Zoomer here.
What was renting movies like?
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Zoomer here. What was renting movies like?
Zoomer here.
What was renting movies like?
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Tip Your Landlord Shirt $21.68 |
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I don't know I'd just rent the video games because my computer was too shitty to run emulators. Movies have always been easy to pirate.
Nope, you fall in with the fricking zoomers. When emulating video games started getting popular renting movies were already fading away like your grandmother on her death bed. Anyone born post 92' don't count unless you had older siblings.
Emulators had been a thing since the 90s and started picking up steam in the late 90s and early 2000s.
are you moronic?
I was born in '89 and I can assure you that was not the case.
Born '91 and I was emulating Gameboy on my dad's PC in the late 90s. He was too cheap to buy me Pokemon so I played blue that way in 99. Movie rentals were still going very strong then.
I will agree that emulating wasn't as easy or prolific in the 90s as it was in the mid 2000s though. Remember modding an Xbox to play whatever you wanted? Fun times.
Yeah, I played Green with my brother before Blue and Red were released in America. It was all in Japanese but we just brute forced it.
Gameboy and NES emulation in the 90's was alright but I remember being unable to get a good working SNES emulator until maybe early 2000's. The ones I tried just played so damn slow. NES and Gameboy were fine though.
a library store
>What was renting movies like?
Mostly shit. They'd be out of the movie you wanted to see a lot, so it was picking from a limited selection. The choices were a lot better than today, so you'd always have something to see, but it wasn't whenever you wanted like today.
reddit answer
>He didn't have an independent video store that had tons of obscure horror, action, and foreign kino.
PEAK kino, walking around for an hour just reading covers was pure SOUL and only zoomies larping are millenials pretend to hate it
I'm not gonna lie. I'm sure if I were a little kid I'd find the way things are now a lot more convenient.
It's like so many other things. I just miss being that whole time rather than any specific thing.
>tl;dr
>Youth is wasted on the young
/thread
Pressing F for better days
renting vidya for my n64 was one of the most kino things ever.
turok rage wars had it's own wall one time and they would still rent out all of them
this was kino also
it seemed rare though. I think i only played it a few times
Hollywood Video was good for getting the softcore porns masquerading as real movies. Then they added Game Crazy and the whole thing went Black personed.
Local video places were like local pizza places and Blockbusters were like Papa Johns. Younger millennials romanticizing Blockbusters is moronic.
Both had their charms.
The local places had their low rent value but Blockbuster had a wider selection.
Why do zoomies and gen A's larp in these threads as if they experienced video kino?
cringekino
Yes you are
When I was younger before I totally ruined my life on Cinemaphile and pirating everything, the movie selection at these places was very good. The big chains, most famous being blockbuster, had pretty much every famous movie made after the black and white era, and lots of smaller stores had some more obscure indie movies and weird stuff you never would have heard of. Most of the employees didn't care about movies, they were just regular lazy high school aged to 30 year old cashiers. It was also not cheap, I remember paying more than 10 dollars every time I went to my local video rental place, and this was around 2005 so 10 dollars was a lot if you are renting lots of movies every week. But then around 2010 when pirating got a lot easier and more common, I was able to see everything I could get at blockbuster, and a whole bunch more. So I just stopped going. Those video rental stores usually didn't have foreign movies either.
Like going to the library
overrated. usually it'd give me so much anexity as each day would go buy because i hadnt watched the movie yet and i knew i only had 3 days left, then 2, then 1 before i had to return my 5 day rental. too much pressure man and it was never the right time then id suddenly have to race the clock to finish it on time to return it before i got another 5 dollar fee for being late. that was maybe a me thing though lol, im a procastinator, so the DVDs in the mail you could keep as long as you wanted was great when it came out, tho i guess i was wasting money when i coulda finished it in a day but instead it was a week or more turnover depending how excited i was to see a movie or not, sometimes it would take me up to two weeks to finally watch it and mail it back. also i think im the only person alive who it usually takes a whole week to finish a movie, i usually can never watch more than 10 or 20 minutes a day before im like EHHH ILL GET BACK TO IT. why am i like this? is it autism?
autism + severe ADHD
very common with younger people. trouble focusing for any long period on one thing. Reading a book, watching a movie. I think people have so much trouble just getting into the movie or the book or whatever it is, so they always retreat to scrolling through their phone or just messing around with something else. But if you just let your mind rest and not be jumping around to 10 different distractions all the time, you could really get into an hour and a half movie.
