Wow, what a difference…a couple of decades make; Blockbuster Video is dead. In a somewhat unceremonious exodus, Dish Network announced they will be closing the remaining 300 Blockbuster stores. It’s a sad day, indeed, since most of us thirty-somethings grew up renting movies at Blockbuster. So as Blockbuster says goodbye to their failing business, it’s time to look back at some of the things we won’t miss about the former rental giant. Tongue fully in cheek.
10. Finding movies with the wrong category labels. I remember going into Blockbusters and finding mis-labeled movies all the time. Cool World is not a kids’ movie, but it would always be there because, hey look; a cartoon character on the cover. This happened all the time, but I’m guessing the category labels were from corporate and not the individual stores. Still, it was annoying.
9. The smell. This might be a personal thing, but a lot of the Blockbusters I went to were built sharing a building with a Subway. For some reason, the stench from Subway always leaked into the Blockbuster and the smell was almost unbearable. If Subway wasn’t the culprit, then inevitably, it would be the smell of burnt popcorn. Popcorn smells good , but burnt popcorn can wake the dead.
8. The thrill of finding a used movie you’ve been searching for. Ahhh…life before the internet. Nowadays, you can have any movie you want, on any format you want, at just about any price range you want, any time you want it. But back in the day, if you wanted a discount on a used movie, you had to wait for Blockbuster to put them on the used rack. And since there were 20 Blockbusters in every city, you could bounce from store to store to find that one Blockbuster that had your movie, usually in the bad part of town. And the more you searched, the more frustrated you got when you saw 100 copies of the movie you want sitting on the rental shelf, with the knowledge that they haven’t been rented since the movie first came out.
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