frontal pics at them for free.
kazaa photoshops of naked Christina Aguilera and Britney Spears that I was convinced were real that were also probably loaded with crippling viruses and refreshing to see if the titty part had loaded yet. No, 13 year old me wouldn’t know anything about that.
Back in college I rented anchorman like a week or two before summer break. I packed up all my stuff in my apartment and when I got home I realized I’d packed up the anchorman rental. A few weeks went by and I got a voicemail from the Blockbuster store telling me I’d accrued $75 in late fees, and then a few weeks after that that my account was suspended. When I drove back for fall semester I went by the store and it was closed permanently. I sometimes think that I was a contributing factor in their downfall...
My friend printed the tiffani amber thiessen see through shirt pic in giant size where it was multiple pages that had to be pieced together on a black and white printer CuckFinn
That was me. I’m that friend. These kids don’t know about the struggle and those who paved the way to porn hub.
Young fusion’s first j off material was color printed pictures of TAT stored in the back of an upper bathroom cabinet. I would later learn to save them to looney tunes themed 3.5 diskettes.
My best friend and I found his dad’s Penthouse stash in the back of a filing cabinet when we were 10 or 11. It couldn’t have been anymore stereotypical. Fast forward probably 20 years at my friend’s sister’s wedding. Everyone was having a good time reminiscing and the subject of the dad’s nudie mag stash came up. He said “Of course I knew you were taking them. That’s why I left them there.”
One of my favorite things was walk with my two oldest to blockbuster get ice cream and rent movies and games.
The last Blockbuster is also a AirBnB https://news.airbnb.com/store-manager-lists-worlds-last-blockbuster-on-airbnb-for-local-residents/