A big part of it was the fact that you saw other people who were interested in movies and might want to comment on them, even briefly. And the Design of all the VHS tapes were centered around the AIDA advertising method, which hooked a viewer in directly through a skillful process of art direction. Just looking at the boxes felt interactive, more artfully interactive than an online forum really, because it was more concentrated.
my Cinemaphile addiction makes it hard for me to do anything without feeling like i might be missing out on an epic thread. i could be outside where and itll drive me nuts
>AHHHH MUST PULL OUT PHONE!!!! NEED TO SEE WHAT BASED THINGS MY CHANBROS ARE POSTING ON Cinemaphile
christ... im getting Cinemaphile FOMO when im not on it, just end my life now i never thought id be this far gone
Ladies (male) and gentlemen (incels) I present to you: the average millennial!
Such a useless human being, just the thought of having to return a movie in 5 DAYS is enough to cripple him with fear.
>going to blockbuster to rent movies
>too much pressure man
Ask me how I know you live in your mother's basement.
I think a big element that is almost never talked about as to why these places closed down, was the huge increase in people breaking and damaging and not returning movies. If one out of every 10 movies that a place rents out end up not coming back or get damaged, then that is a huge cost and logistics issue that is almost impossible to solve. If everybody treats the movie store like shit then the place isn't going to want to stay around. I know when netflix had their dvd mail service they had that same problem too
>I think a big element that is almost never talked about as to why these places closed down, was the huge increase in people breaking and damaging and not returning movies.
They closed down because Netflix and streaming killed them. Which is ironic because Netflix tried to sell themselves to Blockbuster for cheap, and Blockbuster refused. They didn't think Netflix had a viable business model.
And Redbox was cheaper and more convenient, streaming also killed that and now Netflix is getting killed by better streaming services.
Redbox is still around. In many ways it's better than Netflix since Netflix can't carry the latest movie releases. Their catalog is limited.
The only time I ever used redbox, I rented a movie and bought a used blu-ray in the app to go pickup down the street. When I drove to the redbox, it gave me an error message. The app said it dispensed the movie I bought and it charged me, and that it was out of the movie I was trying to rent. Didn't ever try to do that again.
I don't bother with reservation apps. In general, my experience with them is that they are made as an afterthought, and have many errors when using them.
I use my phone to check the redbox website to see what's in stock. Then I go directly to the machine itself and pay at the machine. No apps.
>late fees
>new releases out of stock
>overpriced snacks
But occasionally you'd find something you'd never heard of and rent it and be pleasantly surprised. Also sometimes a fad would be going on like the Pokemon Snap photo printers. Also the video store smell.
>late fees
This is the biggest zoomie alert of them all, just dont return it late zoomie. Stop larping
I can't tell you how many times my parents and my friends' parents were late on their returns.
Zero times? If you arn't larping
They were late a shit ton of times. But then again back then parents were a little more involved in their kids' lives and had errands to run and forgot shit like returning a movie.
Stop lying zoomie
please stop posting the world would be better for it
mine had a game crazy attached to one wall so if my dad spent too long looking for a movie I would sneak off and play games. I have nothing but hate for suncoast. My dad bought hundreds of dvds there and we would spend hours there on custody days. After inheriting the dvds I feel an obligation to keep them all but its a lot of 60s musical crap I remember hating the first time I watched.
