You’ve perhaps heard the news that the Blockbuster chain is in major trouble and closing stores all across the country- including a couple of locations in Kenosha and Racine. Hearing the news and seeing the signs got me thinking back to the first time I ever walked into a video store. It was the early 1980’s, and the Bergs was trying out their very first VCR- one which we were actually borrowing from my dad’s intern at Luther Valley, Larry Giese. (I’m not sure why we had his VCR in our house, but we did.) I was home from either college or graduate school, and I vividly remember my siblings and I heading off to the closest video store, which was in the Beloit Mall. I don’t remember how much the rental fee was, but I know that that there was a limit of three videos per visit . . . and as if it were yesterday, I can still remember the sense of incredible urgency with which we tried to come up with three videos that we could all agree on- feeling like we didn’t want to waste one of those precious rentals on something that only one of us wanted to watch. It seems absolutely absurd now, but at the time it was as though we were choosing the food for our very last meal. And you’d better believe that we all gathered in front of the TV/VCR and watched those rented movies with a great sense of momentous expectation. . . roughly akin to the day when the Waltons got their first radio and gathered around it to hear one of FDR’s fireside chats.
(Thinking about this actually takes me back to a memory that I had completely forgotten until just now. The very first time I saw a functioning VCR in someone’s home was at a home stay during a Nordic Choir tour- probably in 1981. It was a lovely home and these people obviously had quite a lot of money, and I can vividly remember thinking to myself “I hope I’m wealthy enough someday to own one of these” as though a VCR were the home entertainment equivalent of a yacht . . . much like I felt back in the 1960’s when we would visit my Aunt Marvel and Uncle Carl in Milwaukee and see their color TV- complete with a lava lamp on top of it. To this young kid from Iowa, nothing said RICH like a lava lamp!)
And now, astonishing though it may be, we live in a house that has a VCR/DVD in the living room, a VCR/DVD in the loft, and a VCR in the guest bedroom- plus there’s a VCR/ DVD in my office at Carthage. And we own literally thousands of videotapes and hundreds of DVD’s – so many, in fact, that if tomorrow we were seriously injured in a snorkeling accident and left bedridden for the rest of our lives, we would not have enough time to watch every video we own.
And what is craziest of all is that for as quickly as this whole home video business has swept into our culture, a lot of it appears ready to wink out of existence, beginning with the neighborhood video store, which seems unable to compete with services like Netflix or pay-per-view or web-based viewing and rental. And we may not be all that far away from the day when the whole notion of holding a tangible tape or disk in your hand from which you play a movie will be as obsolete as the butter churn. And I can’t say that I’m all that excited by this bewildering turn of events, but those STORE CLOSING signs in the window of our neighborhood Blockbuster would seem to suggest that the world is going to continue to spin at this dizzying speed.
At least I’m getting used to the motion sickness.