Friday Night at the Video Store

The first pass was mostly instinct. You recognized a title, an actor or something you’d seen in a television commercial. Everything else had a few seconds to convince you to stop.

The front was the whole pitch. Painted artwork, somebody mid-leap, an explosion that may or may not turn up in the actual film. And if a movie had nothing else going for it, the box borrowed somebody else’s reputation. 

Cannon put “The Star Wars of the ’80s” right on the front of Masters of the Universe. An unfortunate claim that led to a lot of disappointment. (I do actually enjoy it now despite my 10 year old self being upset about it back in the day. But it’s still no Star Wars.)

You picked up one box, put it back, walked another aisle and somehow ended up holding the first one again. Choosing was part memory, part artwork and part fear that everybody would blame you if the movie was terrible.

If the front worked, you turned the box over and started doing the closest thing we had to research.

The description could give away half the movie or tell you almost nothing. The back of Back to the Future walks you through the DeLorean, the “slightly mad scientist” who built it and the teenage parents who need to fall in love. E.T. goes the other way, promising “unparalleled magic and imagination” without mentioning one thing that happens in it.

Familiar names helped. If a movie had a face you knew, the box led with it, and if it did not, it borrowed one. Dirty Dancing introduces Patrick Swayze by way of Red Dawn and TV’s North and South, because in 1987 that’s who he was.

Then a couple of small screenshots that you studied harder than they deserved. Unless you had caught a trailer on television, this might be the only preview you were getting.

By now somebody else had found another movie, so the negotiation started. Comedy or action? Something everybody had already seen or the strange box nobody knew anything about? The longer it took, the more likely someone was to say, “Just pick something.”

What was fun about that process is, you’d sometimes come back with a hidden gem that you’d never even heard of. That’s how I came back with Young Sherlock Holmes one time. What a great decision that turned out to be.

The one wrinkle in the whole system would be seeing something you liked, getting all hyped up about, picking up the box... only to reveal there was no tape behind it. It was rented out. So then you might walk up to the counter and see if someone had happened to return it and it just hadn’t made it back to the shelf yet. (That was never the case though.)

Rental tapes picked up layers, and every store had its own way of marking territory. You learned to read whichever one you grew up with.

I love this copy of The Muppets Take Manhattan from Four Star Video with a classic BE KIND! REWIND! sticker, along with an inventory number on it. Further down, you'll see a Blockbuster Video tape that got a little more creative with, "To PLAY is human. To REWIND is divine!"

This copy of Adventures in Babysitting is one of my favorites. The iconic COMEDY genre sticker is so nostalgic. This one obviously got cycled out of rental rotation, and could be yours for $4.95 - which was quite the bargain back then. More about the prices of VHS tapes later!

Some boxes looked as if they had already been through every VCR in town. That was not necessarily a bad sign. A worn rental copy meant plenty of people had taken a chance on it before you and it had to be a good movie.

Once everybody finally agreed, you carried the choice to the counter and handed over the membership card. That’s right. You couldn’t just walk in willy-nilly and rent a movie. You had to be A MEMBER. They needed to know they could track you down if you didn’t bring that tape back.

These cards lived in our wallets, pocket books or the kitchen junk drawer, usually laminated, which made it feel more official than it actually was.

Queue up some Orville Redenbacher popcorn, grab a 3-liter of Pepsi and pour it into your Muppets glass from McDonald’s. It’s time for everyone to watch the same thing in the same room on the same TV all at one time! Can you believe we used to do that???

We’d pop it in, see that FBI warning, and then the movie studio intro (Orion was my favorite), and then it’s showtime!

When the movie was over, there was one more chore.

Time to rewind that tape, or you were paying the lazy tax. Ours was fifty cents, which felt like real money at the time.

Rewinding took long enough, and VCRs cost enough, that a separate one-job appliance seemed like a reasonable purchase. It promised to rewind faster while saving wear on the machine you actually cared about.

So while you’re rewinding Dirty Dancing, you could go ahead and pop The Karate Kid in.

That price was not aimed at a family looking for something to watch after dinner. New tapes were often priced for rental stores, which could earn the money back a few dollars at a time as the same copy went home with customer after customer.

Cheaper tapes eventually made owning movies normal. In March of 1987 Paramount put Top Gun out for $26.95, unusually cheap for a brand new hit, in exchange for running a Diet Pepsi commercial at the head of the tape. Nearly two million copies were ordered before it shipped. At the beginning, though, renting was the only version of movie night that made financial sense for most people.

The trip back to the store was not the exciting part, especially if the tape was already late. But returning it finished the ritual and cleared the way to do the whole thing again the next Friday.

Streaming gives us more movies than that video store ever could. What it does not give us is the memories. The whole process made watching the movie seem so much more special. I really do miss it.

How about you?