Alan Smithee

"It's my belief that no true movie lover has any business going into Blockbuster in the first place, since its policies have done so much harm to modern American cinema. By refusing to handle NC-17 movies, Blockbuster has all but destroyed the freedom of American directors to make studio pictures intended for adults. At the same time, by killing the safety valve of the "adult" rating, Blockbuster has contributed to the downward leakage of unsuitable material into the R and PG-13 categories. Thus it corrupts youth while appearing sanctimonious."

-Roger Ebert

TomOpus

That's only a very teeny tiny segment of the movie industry. On the other hand, Blockbuster probably gave access to movies, especially if a neighborhood didn't have a mom/pop movie rental location. I was lucky in San Diego where there were several places with rentals that weren't part of a corporation. And movie directors were first limited by the studio financing the film.

d2cheer

Yet another moronic tirade made by someone who is completely clueless about the industry he was supposed to represent and talk about. Ebert was a tool.

Without them millions and I mean millions would have never enjoyed home theater or movies. Fuck that fat POS,

Paff

Blockbuster invented home video and movie rental?

Dan

Except... John Oliver sent that stuff to one of the three locations in Alaska... before it also shut down.
The one that's still open isn't the one that originally got that stuff, but it sounds like the guy who took ownership of that memorabilia lent it to the store in Oregon.
and they don't have the jockstrap... Dude must have kept that one.

Alan Smithee

They certainly dumbed it down for the masses. You could RENT a VCR head cleaning tape there forchrissakes, THINK about that for a minute!

Paff

Well I was sarcastically refuting d2cheer's assertion that without Blockbuster, "millions and millions would never have enjoyed home theater", because I sure seem to remember plenty of video stores operating long before Blockbuster came in. And they weren't hurting for business, either. The home video store was absolutely thriving before Blockbuster came on the scene, they just consolidated the industry, and narrowed the selection down to, well, the blockbuster films. More or less. I mean, yeah, you could rent something obscure if you looked hard enough in the store, but that wasn't what they were all about.

In other words, Roger Ebert was right on the money.

PatD

He usually was. May he forever find happiness in that movie palace in the sky.

mickey65

While its pretty convenient these days to rent whatever movie you can from Netflix, stream or watch on You-Tube, I actually miss the days of going to the neighborhood video stores (the mom & pop ones before Blockbuster came along). I had memberships at a few since one would have certain obscure movies I wanted to see when the others didn't. Sometimes that "chase" was fun, trying to find them. I guess I just miss the old days as I get older now (56).

GoldenJCJ

We had a mom and pop video shop we used on occasion but I specifically remember wandering the numerous aisles of movies at our local Safeway while my mom shopped for groceries. Safeway’s video rental store was literally 1/3 of the entire building.

Xander

Working at a video store was mostly awesome. I didn't love the fucking deadbeats who would scream at me when I wouldn't let them rent 8 movies on a Friday night because they had $50 in late fees already. But other than that, I loved that job. And a BIG part of my high school experience involved browsing video stores with my friends arguing about what to watch that weekend. Definitely need to check out this doc.

Jay G.

VHS was actually when "affordable media" became a reality. The watershed moment was the home video release of ET, after that studios would release movies on VHS at reasonable prices. Disney made a ton of cash with their clamshell VHS releases of their animated films, and started the "Disney Vault" with VHS. When I was working at Best Buy in the mid-90s, before the launch of DVD, we had bins of cheap $5 VHS titles.

What happened though was the creation of the "rental window," which their being two release dates for a new release title on VHS: the rental pricing, around $100, and then the retail pricing 3 months later, around $20-30. The reasoning being that, now with rental stores firmly ensconced, the studios could maximize profits from the rental stores and the customers that only wanted to rent it, then sell copies to the mass market a few months later after the rental demand for the new release died down.

I owned a few home VHS releases, including a Collectors Edition Star Wars Trilogy set and a Highlander Director's Cut, bother letterboxed, which was rare on VHS, but becoming a bit more common, as cinephiles were becoming more aware of "Full Screen" cropping and wanting OAR, but with many not wanting/not able to afford Laserdisc. I believe the VHS tapes were just using the letterbox master made for the Laserdiscs.

