Heyday

A Love Letter to the Blockbuster Era

Life was once simpler, gentler, kinder. Except when someone got in your way at Blockbuster when you were trying to get to that last coveted copy of new release Speed or Fridays for beer night with the boys, or Sleepless in Seattle if it was evening with the missus. Or even if you were just a snot-nosed cinephile loading up on B movie classics for the weekend like Maniac Cop, Toxic Avenger, or Class of Nuke ‘Em High.

Blockbuster was the local dealer. Our Mister Feel Good, everything’s gonna be all right. Tapping into our veins two to three times a week. Our lives went from VHS to DVD in a flash. The future is now. Then it all fell apart before our very eyes, vaporizing as streaming became all the rage.

But let’s go back for just a moment more.

Remember Friday nights with your pals or your gal—or gals—rummaging through the shelves and aisles of the local Blockbuster to find just the right movies for date night, a beer bash, or a lone wolf movie marathon.

It would be hard to describe to Gen Z and Gen Alpha what that experience was and why it mattered so much. It was visceral. Tactile, emotions and intuition guiding your decisions. And if you chose wrong you had to suffer through a bad movie while friends and loved ones berated you mercilessly for ninety minutes, or more.

Choose wisely, young master.

I believe that movies are the stories that connect us all. Reaching for the last copy of A Better Tomorrow could say a lot about you. Define you. Maybe your soulmate was reaching for it at that exact moment. A life built together on a Blockbuster casual encounter.

Blockbuster was connection.

Going there was tribal, communal. It reminded me of Romero’s original Dawn of the Dead, where zombies were drawn to the one place that held a position of prominence in their lives: the mall—sadly.

Or maybe I’m just waxing poetic, nostalgic for a time that wasn’t all that romantic. Whatever it was, Blockbuster was a snapshot of life in America, a country dominated by pop culture. Pop culture that was fueled by twisted little indie producers with delusions of Oscars dancing in their heads.

Many of the B movies on those shelves would likely never be made today—not by the studios who trot out formulaic, by-the-numbers commercial crap with hundred-million-dollar price tags, nor by the indie producers with their mathematical sales projections.

Can you imagine a writer pitching Surf Nazis Must Die to a studio executive? Or the ultra-violent Exterminator? Deranged visions by deranged filmmakers. But, good or bad, at least they weren’t boring. Or predictable.

When did the whole goddamned world become a bunch of assholes draped around cellphones with the ability to video everything? All the magical memories nowadays are just last year’s Facebook post. A memory that a damn algorithm has to remind you was a good memory.

I reject that premise.

We were happier back then. With our precious VHS tapes and DVD collections.

The biggest joke of all was Blockbuster’s would-be competitor Netflix, which, at the time, had the worst business model in the world: video movies that were mailed to you. Video movies that you had to mail back after watching.

But the joke was on me.

I remember house sitting for an actress friend of mine. She and her husband were going on vacation, and they had this big old dog who liked to do laps in their swimming pool every morning. Basically, I was his lifeguard. Baywatch meets Home Alone meets Marmaduke.

On the way out the door to their holiday, the actress casually said, “We have the new Netflix channel on our TV.”

That night, I checked it out. They had maybe twenty titles in all. I laughed my ass off and thought, Netflix, you’ll never win.