I was pretty young and havent seen it since. But Laserdisc was the big dvd right? I was mentioning Video Disc. Those plastic encased records that you had to turn over while watching a move. The lesser format of the two
I was pretty young and havent seen it since. But Laserdisc was the big dvd right? I was mentioning Video Disc. Those plastic encased records that you had to turn over while watching a move. The lesser format of the two
Laserdisc still had the same limitation; data was stored on both sides / read by both sides, so you had to flip the damn thing over, and keeping it scratch free would've been a real hassle.
I actually still owe Blockbuster like $9 or something, because I was indeed serious about not coming back. The one near me in college was chintzy as hell and refused to take part in Blockbuster's "no more late fees" campaign, and I didn't realize until I brought two games back late. The first time I wrote them off, I got something in the mail a few months later saying that they were waiving my late fees so please come back.
Like a year later I had late fees again, and just avoided the place. This time they sent a bill, which I promptly ignored.
I think they might have sent one more bill, but things were starting to go downhill for them not soon after, and I moved away, and I never heard from them again.
I think everybody can agree that LaserDisc was the most ridiculous of the formats.
As the format itself goes, okay, sure. But my God. LaserDisc. The name is evocative of everything the future was supposed to offer us. Lasers! Discs! It was like living in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Very much like living in 2001: A Space Odyssey when you consider that people still used something like a phone booth to talk to their families while they were waiting for their flight at the space port. Stanley Kubrick thought we'd be taking shuttles to the moon by now, and he also thought in this same bright future, we wouldn't be able to imagine a way to do peer to peer video telecom without a kiosk the size of a blackboard. Wrong again, Kubrick! Wrong again.
I think everybody can agree that LaserDisc was the most ridiculous of the formats.
I have to say, a Laserdisc in person is quite the thing to behold, and I have to give a world of credit to anyone that can manage to keep one in shape. Scratches over that surface must be a nightmare.
I also liked the Laserdisc cover for Ghostbusters.
EDIT: For anyone who doesn't know, a Laserdisc actually stores data on both of it's sides - there isn't a 'cover' side like on a modern optical disk. Most films would be split 50/50 between the two sides, so halfway through the movie you'd have to flip over the disk (unless you had a more expensive player that could read from either side; then you'd just tell the machine to play side 2 or whatever).
Same went for early DVDs of any film longer than like two hours. I still have my double-sided edition of Goodfellas because fuck you if you think I'm buying it again. Then they went dual-layer, and that shit ended, except for some TV shows that insist that its totally worth making DVDs impossible to take care of in order to fit a season on half the number of discs.
Oh, and while we're in nostalgia land, the early DVDs that had both the widescreen and "full screen" version, one on each side? Yup, you just chose the side you never wanted to watch, and that's the one you let get scratched to shit.
And working in a video store those were like twice the nightmare. Because those were hard to take care of when they were your own discs, and you gave two shits.
I actually still owe Blockbuster like $9 or something, because I was indeed serious about not coming back. The one near me in college was chintzy as hell and refused to take part in Blockbuster's "no more late fees" campaign, and I didn't realize until I brought two games back late. The first time I wrote them off, I got something in the mail a few months later saying that they were waiving my late fees so please come back.
Like a year later I had late fees again, and just avoided the place. This time they sent a bill, which I promptly ignored.
I think they might have sent one more bill, but things were starting to go downhill for them not soon after, and I moved away, and I never heard from them again.
LOL. I still have a couple Blockbuster cases in my collection that are not purchased from them but rather unreturned as well. I went back and they didnt try to charge me anything for that last year they were hanging on.
Anyone else remember the slowly escalating policies that video stores would use to deter thieves?
All of the stores I knew started-off by just putting big black plastic proprietary locks on the video cases. This didn't deter people from shoplifting the expensive stuff out of the store anyway (and presumably just breaking the case later), so then they began putting magnetic alarm triggers on the cases and installing the door gates. So, thieves would either just run out the door, alarm be damned, or break open the case in the porn room.
Phase 2, of course, was to start putting high risk items behind the counter. But, at first, thieves didn't realize that the boxes on the floor were empty, and the stores didn't bother to change the cases - so you had empty boxes with locks & magnetic triggers being run out of the door.
I'm not sure if the video stores found this as funny as I did.
I can't believe this didn't exist long enough for disk jockeys to get a few solid years out of scratching one of these disks at a rave. It's like learning that a library burned down: Western culture lost something.
Say what you want about the movie rental segment of Blockbuster. With the growing popularity of on-demand, Netflix, and the ilk, it was clear that part was waning. Shit, even simple piracy was having a profound effect with how simple the process has become.
