There was a time when Friday night meant takeout meals and a movie.
You go through the routine of grabbing a menu from the kitchen drawer to order the same thing you always do, then make a trip to the nearest video rental store.
It was heaven, with shelves brimming with movies of untold stories and adventures, as well as old favorites that I rented countless times because they were so good.
These days, you’re more likely to order Deliveroo, browse the Netflix options and decide there’s nothing worth watching.
Maybe I’m just nostalgic about the old days, but even though convenience has made us get off the couch less often, it still doesn’t feel that good.
Not to sound cocky, but there is value in physical media. (Instagram/@blockbusterbend)
I was a kid in the ’90s, and even my local corner store had a video rental shelf, and as the 2000s rolled around, VHS tapes were increasingly being replaced by DVDs.
At one point it felt like a golden age, but all things come to an end, and movies eventually disappeared from the shelves, including A Knight’s Tale, which I probably rented a dozen times.
At my local corner store, two shelves were merged into one, and one shelf became a little turnstile filled with DVDs, which sold out quickly.
By 2013, the nearest Blockbuster announced it was closing, and the movie mecca was gone, replaced by a beauty salon.
You can go on and on about how the kids of Gen Z don’t understand, and some of the oldest members of that generation were able to experience these things in the 00s, but you can’t blame them for not having had the proper opportunity to understand.
Once upon a time, Blockbuster was the king of movie rentals. Sadly, that’s no longer the case. (Instagram/@blockbusterbend)
Every description of these places passes through the filter of intense nostalgia from those who enjoyed them but were ultimately betrayed by them.
Who killed Blockbuster? We did.
Companies like Netflix grew by offering a service that would send you DVDs so you could rent Friday movies without having to leave the house, and we took full advantage of that.
We can talk about how precious those days were and how we didn’t fully appreciate them until they were gone, but they are gone because we voted with our wallets and chose a different way that required less effort on our part.
And of course, there’s a compelling argument to be made that times weren’t actually better back then and that we’re more nostalgic for who we were back then than we are for what we were doing, which is probably true.
Yet there was a certain ritual that existed that was remembered as incredibly fun, but that no longer exists.
Who knows what we’ll be nostalgic for in 20 or 30 years’ time?