>custody days
>musical
You're angry for other reasons.
like going to the toilet store where your mom went to college
Life use to demand you went outside, now you dont even have to leave your house
I remember we got our first rental store around the mid 80’s
Maybe 86-87 I was a little kid but they had movie posters and wall to wall brown shelves with color coded ares corresponding to different genres
It was there, I became fascinated with the cover of a clockwork orange because even then I had great taste
I think I wanted to rent it and my dad said absolutely not which sucked and it saddened me
Anyway a few years later my father had it in his video collection but it was in the section I wasn’t allowed to watch with Blow Up and some other boomer edge
If your wondering, I did end up watching it at a later time and yes the breasts were nice
I want to go back zoom!
it's funny because about 90% of the time they wouldn't even have the frickin movie you wanted and you would have to spend 20 minutes walking around trying to find something else to watch. and then you would have to go all the way back a couple of days later to return it. oh and before DVDs they were all VHS tapes and about 100% of the time the previous renter hadn't rewound the tape so you would have to rewind the movie before you got the watch it. so basically it was all a giant pain in the ass. but we didn't know any better. just the idea that you could watch a movie in your home was amazing.
I forgot about tape rewinders. We had one but always remember the VHS players having rewind built in.
>"they never had the fresh goyslop in stock"
t.homosexuals who didnt browse the dirtbag kino section of the store that had stuff like pic related graffiti movies like while you were sleeping, ichi the killer and kiyoshi kurosawa movies, and translated anime
forgot pic
A wall of the same slop. If you brought it back late you got raped.
There's some moron itt who thinks no one ever had to deal with late fees
I fricking miss having reasons to just go outside
It wasn't that we had reasons to go out, it's that we had no reason to stay in.
one time when I was renting something the girl behind the counter flirted with me
that was like 2003 or 4 I think
Was good. Was better before blockbuster and Hollywood video, tbh.
shitty and kind of fricking expensive too be honest family
even when Netflix sent DVDs and vidya in the mail it was way fricking cheaper
I fricking hate zoomies who larp
Yeah we fricking know moron. You're not a special snowflake because you remember video stores a certain way.
Ok zoomie
Why do you hate yourself, anon?
I hate you, zoomie
Stop it anon, self hatred isn't healthy.
I hate you, zoomie
Anon, if you keep hating yourself like this, you won't be able to look yourself in the mirror.
zoomie
Anon, its your father. You've been online too long, so its time to get off your computer and finish your chores.
Zoomie
Don't talk back to me young man. If you keep that attitude, you won't be getting any supper.
Grow up homosexual and stop larping, its pathetic
You'd call your own father a homosexual? Your mother and I should've aborted you.
Walking in to the store was almost as kino as walking in to a theater itself. And then there was the Vidya section
How did you pick the superior kino rental shop if you're a zoomer?
If you want a true answer, it was a rip off, and my parents typically would not allow it (rightfully so). But people remember them fondly because they had atmosphere and they were emblematic of nation that still had hope.
you people kvetch about shit now, but even in the 1990s crime was fricking way more prevalent and more obnoxious
Yeah Yeah, everything is great and things are better now than when the farmer was in charge. I get it.
there was way fricking less homeless back then, but there was a way higher chance of getting mugged and shot and way shittier ccw laws
If you didn't live in a city, none of that mattered. America was about suburbia in the late 20th century.
>if you live in bumfrick nowhere there isnt crime
it doesnt matter now either moron
>oh noes, theyre not murdering CVS shoplifters, who will think of the precious ~~*multinational*~~ convenience and dept store chains that deliberately undercut and shut down all the independent stores that used to exist across the country?
I guess to nonwhite zoomers, anywhere that isn't a city is bumfrick nowhere. Not surprising.
yes homosexual
theres still cities in bumfrick wisconsin, Iowa and minnesota
and they had insane murder rates in the 90s
You keep on talking past what I am saying and talking about cities because you can't get it. You never lived or understood the real America. It's not your fault, but know that you have no idea what you are talking about.
bumfrick nowhere is not "real america"
its bumfrick nowhere
The majority of America is suburban moron.
The majority of Americans are suburban is what I mean.
>no moron, the stripmall with hollywood video and a mcdnonalds isnt america, the stripmall with the hollywood video, a mcdonalds and a fat moron security guard who calls the police on kids skateboarding is the REAL america
if you've ever driven cross-country you know that most of the united states is "bumfrick nowhere" by a pretty fricking large margin
>but most people live in big cities
yeah and most of them don't even like america, so I say they don't count
being an alcoholic and fishing on the weekends doesnt make you special
you can live in any midwestern city and do that
do you even have a coherent position or are you just arguing for the sake of arguing?