But the video game rental segment... that still has/had fucking relevance. That's the part I'll truly lament and miss.
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
I looked up the cool video rental+record store where I used to live and was pretty bummed to find out that it's been closed for a couple years.
But! Like 40 minutes from here there's a neato hipster cavernous dimly-lit video rental place/coffee shop with a good and eclectic movie selection and staff that seemed friendly and movie-knowledgeable. It's still open last I checked. Too far away though!
As a kid I liked looking at the covers in the horror section even though I was too scared to rent any of the titles
I know so many movies and games strictly through their covers.
Did anyone else go to one of the video stores that used little tags on the shelves under th movie or game that you had to take up to the front desk? So rewarding.
Or did anyone else hide the game or movie they wanted to get next time or come back for later behind the wrong case?
We had someone try and just straight up jack a 360 the week of release, like the dude just walked in, snagged it off the shelf and headed for the door.
So I watch him do this while my coworker is busy flirting with a friend who'd come in. I let him get to the exit before I tapped my coworker, a guy in freakishly good shape, on the shoulder and asked "So you're just going to let that happen?"
Coworker runs the kid down and rips the case away from him then proceeds to shame this poor scrawny highschool kid and his three friends into apologizing profusely in the middle of a fairly busy stripmall parking lot
By the time they left I think every customer in the store was watching them get scolded and I think we all had the exact same bemused smirk on our faces.
Four very humiliated teenagers ended up leaving that day and I'm fairly sure they never came back to our store.
Here's the thing: you can't name one thing about VHS that is superior to DVD, BlueRay or even artifacted HD YouTube footage. This isn't like records vs CDs, where one has a very distinct sound that, while not 'superior', some people find more enjoyable - VHS is just a grainier, dirtier experience
Two words:
Movie. Marathons.
I'm sorry, but cassettes (be it VHS, Beta or any other more obscure format) are the 'Ironman Mode' of movie marathons. There's none of this 'Skip Scene' bullshit; you've got to watch the whole movie - even if you fast forward through some of it, the visuals are still there, and it still takes time. If it ain't a cassette set, it ain't a real marathon.
There you go. One thing VHS has that DVD doesn't.
Yes, I am positing a convenience feature as a drawback. No, of course my rose tinted glasses aren't becoming more and more opaque as this discussion continues; that's just your imagination!
Which DVDs have ruined, by the way!
I found myself out in the wilds of PA a while back without internet or cable television.
let me tell you. when i stumbled onto a VHS of Home Alone and a working VCR in the living room I was in a new kind of heaven. There's something about how the VHS format demands your attention. Sure it's not crystal clear but ain't there some charm in that?
I saw Snow White: A Tale of Terror was on Netflix and I watched like two thirds of it. At last my childhood curiosity is sated. It's not exactly an artistic masterpiece.
You know what obscure movie was way more entertaining than I was expecting? Troll. An exceptionally weird kid's movie/pseudo-horror movie with good puppet work and one random musical number.
I didn't know anything about it before I started watching, except that I heard it didn't have anything to do with Troll 2. I saw it because I bought Troll 2 and Troll came packaged with it.
There is something really great about going into a movie totally blind: nobody's recommended it to you, you haven't read any reviews, you don't know what star rating Netflix algorithms predict you'll give it. All you know is what's on the cover or the poster. It's a bit harder to do that sans video rental store.
My memory of VHS is the often obscure trailers for Australian movies, as the main NZ distributor seemed to purchase all foreign tapes from there. So I have a collection of fragmentary memories of these films which will never be watched
Seriously, I could tell you stories about how big a pain in the ass it is to find an item that's in the wrong spot. Like, when your one copy of something isn't where it's supposed to be, but isn't checked out, which means it could be anywhere in the store. Behind any box. In any section.
Seriously, I could tell you stories about how big a pain in the ass it is to find an item that's in the wrong spot. Like, when your one copy of something isn't where it's supposed to be, but isn't checked out, which means it could be anywhere in the store. Behind any box. In any section.
I had a fail-safe system; I'd always hide the rental I wanted behind a specific western movie I always recognized the cheezy cover of (couldn't tell you the name now, though). I knew nobody would ever move that movie, and nobody would ever go looking in that section for my craftily 'reserved' rental.
You know I'm amazed rental stores weren't killed stone dead the second DVDs replaced VHS. The goddamn things are so fragile that renting them out to the general public and expecting them to last longer than three days is a joke.