DVD was launched without the "rental window," which meant it was typically released the same day as the "rental" VHS, but at an "end consumer" retail price of around $30. This made it highly appealing to consumers that wanted to own a movie, since even though DVD was about $10 more than the eventual VHS release, it was available now instead of waiting 3 months for the VHS to be available in retail stores. Big titles were The Matrix and Titanic. Of course, independent rental stores took advantage of the fact that DVDs were about 1/3 the price of VHS new releases to fairly quickly start offering DVDs for rent. The fact that they were smaller, lighter, and didn't have to be rewound likely appealed as well. Of course, DVDs are what enabled Netflix's initial "rent via mail" business method; it was simply too expensive to ship VHS tapes back and forth in the mail to rent tapes via mail.

Jay G.

The jockstrap went missing after the Alaska stores closed. It has its own Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russel...%27s_jockstrap

Jay G.

Video Rental stores in grocery stores were incredibly common, although I recall them being regulated to a small "store" area in the front, like the size of one of the bank branches. The appeal seemed to be the 2-in-1 prospect of picking up groceries/ingredients for dinner, and renting a movie for the family, without having to make two stops. The selection was a lot smaller than a dedicated store though, even a Blockbuster Video. If a Blockbuster Video moved in nearby, the grocery store's video rental "store" often closed up.

JeffTheAlpaca

I admit I liked this doc for the historical aspect and commentary though I don't like Blockbuster.

Still my nostalgia is limited when it comes to watching movies on VHS which would be the equivalent of listening to music again on cassettes and something that hads it time and passed.

I was glad I did not go to a video store when I saw all those movies on their shelfs that I rented from Netflix without wasting money on gas.

Sandi could hire somebody to upgrade their computers and get some Imacs at that place.

I assume most of the people that go there to rent dvds in Bend, OR don't care about Blu-rays or HD picture quality or that is not a priority?

OldBoy

I never worked at one, but Tuesday’s I practically lived at one. I would get all the new Tuesday release. Those were the days.

JeffTheAlpaca

Surprised nobody mentioned whenever you went to Blockbuster all 20 copies of every new release was checked out.

You would look under the card or placard and no VHS tape underneath it and you would have to settle for your 6th choice as a movie rental.

One time my brother got Ace Ventura and it was like hitting the jackpot that a new movie was available to rent.

GoldenJCJ

^ Yeah, Friday nights were like Thunderdome at Blockbuster for new releases. If you didn’t get that new release by Friday, you were SOL the entire weekend. I’m surprised all-out brawls didn’t break out every weekend.

tanman

Jay beat me too it. But yeah VHS was definitely the era when "owning" a movie became a real proposition for most families. And it was families that really drove the market as of course the proposition of owning the Little Mermaid on VHS for $25 to watch as many times as your kid wants was an almost irresistible proposition when the alternative is paying for a ticket for each member of the family to watch it once. So while Roger Ebert and some members here might lament the family demographic, I would argue that it was this demographic that really spearheaded the movement for consumers to own copies of media versus paying to watch for every single viewing.

Did you watch the documentary? The folks in charge don't really strike me as the IT type that could make this happen. Plus they're smart enough to know they're on borrowed time. Why upgrade your tech when you could be closed the next day? It also seems like they're prepared for the inevitable and ready to retire when it does happen.

tanman

Here's one thing I don't get with a lot of these documentaries. How did the guy who made this know that the Bend, Oregon Blockbuster would be the last one? If it wasn't manipulated at one point they're interviewing the manager and she's talking about how there are 17(?) Blockbusters left, then 4 then finally just them. Were they following all the final Blockbusters with them shifting gears when the final one was the one in Oregon? Or did they just get lucky and happened to be filming the last one standing? Same with Tiger King. They just happened to be making a documentary about Joe Exotic when all of the legal stuff went down?

bluetoast

As for the issue of updating software. Data migration can be a fucking nightmare. It seems straightforward, move this shit from this software to that software. No. Shit will randomly not get converted or moved. A record will be missing part of its history. Other random issues. If you’re actually meeting with people to figure this out, there will be arguments. “Do we care about records going back further than two years? Why don’t we leave that? What if a customer comes in and wants to deactivate an account and we already deleted it? When we convert from the old system to the new, do we keep both running simultaneously or close for a few days or do it all manually and enter it later?”