There's no /druk/ thread currently up. That's clearly just an alcoholic with no one to talk to.
>There's no /druk/ thread currently up.
lmao moron
No it's worse now. They're letting nigs walk on charges left and right now.
Just like when you walk into a fricking Spencer's gift store in the mall. I just went into one today and it surprisingly still has the same vibe it did 20 years ago.
For me it was My Video Store because they sold candy cigarettes and Wonka bars and let me rent M games when I was 14
what is this dumb moron ass "hurrr im a zoomie (lmao) what blockbuster like?? uwu~" thread fricking fartsniffers i swear
You mad zoomie? Gonna cry?
When you were a kid, did you try to avoid seeing certain movie covers in the aisles that scared you? Pic fricking related.
Yeah, whichever one has the eye all peeking through a hole or something
Yes, there was one that had one of those covers that changed depending on what angle you looked at it that I always avoided.
bump
Depended on your mother. My mom would get really angry if I wanted something that could be described as
>insipid
or
>disgusting
And she was suffering from (now diagnosed) mental problems that made her hate literally everything, so these nebulous terms basically meant "you're at blockbuster today to impress me with your knowledge of movies I watched as a child myself"
For some reason the only movies that made it through her filter were Spaceballs and The Mask. We must have rented them dozens of times, and she never saw anything wrong with that. Boomer women are crazy
>too much of a little homosexual to tell your mom to frick off with here criticism
The last male who tried that lost his house and children so I just kept my mouth shut
...Somehow Spaceballs and The Mask weren't seen as 'insipid' or 'disgusting'. Clearly she had checked out by the time you actually slid these in the VHS player.
your mom was based, and saw what led to you being here on Cinemaphile before it happened. respect that shit. the closer we get to realizing what is going on in this world, the more "mentally ill" we become. you had a good mom who was trying to protect your mind.
Like having to hunt for dinner.
Born in 2000 here and it was magical. I remember just getting home on Friday afternoon, playing some tony hawk underground on gamecube before mom would come by my room and ask if we wanted to go and get a movie and a pizza. We would go to Blockbuster and get whatever dumb Adam Sandler/Kevin James/Robin Williams DVD family comedy was out at the time and get some little caesars pizza because we didn’t have a lot of money. Then we would go home and eat pizza and have
a laugh riot at the silly movie because I was a kid. Good times.
This post made me start to tear up. God, I want to go back. I miss my family.
I enjoyed it. I'm pretty young (born in 2000) so i never rented anything by myself but my dad took me a lot to the local blockbuster. He let me wander around while he got what he wanted (most times if i brought one dvd he'd let me get it). I spent a lot of time just looking at all the movie covers. My favorite part of going was seeing the decorations they'd put up. During halloween, there'd be all these big mannequins dressed like slasher villains and zombies and what not. It was fun (having to return the DVDs on time was a massive pain in the ass though).
Based fellow 2000 baby.
GameCrazy > GameStop
My local hollywood video/game crazy became a gamestop lmao
>What was renting movies like?
gay as frick.
extreme late fees
rewind fees
lost tape fees (one tape cost 100 dollars)
it sucked
Imagine going on Netflix and looking through genre tags and picking a title based off the Cover and maybe what a friend had recommended and then paying money and having to sit through the flick NO MATTER WHAT
Basically Redbox but a whole building
Renting a couple gaming cartridges for a sleepover was pretty based though
Anyone who complains about late fees is a zoomer
You're drunk
You are a zoomer
I fricking wish. I turn 30 next year.
I could see possibly having late fees if your local blockbuster was out of the way and not right next to a safeway or krogers like it normally was
in the late 90s you could rent PC games, then copy the discs and keep the games.
Even better, you could get them for free at the library then copy them
you could by them, burn them, then return them
pay the restocking fee
can't recall renting PC games ever
It was pretty radical my dude. Mom and Pop videostores with super nintendo games, candy, popcorn, vhs tapes. There were posters everywhere, some figurines, and cool toys like slimy goo in a box. You could even buy those water sticker tatoos. The slushy machines were always running, and you could return tapes through the door if they were closed. I would almost always forget to rewind the tapes but the man was cool with it.