I'm surprised they didn't just have all the movies on an HDD in store and burn them to a new disc every two or three rentals. Well no I'm not really because obviously the cost of all the blank discs would have made it impossible to make a profit on renting them out for a couple of bucks.
But yeah, blockbuster were a stagnant and obsolete business. The writing was on the wall for them as soon as the streaming services took off, that and bargain basement supermarket DVDs going for a couple of quid a pop.
They could possibly have saved themselves if they had been much quicker about getting their own online services going but they seemed to just freeze in the competitions headlights and got hit by the oncoming truck. It's a shame, especially for the people losing their jobs but that's what happens to businesses that refuse to evolve with the times. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the future was streaming.
I think the thing with DVDs is that when they rolled around a lot of the major places like Blockbuster still had some pretty strict renting properties. Like your CC# and information would be on file and they threatened to charge you for any damage incurred.
That right there was enough for most people to take care with the product.
I think the thing with DVDs is that when they rolled around a lot of the major places like Blockbuster still had some pretty strict renting properties. Like your CC# and information would be on file and they threatened to charge you for any damage incurred.
That right there was enough for most people to take care with the product.
It didn't really work. Whenever I rented DVDs you could always rely on at least a couple being damaged. It's what put me off it in the end.
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MattitudePaste Pot PeteKicking The BucketRegistered Userregular
I worked at a Blockbuster here in the UK for a couple of years. Even back then (I left about 4 years ago), it was not going well. The US company tanked around the time I left. It did strike me at the time how difficult it must have been to make any profit on rentals: the discs cost about £50 each, as we had to pay for a rental license, and if it wasn't made back in the first two weeks or so, chances are we'd lose money on that disc. Hence why staff weren't allowed to use their free rentals on New Releases.
Damn I loved that job though. Spent 90% of my time on the games desk. Good times.
I got this Tumblr and I don't know how to use it.
Decide on the next line by the rhyme when I choose it.
Also I put songs on YouTube
The musings of this lonely rube.
I remember VHS well, fuck did I waste money on that shit. I used to buy VHS tapes for around 25$ a pop. I had a gigantic collection of star trek DS9, 4 seasons worth. They only had two episodes per cassette and 13 cassettes per season. Do the math. I just did. 1300 dollars for the whole shebang. For cassettes that degraded after 3-4 years of just sitting around.
I am going to go into a corner and cry now, because this thread is depressing. Man, was I young and dumb.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
I used to go to Super K Mart and rent SNES games. In the N64 era ( and PS1 ) I believe I moved on to Hollywood Video because the Super K like imploded or something. I mostly rented games, but I think I have a blockbuster card from when I was dating and we would just stop in and grab a movie, take it back to her/my place and then watch it. Granted, as teenagers, you generally only watch the first 20-30 minutes 85% of the time when you are watching a movie together, it was still a semi-nice function.
I don't particularly miss the function, though. It was just a part of my childhood, one of a million things that changes as time goes on. That's life.
RCA SelectaView Video Disc Player that we had back in the day
Video? On a record, with a stylus to read it? That's actually pretty sweet.
The picture posted earlier of a Laserdisc player really doesn't represent the sheer size of a Laserdisc. This is what I'm talking about;
As a... 12 or 13 year old? I'd never heard of these things before I visited my older brother at his new apartment. Not only did he have one of these ridiculous things, he also had Terminator 2 on Laserdisc, which I'd never seen or even heard of before. And a bigass Dolby surround sound setup. That was one hell of a visit, I tell you what. I still love the shit out of that movie.
Back to the topic of VHS, my parents still have three double-door'd cabinets of VHS tapes in the guest room off the frontroom (aka living room, for you non-Chicago folks.) My dad is an electrician who did a lot of second shift work at a fancy hotel downtown, and said hotel had pay-per-view of course. So he'd go to the video room with some fresh blank tapes and just tape movies for free, all night, filling our collection. This is how I was exposed to things like the entire Back to the Future trilogy on one tape (woo 6 hour capacity), the Beverly Hills Cop trilogy, Naked Gun, National Lampoon (Christmas Vacation!)... pretty much every amazing movie of the 80s and early 90s. That whole VHS experience, now that I think about it, had a profound impact on me and really defined the sort of humor I like today.
If this thread morphs into an [Obsolete Technology] thread, I'd be happy to talk about Minidisc players
I always figured working at a video store would be pretty easy. A lot better than working at, say, McDonalds or Wal-Mart anyway. Easy-to-move, homogeneous stock, lots of down-time to enjoy not being hassled by the stupid freaking customers on the not-weekends, and free rentals. Also one of the video stores I used to frequent always had a movie playing on their display TVs and I figured it was nice that the employees at least had somethin' to watch when things got boring.