Fuck all that. Better to keep their stuff going as long as they have the parts.

clckworang

No, I didn't watch it. Do you think I should?

I don't think you have to work in IT to type some data into a field or to find someone who is willing to help out. They clearly don't have a shortage of goodwill. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if my capabilities through DVD Profiler are more robust than what that software has. I can add users, mark when people check out things, set due dates.

If you can use a UPC scanner, it probably wouldn't take so long to create a new database for your inventory. The thing that would take the longest is customer info, but if you devote some time each day to it, it probably wouldn't take so long.

Jay G.

They got lucky. The director lived in Bend Oregon and started filming when there were still a dozen or so left.
https://cinemadailyus.com/interviews...st-blockbuster
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...st-blockbuster
The Kickstarter started in August 2018.

If that particular store hadn't happened to be the last Blockbuster, they likely would've expanded the film a bit, and maybe visited the actual last store. They did interview the owner of the Alaska stores, and went to NYC to interview Llyod Kaufmann, so they were willing the travel. The Bend store could've ended up being just one chapter in the finished movie if things had turned out different.

Not to mention part of their luck is why this particular documentary about video rental stores got the attention, and Kickstarter funding, did. It's not the only documentary people have made, or wanted to make, about video stores, but they had the brand recognition and the allure of about being about the last one.
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/t...-documentary#/
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...t-video-stores

It's not like the filmmakers were the first to think Joe Exotic was worth filming. Rick Kirkham's earlier attempt to sell a TV show based around Joe is a major part of that documentary. Also, that documentary started off more as a general expose of Big Cat collectors, but Joe turned out to be the far most interesting subject.

And again, part of the reason it got such widespread attention was due to that luck. If all that stuff hadn't happened to Joe, it likely wouldn't resulted in a show that was still quirky, but maybe didn't go as mainstream. Additionally, that show landed at the right time when people wanted a distraction from real-world events. Not to mention the filmmakers likely extended their project once all the legal stuff started landing.

Sometimes documentaries are about being in the right place at the right time, and being able to pivot.

Jay G.

As the documentary shows, the store software/hardware seems to rely on a very specific, possibly customer, PCI card in the PCs. So switching to Mac won't be easy, as there's likely no Mac drivers. Hell, there's likely no Windows drivers past a certain version of Windows, and finding a PCI slot in newer hardware is difficult.

Also, the existing software looks to be the same that Blockbuster was using in the 90s. It may only run on certain versions of Windows.

Finally, it likely connects to a main Blockbuster server/network. Keep in mind that membership cards worked at all locations. So they're constrained by the software that can connect to that Blockbuster server/network stuff remotely.

So it's not a simple migration. They have an old, outdated, legacy program, but it works, and it's more complete and robust than what a single video store could whip together on its own. Not to mention there's likely no tools to migrate that data off of Blockbuster's system to something else, and the Blockbuster franchise agreement likely forbids that; Blockbuster likely considers all that data in their systems proprietary. So the store would have to build a new system from scratch: inventory, customers, everything.

Jay G.

You're forgetting that a rental store has to deal with multiple copies of each title, with a unique identifier for each copy, and as an operating store, will have copies outside the store, with specific return dates and such, at any given time.

Also, the customer info is going to be constantly changing, with updated addresses, changes on what they have checked out, the status of late fees, etc.

Typically, a migration like this you want to move everything at once, normally overnight, and start on the new system with accurate data. Otherwise, you end up with things like having to use two systems simultaneously, as some data is migrated and some isn't. It's a herculean task, and something a single rental store likely operating on thin margins isn't really up to doing, especially if the older stuff still works, albeit with occasional repairs.