Zoomer here. I remember renting movies.
Renting from streaming services doesnt count
I went to Blockbuster, Hollywood Video and two mom and pop shops in two different states. I was born late enough to see the decline of the industry while still being old enough to partake in it. Even after my family got Netflix we still occasionally turned to Blockbuster when it was convenient, until it closed of course. And yes, even as a zoomie I still hated Blockbuster.
stop larping its just sad
you would walk in and look at all the cover art and basically only watch based on that and what it said on the back, twas based as frick
You went to the store at least once a week, often multiple times a week. The preferred rental store was usually the closest one to your home, or a location you could stop at on a daily commute. Often, there's be a 'nicer' store that was out of the way you'd go to every now and then too, which would tend to be a big chain place.
When you went inside it smelled like stale popcorn. There was usually a TV in there that was either playing a movie that the cashier is watching, or a promo video with a bunch of trailers. Typically you'd go to to the 'new releases' rack near the door first and see what's new. If nothing new interested you, or the good new stuff was all rented, you'd go look in the rest of the store at the selection of other older movies. There was a porno section either in a small 'adults only' room near the front of the store, or in the very back rack of the store. The old regular stock of movies were cheaper to rent, but that selection of movies almost never changed. There was usually also a bin near the front of the store where you could buy 'pre-viewed' movies, usually they were newer movies that were no longer 'new releases', since they carried more copies of a movie when its new. You'd typically either supply a membership card or a phone number as identification, sign a invoice that said you'd return the video in the specified time or be billed, and you'd get typically get a free bag of popcorn from the popcorn maker before leaving. You could return the movies in a slot in the door, or sometimes in a return slot at the front desk.
at some corporate establishment like that or blockbuster? shit. they'd only have "big movies" and mostly would be sold out of them and you'd be stuck with some shitty rom com or whatever. video game renting was good at those places however.
Now if you mean actual mom and pop stores with tons of B movies and saloon doors for the porno section, they were kino as frick
Now see THIS is a larper. Someone who was actually familiar with video store chains would never equate blockbuster and hollywood video. I got a lot of b-movies from there too. I swear they seemed to have every kaiju movie ever made.
Go rent a movie from your library.
Rented a bunch of films for the nudity but it was awkward taking it to the cashier. Like I got Prison Heat once but it was so fricking awkward. But that made it more rewarding to finally take it home.
>Like I got Prison Heat once but it was so fricking awkward. But that made it more rewarding to finally take it home.
Did they make any small talk? Sometimes that's worse.
I lived in the middle of nowhere so the best we had was a gas station that had about 20 movies for rent.
We would usually rent the same ones over and over again because it was all we had.
Same here, there was only one place near my house for a while when I was very young. It was inside of a mom and pop grocery store and it had only about 50 movies and 5 SNES games, 3 of them sports games.
Anyone old enough to remember renting a VCR with the tapes because you didn't own one
I remember rental places doing it with DVD players in the late 90's. Most people didn't want to commit to buying a new format without trying it first, and DVD players weren't really affordable until the PS2 came out.
it fricking sucked anyone pretending like it didn't is a zoomer larping or a boomer nostalgic for a time in their life when they had hope
people saying vidya rental was good have rose tinted glasses
you were always renting odd mid budget games, for every gadget racers Maximo or katamari thered be 10 absolute shitters like Headhunter youd have the misfortune of renting
the new games you wanted was always sold out, there would be an entire section for a new AAA game like Maxpayne but it would always be somehow sold out despite having 20 copies and if there was one in stock it was a game you already owned, if you didnt own the new GTA or halo yet and wanted to try it that shit definitely wasnt in stock
It's just nostalgia, no one actually thinks we should go back to that.
Yeah paying for streaming that edits the shows you watch is way better
Pirating unedited VHS rips of older movies for free is better than both.
This, especially if you only had access to a locally owned store. Whenever a new game came out, you had to call a few days beforehand to see if they were actually getting it. If you wanted to be the first, you had to be there when the store opened when they got it. If I remember right, the policy at my local place if the game was already rented was that you could be put on a waitlist for a new game and they'd call you to pick it up when it was your turn, which could take a week or two usually.