I never did work at one though, so maybe it still sucked.
I worked at Movie Gallery in their waning days of their shit. They stiffed me on pay, demanded off the clock work, etc. It was a horrible, horrible job. When no customers were in the store you have to clean, always be cleaning, even if its clean. You cannot sit down, even if there's no one in sight. You cannot lean on the counter. You must stand for your entire shift and don't even think about breaks
yeah working at a video store can go fuck itself
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Hi I'm Vee!Formerly VH; She/Her; Is an E X P E R I E N C ERegistered Userregular
Best part about movie rental stores was the discount video table.
I still have a box full of softcore porn VHS tapes I bought for 2-3 bucks a pop when I was like 14. Trying to find the ones with the most innocuous-sounding titles so I didn't get "carded" or whatever at the register. Sneaking them into the apartment tucked into the front waistline of my pants, sucking my stomach in so my mom didn't notice anything unusual.
I thought I was so fucking clever, but looking back I'm pretty sure that everybody (even my mother) knew what was up.
Posts
Laserdisc still had the same limitation; data was stored on both sides / read by both sides, so you had to flip the damn thing over, and keeping it scratch free would've been a real hassle.
Like a year later I had late fees again, and just avoided the place. This time they sent a bill, which I promptly ignored.
I think they might have sent one more bill, but things were starting to go downhill for them not soon after, and I moved away, and I never heard from them again.
If only they had those late fees...
EDIT: Magnavision: A Whole New Dimension in Entertainment!
Same went for early DVDs of any film longer than like two hours. I still have my double-sided edition of Goodfellas because fuck you if you think I'm buying it again. Then they went dual-layer, and that shit ended, except for some TV shows that insist that its totally worth making DVDs impossible to take care of in order to fit a season on half the number of discs.
Oh, and while we're in nostalgia land, the early DVDs that had both the widescreen and "full screen" version, one on each side? Yup, you just chose the side you never wanted to watch, and that's the one you let get scratched to shit.
And working in a video store those were like twice the nightmare. Because those were hard to take care of when they were your own discs, and you gave two shits.
IT WAS ALL YOUR FAULT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc
RCA SelectaView Video Disc Player that we had back in the day
All of the stores I knew started-off by just putting big black plastic proprietary locks on the video cases. This didn't deter people from shoplifting the expensive stuff out of the store anyway (and presumably just breaking the case later), so then they began putting magnetic alarm triggers on the cases and installing the door gates. So, thieves would either just run out the door, alarm be damned, or break open the case in the porn room.
Phase 2, of course, was to start putting high risk items behind the counter. But, at first, thieves didn't realize that the boxes on the floor were empty, and the stores didn't bother to change the cases - so you had empty boxes with locks & magnetic triggers being run out of the door.
I'm not sure if the video stores found this as funny as I did.
I can't believe this didn't exist long enough for disk jockeys to get a few solid years out of scratching one of these disks at a rave. It's like learning that a library burned down: Western culture lost something.
I think my favorite nes rental movie place did that.
Or I'm confusing my life with that Seinfeld episode.
The Adults Only back room, I never went back there. Even when I was old enough.
...what did they keep in their?!
But the video game rental segment... that still has/had fucking relevance. That's the part I'll truly lament and miss.
But! Like 40 minutes from here there's a neato hipster cavernous dimly-lit video rental place/coffee shop with a good and eclectic movie selection and staff that seemed friendly and movie-knowledgeable. It's still open last I checked. Too far away though!
I know so many movies and games strictly through their covers.
Did anyone else go to one of the video stores that used little tags on the shelves under th movie or game that you had to take up to the front desk? So rewarding.
Or did anyone else hide the game or movie they wanted to get next time or come back for later behind the wrong case?
So I watch him do this while my coworker is busy flirting with a friend who'd come in. I let him get to the exit before I tapped my coworker, a guy in freakishly good shape, on the shoulder and asked "So you're just going to let that happen?"
Coworker runs the kid down and rips the case away from him then proceeds to shame this poor scrawny highschool kid and his three friends into apologizing profusely in the middle of a fairly busy stripmall parking lot
By the time they left I think every customer in the store was watching them get scolded and I think we all had the exact same bemused smirk on our faces.
Four very humiliated teenagers ended up leaving that day and I'm fairly sure they never came back to our store.
