I remember Erol's and their yellow bags.

Who in their right mind rented porn without being able to see the cover?

A bunch of people. You could go by the title and we told people that all the titles were straight, mostly white people. The owners philosophy was is we created a back room area, then kids would always be trying to sneak in. Putting them right in the middle of the store, without covers, allowed people to quickly walk by and grab a tape.

We had a couple of independent stores in town when I was younger that my family and I frequented. One was called Video Express and the other was Video to Go. I have more memories of Video to Go and mostly remember when I was younger going there and renting shows I liked as a kid. The big ones that stick out to me are a bunch of Scooby-Doo and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe tapes. Later I got into Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation and would occasionally rent out episodes that were available and the films.

I also remember renting the Back to the Future Trilogy for the first time from there and falling in love with it. In fact the store later sold some of their copies of the films and one year for my birthday my parents got me Back to the Future Part II and Back to the Future Part III from there (I already owned the first one). I still have those tapes and keep them for nostalgia purposes. I also remember being a kid and being intrigued by some of the films I wasn't allowed to watch at the time such as the R rated action films or stuff from the horror section.

Also there were the video games. I remember renting a ton from consoles like the NES, Sega Genesis, Playstation, Playstation 2, and Nintendo 64. There were many times when my mom would take my brother and I on Friday after school to go to the store and pick out some video games or movies for the weekend. I remember renting a bunch of the Mega Man games on NES and a ton of other titles.

Later the main independent place went out of business after losing business to our local Blockbuster. We'd still go there and rent various movies and games though. Blockbuster itself has gone out of business too and funnily enough there are still a couple of independent places in town. I've never been a big fan of the ones that are left though really and never really go to them. Plus now days for the most part I buy what I'm interested in seeing.

Sorry, I am half blind so I thought the picture was of a VHS tape.

Sorry, just messing with you since you went to the effort of posting a pic.

I was in Paris in July and up the block from my hotel was a video store:


They still have lots of VHS on the shelves, including tons of old Hollywood films that you'd never find on the shelves of a typical American store:





Plus, of course, tons of French films:


It was a big store, too.

I remember going to the local mom and pop video stores with the parents and sneaking off to the horror section and looking at the horror box art for the VHS tapes. Some of them scared the crap out of me.

The VCR my parents bought from Sears in 1983 still works. I just used it to watch my VHS tapes of the Original Star Wars trilogy. The thing weighs more than my 55 inch TV and will probably outlast it and and my PS3 and the Sony BD player that I bought this year.

It's great reading all these tales.

You told them right! lol





Goddamnit. Is that Gance's Napoleon in there? Do I have to go all the way to Paris just to finally see that movie? lol And I see Le Bonheur in there. I just name-checked that movie in the "Movies that age well" thread.

The only time a clerk was hesitant to let me rent a R-flick was (Of all movies) Harlem Nights. I don't even think I finished the movie. But the one that I was shocked to get away with renting was Henry:Portrait of a Serial Killer. I think I was 15 when it first came out on video and the box had layers of "No one under 17" warnings on it's cover. The clerk didn't even seem to notice. It almost felt like I had bought my first beer.
But we (My best friend and I) played it safe when it came to those Faces of Death flicks. We would get his mom to rent those for us (She just thought they were regular horror movies)

I alway remember actually walking to one to rent a horror flick when my parents were out of town. The old HBO tape of The Evil Dead. The clerk barely spoke English, and asked "are you 17." Not quite, but figuring he'd see right through me, I mumbled "yes." He shrugged; said, "OK," and let me rent the tape .

I remember going to the mom and pop video stores and music stores and chatting with the owners about films and music. Now you go into store that actually sells movies or music and the college age clerk has no idea what a Pink Floyd is and has never heard of Dark Side Of The Moon.

That's why they called ahead to have me describe the box cover. I now know who Jeff Stryker is. And that Switch Hitter wasn't a film about the MLB.

I live in SD and Tower Video was my favorite place to buy laserdiscs. There was also a place in Mira Mesa called Laser USA. It had the Japanese laserdisc of Pulp Fiction and Pulp Fiction was still in theaters!

I loved how they had a separate store from Tower Music. I miss Tower so much.

Family Video?

Used to always get my Asian Cult digest there.