People always talk about mom and pop stores like they had so much more variety and character, but it really depended on the store. Some could afford to go the extra mile, some couldn't. The first one I went to as a kid was really unique and fun to visit with a safari theme and a ton of diverse titles, but the second one I started going to was extremely small and as no-frills as you could get. Didn't even have porn.
Pretty much
I managed to rent Halo 3 on release day. I didn't want to buy it because I had a feeling someone would go wrong and it would suck. I managed to get the last available copy the first day by going less than an hour after they opened.
>being a teen and checking out the 18+ section and seeing all the porn
best thing ever... i rented happy gilmore so many times the girl working there one day just gave it to me she was so hot..i was 8.. she was my first crush.
Like a ritual.
I've been around the Blockbuster in Bend a few times and only saw old people and people dressed like 2012 hipsters walking in and out of it. I don't see it surviving after the boomer die off.
I'd imagine they don't make much/any money, and just ride on merchandise sales and tourism. Places with shitty internet still had high-traffic rental stores up until recently. The last time I was in one was 2017, and there were plenty of customers. It was a Family Video in the middle of butt-frick nowhere in Missouri, and there was no high-speed internet in the area.
24 year old zoomie here.
I remember my dad would take me to Hollywood video on Fridays to rent a PS2 game and a movie for me. It was the best part of my young life.
One of those 'you had to have been there to understand' things, but if the mom and pop rental place also doubled as a tanning salon, they 100% of the time had a kino horror section.
What really sucks is that a lot VHS movies never got converted to DVD. And many DVD movies never went to Bluray. VHS had so many indie movies made by people with a camcorder. It was the peak era for B movies.
There are some cult classic movies you can only watch on VHS tapes. They aren't available to stream online on any service. None. Netflix probably couldn't even acquire the rights even if they wanted.
What are some of your favorites?
Zoomers are 1997-2012. The older ones were there when rental stores were still a thing. Same with VHS, especially if poor.
>1997 is the same generation as 2012
That's moronic. Generations need to be smaller with the amount of rapid change that's happened over the past 20 years.
I worked at Hollywood Video. It was my first real job. I loved it.
as a zoomer id rent games. beat them in a night and returm em
>be kind please rewind
Setting aside the rose-tinted glasses, it was alright.
Kind of a pain to drive there to pick up a tape, and then drive back to drop it off.
Sucked when what you wanted wasn't in. You could call in advance, and most places would hold it if it was in so you could pick it up, but if it was out it was out. Worst was if they never returned it. I wanted to play X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse so bad, but only one place had it near me, and it was always out because some butthole never returned it. Eventually got to play it some time later and goddamn was that a good game.
You'd also have times where you'd just browse and be unable to find anything you wanted. Kind of frustrating.
But at the same time, it was kind of a treat to go to a rental place once a week and pick something up. If you went to a good one, the staff or even owner would talk with you and have a passion for movies (and sometimes video games) and could give you good recommendations. I remember talking with some college student working at a Hollywood Video about Crumb and other movies for about an hour when I was in high school. Guy clearly loved his job and loved movies. I think I rented one of the Golgo 13 movies off his recommendation and enjoyed it.
The only exception to all this was Blockbuster. Blockbuster was the absolute worst and the only way you could have good memories of it is if you were a very, very young kid at the time. Otherwise, they were just such a scam.
was kino finding out what to watch but if you try to israelite them and rip the disc they will know and charge you full price.
Honestly annoying and inconvenient, but the world was a simpler place back then and going to a store meant you were gonna have a grand ol night ahead of you comfy inside without the perpetual cycle of FOMO that we have now thanks to social media
my uncle said he used to be able to pick up chicks in the 90s by going to the video store and talking to them a bunch and saying hed rent whatever movie they wanted and they could come back to his place and watch it. He also had a bunch of drugs for them to take so I'm sure that helped. I'm sure he exaggerated a bit but it just shows how different things were in the 90s. It was annoying always having to return the dvds to those but it was at least better than having zero human interaction
You used to be able to pick up chicks anywhere. Connections were made in person, not through cyber space. And you didn't have to put on an artificial layer of social media clout to impress people either. You were judged by who you were in person
>cyberspace
Boomer alert
Wtf why would people who remember the 80s be older than 21
The 80s were like 70 years ago grandpa
It made the worst part of Netflix the best part: browsing through movies, but I think this has more to do with box art and lack of internet access. The internet kind of took the mystery and adventure away from entertainment in general.