I found myself out in the wilds of PA a while back without internet or cable television.
let me tell you. when i stumbled onto a VHS of Home Alone and a working VCR in the living room I was in a new kind of heaven. There's something about how the VHS format demands your attention. Sure it's not crystal clear but ain't there some charm in that?
You probably don't deserve legit movie marathons, scrub
I didn't know anything about it before I started watching, except that I heard it didn't have anything to do with Troll 2. I saw it because I bought Troll 2 and Troll came packaged with it.
Oh, come on now:
Absolutely everyone did this.
YOU ANIMALS
I had a fail-safe system; I'd always hide the rental I wanted behind a specific western movie I always recognized the cheezy cover of (couldn't tell you the name now, though). I knew nobody would ever move that movie, and nobody would ever go looking in that section for my craftily 'reserved' rental.
Hahaha. I did this too.
From time to time I would just put them in the correct spot.
The real kicker is when you finally saw that thing you've been waiting to get it and. . .hey. .wait a minute this is Ferngully 2!
I'm surprised they didn't just have all the movies on an HDD in store and burn them to a new disc every two or three rentals. Well no I'm not really because obviously the cost of all the blank discs would have made it impossible to make a profit on renting them out for a couple of bucks.
But yeah, blockbuster were a stagnant and obsolete business. The writing was on the wall for them as soon as the streaming services took off, that and bargain basement supermarket DVDs going for a couple of quid a pop.
They could possibly have saved themselves if they had been much quicker about getting their own online services going but they seemed to just freeze in the competitions headlights and got hit by the oncoming truck. It's a shame, especially for the people losing their jobs but that's what happens to businesses that refuse to evolve with the times. It didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the future was streaming.
That right there was enough for most people to take care with the product.
It didn't really work. Whenever I rented DVDs you could always rely on at least a couple being damaged. It's what put me off it in the end.
Damn I loved that job though. Spent 90% of my time on the games desk. Good times.
Decide on the next line by the rhyme when I choose it.
Also I put songs on YouTube
The musings of this lonely rube.
I made a thread once. It didn't end well for me.
I am going to go into a corner and cry now, because this thread is depressing. Man, was I young and dumb.
I don't particularly miss the function, though. It was just a part of my childhood, one of a million things that changes as time goes on. That's life.
Video? On a record, with a stylus to read it? That's actually pretty sweet.
The picture posted earlier of a Laserdisc player really doesn't represent the sheer size of a Laserdisc. This is what I'm talking about;
As a... 12 or 13 year old? I'd never heard of these things before I visited my older brother at his new apartment. Not only did he have one of these ridiculous things, he also had Terminator 2 on Laserdisc, which I'd never seen or even heard of before. And a bigass Dolby surround sound setup. That was one hell of a visit, I tell you what. I still love the shit out of that movie.
Back to the topic of VHS, my parents still have three double-door'd cabinets of VHS tapes in the guest room off the frontroom (aka living room, for you non-Chicago folks.) My dad is an electrician who did a lot of second shift work at a fancy hotel downtown, and said hotel had pay-per-view of course. So he'd go to the video room with some fresh blank tapes and just tape movies for free, all night, filling our collection. This is how I was exposed to things like the entire Back to the Future trilogy on one tape (woo 6 hour capacity), the Beverly Hills Cop trilogy, Naked Gun, National Lampoon (Christmas Vacation!)... pretty much every amazing movie of the 80s and early 90s. That whole VHS experience, now that I think about it, had a profound impact on me and really defined the sort of humor I like today.
If this thread morphs into an [Obsolete Technology] thread, I'd be happy to talk about Minidisc players
Inquisitor77: Rius, you are Sisyphus and melee Wizard is your boulder
Tube: This must be what it felt like to be an Iraqi when Saddam was killed
Bookish Stickers - Mrs. Rius' Etsy shop with bumper stickers and vinyl decals.
I worked at Movie Gallery in their waning days of their shit. They stiffed me on pay, demanded off the clock work, etc. It was a horrible, horrible job. When no customers were in the store you have to clean, always be cleaning, even if its clean. You cannot sit down, even if there's no one in sight. You cannot lean on the counter. You must stand for your entire shift and don't even think about breaks
yeah working at a video store can go fuck itself
I still have a box full of softcore porn VHS tapes I bought for 2-3 bucks a pop when I was like 14. Trying to find the ones with the most innocuous-sounding titles so I didn't get "carded" or whatever at the register. Sneaking them into the apartment tucked into the front waistline of my pants, sucking my stomach in so my mom didn't notice anything unusual.
I thought I was so fucking clever, but looking back I'm pretty sure that everybody (even my mother) knew what was up.