Videoland.

Oooh, I want to play!

- My family's first video store membership was at Erol's Video. I still remember their commercial jingle. First two movies we rented: Gremlins and The Natural. On Betamax.

- I remember being insanely excited that I could rent VHS tapes that contained four or five episodes of ThunderCats and He-Man. Without commercials. And I could watch them over and over again. Without. Commercials.

- My dad had a strict no-rated-R policy in our house. My older brother somehow convinced him that unrated was less extreme than R. And thus we were introduced to The Evil Dead. Luckily for my brother, our TV was on its last legs, so the tree rape scene was too dark to really see what was going on. In fact, the dark picture actually made the movie scarier. My dad got bored and left the room before the extreme gore really started. It was a revelation, and I barely slept that night.

- As a teen, one of my first jobs was for a local video store. Loved it. Free screeners, and discounted rentals on weekdays. With my brother and I both having retail jobs, we were frequently home by ourselves during the day. We'd watch at least one horror movie every day. Most of them were awful. Rawhead Rex anyone?

- There was one customer -- dude in his late 40s -- who would pull his mobile home into the store parking lot once a week. He would come in, rent a soft-core porn video (we didn't carry the hard stuff) and a VCR, and go out to his mobile home in the lot. He would then return the VCR and video about an hour later. None of us would want to touch it.

- Other regulars included a guy who would come in every Tuesday morning and rent one of every new title we'd gotten in. One customer left a video in his car and it melted, and he pitched a royal public fit when the store charged him $99 to replace it. He insisted he could buy it elsewhere cheaper and replace it; about a week later he returned and sheepishly paid the $99.

- When Fried Green Tomatoes came out, our copies arrived with a giant inflatable green tomato to use to promote the title in the store. On a quiet night in the store, I decided to see how fast I could inflate it. I blacked out and fell on the floor. Teenagers are stupid.

When I was 18 I got a few job interviews at video stores, but never got hired- I came close at one store but they gave the job to this other kid from my school who I hated because his uncle worked in the movie business and he got the job just because of that. Also got interviewed at Blockbuster which had just taken over a smaller chain called Major Video- I got to see their back room where I saw a few tapes like The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover, and Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down which Major Video had rented but Blockbuster pulled them off the shelf because they were rated NC-17. Glad I didn't end up working there. I got hired at a movie theater instead which was a much better experience for me.

I remember in the early 80s most video stores would hand out a printed list of every movie they have, which filled out ONE PAGE. Also remember the large padded cases you would get the tapes in. As more stores opened up, I would always keep track of which ones had the lesser-known movies, and would make trips to ones farther out to rent some of them. When Major Video opened in 1989, it was humongous in comparison to all the others, and they had a computer set up in the middle of the store where you could type in the name of the movie you were looking for and it would show if they had it.

DVDs with their low prices turned me into a buyer- can't really say I miss renting that much now, but that's just how it was in the beginning.

That's an awesome throwback commercial for me. They built the Alakea Corporate Tower at the former site of Video House in 1993. There's a T-Mobile store in the ground floor unit now.

Strangely enough I found the tape that commercial came from at a thrift store in Sacramento CA- don't know how it made its way over here, but it fell into the right hands.

I remember renting Def-Con 4 at the local mom and pop. What a piece of garbage.

Yeah I think I have more memories of renting games than movies, as we rarely bought games back then.

More love for Tower Video in Point Loma. That was where I really dug into Hong Kong action films for the first time. They also stocked all the letterboxed VHS titles once that started becoming a thing.

My funniest memory though, was one Sunday morning when I was returning my Saturday night's viewings (at Tower, you paid upon returning the tape, not when you rented it). The guy in front of me had three porn titles. Three was the maximum amount of tapes you could possibly have. I chuckled at him at first then thought, hey my life's not any better. I spent Saturday night alone watching kung-fu flicks. Not even one breast. This guy at least got to see some action, even if it was just on his TV.

But then as I was getting another movie, I saw that guy, BACK IN THE PORN SECTION. Seriously, what could he possibly see that he didn't get in the three movies he saw last night? I have nothing against porn, but it does get old after you've watched 20-30 minutes (and the obvious, um, home viewing interaction that takes place).

Motherfucker. You mean there are other people like me ?!