If streaming platforms never came around these shops would have died anyway because people would look at RT scores or predetermine what they want to watch before going out.
Same goes for vidya, I spend hours looking through steam and end up getting bored and doing something else when back in the early 00s I would go to the game shop and commit to something based on the boxart and I wouldn't have any bias going into that so I'd more likely have fun
The TRUE kino places were THE GROCERY STORE
That's where I got the majority of my rentals.
I remember I used to spend a lot of time trying to figure it out what movie I was going to rent. It was really cool.
Going to a a mom-and-pop store, since better known rental places are farther away and more expensive, picking the latest releases for the weekend, and popping them in the VCR/DVD player for a Friday movie night, before returning them on Monday.
>three Millennial nostalgia threads in the catalog
Yep it's a Saturday night in 2023 alright.
Zoomer here, my parents and me went to buy food and rent a couple movies every other friday. You would order food and then have time to find a movie or two while the food was being cooked and then you would pay for the movies and leave. It was kind of cozy
Pain in the ass but made you appreciate shit a lot more. Now you can just torrent or stream whatever the frick your want in seconds. Overall I prefer the latter but nostalgia is a helluva drug.
Blows my mind that my parents let me run around the store for so long trying to find a game or movie. I really took that shit for granted. I would have missed out on so many pa2 and gcn classics if wasn’t for them though.
Its mostly just the fact that we were kids at the time. Walking into a building full of physical copies of movies and picking one as well as getting some snacks seemed like a lot of fun.
blockbuster got me into kingdom hearts it’s been downhill ever since
The last franchised video rental store in my country shut down a few years ago, now the dude who owned it stuck the sign in his front garden and rents out DVDs/tapes from his bedroom window.
I'm a zoomer and I remember renting VHS tapes when I was a kid. I even recall how renting a DVD was a big deal in my eyes. There was a video rental near my grandparents' home so my parents would always rent a movie to keep us entertained while we visited. Animated movies, mostly. I remember that I was always anxious about misplacing the films and getting into trouble.
I was born in 99 and have lots of memories of going to video stores to rent movies, the last VHS I rented was Harry Potter 4
Survival of the fittest. You'd travel to the video store and find out the trendy movie is taken and the butthole who did it doesn't want to return it.
I remember camping outside the store for a month to see this:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0119675/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
>Go watch kino in cinema
>Movie was truly KINO
>Want to rewatch it asap
>Either you stay in cinema for the next run, go to cinema another day and pay another ticket or wait a couple of months to rent a VHS
>Official original VHS of the movie wouldnt be released for over a year
It was like that.
>there are adults posting on these board who never rented a tape or went to a drive-in movie
Pretty cool, but mainly because it signified it's the weekend for me.
The best part was the culture it created. You'd meet up with a mate or a few, order some pizzas, walk next door to the kinorental, grab some flicks, a few games maybe, head back in time to collect the pizza, and you've got a Friday night with the boys sorted. It was a culture born out of the lack of convenience and everyone did it. Led to better social groups and happier society. We lost the little things along the way.
Like salty milk and coins
Like eating ass
The best part of renting was browsing the section, really. I only rented Horror and that genre is rife with covers scamming you into thinking the movie won't be shit.
While it was less convenient than streaming, it consequently made rentals more memorable. Going to the video store was kind of an event with the family, we'd go togetter ajd usually get like 2 or 3 movies. Usually one for everybidy, then oje for the adults and one for the kids. Occasionally we'd get some snacks to eat while watching the moviem my favorites were butterfinger BBs or the Nestle Crunch Bites, but we didnt get snacks often because (like movie theatres) they were overpriced, even for the time. If we were really lucky, our parents would let us rent a game. I miss it as I miss everything from the era, but I don't think I can honestly say its better than just picking a movie and watching it on a streaming service.