I miss video rental stores

[Wally]

When I was young I used to live in a small unassuming town in the east of the Netherlands, that for some reason had a really awesome video rental store.
Sometimes we rented movies for the whole family, but sometimes my dad and I would rent crazy horror films for the two of us to enjoy.
Some memorable films we rented were Serial Mom, Ticks, Wax Mask, the Nightmare on Elmstreet movies, the Poltergeist movies, Gremlins 1 and 2, and those are the ones I can remember.
Serial Mom was especially good, I think we rented that one several times.
I watched it later as an adult too, still one of my favorite movies!
It's the only John Waters movie I've ever watched, I probably need to watch more.

Wax Mask was an Italian horror film about a wax museum that made wax statues out of corpses, that turn out to be robots.
Yeah the ending made absolutely 0 sense, it made quite an impact.
I still want to see that one again to see if I remembered it correctly.

Good times!
Now we got streaming services that only have big studio stuff..
There are some streaming services that specialize in horror films, b-films and obscure weird films, but none of them are available in the Netherlands, which sucks.

I also miss the smell of old video tapes...
I'm getting ooooooooold

[Edmund]

we had a local fella who ran a video store up until this year, his wife worked at the bank so he had the option of running that store at a loss if need be. Tons of selection for the size of the building, i nabbed a bunch of titles during his liquidation sale

[Gooly]

Yeah, miss it too! That place was cool. Not only bumping into hidden gems, but also being able to find some older classics, forgotten by time.

Oh and, as a kid I always liked it if the video tape was suddenly a different color instead of black.

[Wally]

Oooh yeah, that was fancy!
I remember we had at least one purple one and a blue one, I think those might've been Disney tapes.

[Edmund]

I remember Nickelodeon loved doing the orange tapes for their movie releases. The only reason I know that is because I would incessantly rent Good Burger as a kid purely to watch the opening hamburger animation

[Gooly]

I remember Nickelodeon loved doing the orange tapes for their movie releases. The only reason I know that is because I would incessantly rent Good Burger as a kid purely to watch the opening hamburger animation

Woh, orange! As Waldo said, the furthest we got was purple and blue.

[zekeyspaceylizard]

i miss working at a video rental store
it was nice to be able to chat with random people about movies irl
plus it was nice to be paid for it

[Wally]

i miss working at a video rental store
it was nice to be able to chat with random people about movies irl
plus it was nice to be paid for it

Ooooh sounds like nice work, had any interesting customers?

[rtil]

i don't miss much about seattle, but when i lived near it there's a store called Scarecrow Video which claims to have the largest collection of movies for rent. they currently boast 152,687 titles for rent. it's not a very large building, but they somehow manage to squeeze it all in there.
every once in a while we'd go to the university district (an absolute pain in the ass) just to go here and find a few bizarre films. at the time we were in to obscure asian horror and would watch stuff on VCD and DVD's in secondhand jewel cases. most of them were shit but it was still fun.
they have a mail rental service but it's really expensive.
my favorite thing about going to rental stores back when they were everywhere were the video game kiosks at blockbuster. i can't remember if they also rented out video games, but we'd also rent videogames from a place called hollywood video.
if they still existed i might go to them, i really don't know. the idea of it is nice, and when you rent something you feel obligated to watch/play it while you have it, because it has to go back.
now everything is just there at your fingertips, and there's too much shit to choose from.

[Edmund]

I know of at least one Hollywood Video still in business around where I am on the east coast, my understanding is they partnered with a pizza parlor so they have a symbiotic relationship