Memories of the '80s: The Video Store

Before the mid-1970s if you had a favorite movie, the only place it could be seen was either in the theater or much later if and when it made it to broadcast television, where you would probably see an edited version. And with broadcast television you were at the mercy of the programmers who would decide when and if the movies would air. You liked the movie The Magnificent Seven? You would have to study the TV Guide every week to see if it was on. And if it was on there was a possibility that this could be the last time it ever aired. Plenty of movies simply stopped airing and were never seen again. And good luck if The Magnificent Seven was on at 4:30 in the morning because your only option now was to stay up late to see it.

VCRs and Betamax came out in the '70s and were very expensive. Originally the point of owning any video recorder was to own the camcorder that allowed you to record your own television show, or at leas something like a television show as you could replay yourself on your television set. A side advantage of owning a recorder was that it could also record television shows. This is really what made the technology practical. How many camcorder movies could you make of yourself or your friends and family before the novelty wore off? But you could always tape a television show for later playback. Further generations of the VCR and Betamax allowed you to tape one channel while watching another. But the price on these machines were still way too high for the average middle class family to afford. Video recorders still remained the play thing of the rich. Enter the video rental shop. The idea here was that the shop rented you a VCR for about $10 a week, something most middle class Americans could afford. The rental shop also gave you the option of buying the machine minus the rental fees you had paid up to that point. Most rental shops also repaired recorders and were the only place that sold blank video tapes. In 1977 a company called Magnetic Video paid 20th Century Fox $300,000 for the right to sell 50 movies from their library on home video including The French Connection, Patton and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Each video was sold for $50 but only after the consumer paid another $10 to join a video mail order club. A few months later in Los Angeles a VCR/Betamax rental store in Los Angeles began renting the same movies to it's customers.

By 1980 video rental shops were known more for renting movies than for recorders. While the price of recorders began to drop the price of movies began to go up. The companies that put them out realized that they were losing customers to the rental shops and decided the only way to make their money back was to double or even triple the price. Many movies were priced between $70 and $150 depending on the movie's popularity. The videos would have to be rented 20 times before they turned a profit. Being able to tape television shows and the price being lowered to a more affordable $300 saw a vast expansion of VCRs and Betamax machines in more homes. This created a market for more video rental shops which in turn began to spread across the nation like wildfire. But the one thing not keeping up with this expansion was the major Hollywood studios. While Fox had released 50 movies to video they were reluctant to release any more as were the other major studios. When movies were released they were usually a decade or more old. New major movies were not released unless a bootleg copy was released first, then the studios felt they no longer had a choice. This is what lead to Superman finally getting it's home video release. But video rental shops were looking to expand their stock. A customer could quickly go through 50 movies. So other home video companies began releasing movies by going after independent studios. In other words for the first few years of the 80's the majority of films found in your typical video rental shop were cheap B movies you never heard of. Films like Frankenstein Vs. Dracula, Nail Gun Massacre, Starship, and Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS. And there were always movies you never heard of by well known stars, like Laurel and Hardy in Utopia or Abbott and Costello in Africa Screams.

There were plenty of B grade horror movies with a full serving of gore. Some even managed to become video store hits. There was Madman where a group of arrogant campers waken a psychopath named Marz from the dead by yelling out his name and throwing rocks at his house. Predictably Madman Marz begins to hunt down and decapitate everyone at the camp. I Spit On Your Grave had a more sympathetic monster, this time a young woman who is driven insane after she is brutally raped by a group of men. She spends the rest of the movie hunting down and killing them. Perhaps the most disturbing of the B movies was suppose to be a documentary called Faces of Death. The movie was filled with what was suppose to be real footage of people and animals being killed or executed. Most of the footage of humans being killed was later revealed to have been faked with exception to some newsreel footage.

Some titles could be misleading. Bruce Lee Fights Back From the Grave was in a box that had a picture of a dead Bruce Lee rising up from his grave and punching demon while a sexy girl in lingerie sitting by a nearby grave watches. The movie begins with Bruce Lee being brought back to life after his grave is struck by lightning, but then immediately cuts away to a movie that has nothing to do with Bruce Lee. Fortunately you could find all of the actual Bruce Lee movies on video including Enter the Dragon. You could find all of the Monty Python movies on video including the bootleged Monty Python Meets Beyond the Fringe. There was also A Clockwork Orange and Mad Max. These were popular movies that you never saw on television up to then because they were considered too violent or controversial. Mr Mike's Mondo Video was another show too controversial for television. It was originally shot as a NBC late night special with most of the Saturday Night Live original cast participating. NBC decided that this not-ready-for-prime-time show was also not-ready-for-late-night and refused to air it. It found a new home as a rental tape. It was not alone. There were plenty of programs that went exclusively to video, such as Jane Fonda's Workout and Elephant Parts. Mr T. tried to inspire kids with Be Somebody... or Be Somebody's Fool! while Blondie released their entire 1979 album Eat to the Beat as a long form music video. Perhaps the most confounding direct to video program was called Treasure: In Search of the Golden Horse where you watched a cheap movie about a girl who's golden horse statue is stolen, and by watching the video and also buying an accompanying book you could find clues to where a real golden horse was hidden somewhere in the United States.

One can not talk about the video store without mentioning that other section. The one area every video store had. It was either a separate room behind swinging doors, or was a section of shelves off in the corner that was blocked off and only accessible through an entrance in full view of the store's clerk. This was the porn section, known as the Adults Only section. Of course it was such an attraction to us kids that we were always able to scamper past the clerk when he was busy and go in to look at the boxes. Here you could find some classics like Deep Throat and Debbie Does Dallas. But there were also the video boxes we laughed at. Such as Let Me Tell Ya 'Bout White Chicks with a pimp who goes by the name of Bubba The Black who has a group of white women surrounding him, and Let My Puppets Come, a porno movie with muppets. There was also a porno version of Little Red Riding Hood which as a joke we would bring out to the kids section and exchange for a cartoon version of the same story, putting the videos in each other's box. This was back when video stores still kept the actual video inside the actual box on the shelves, before they realized this was very tempting for those who wanted to steal movies. Eventually the real videos would go behind the counter while the empty boxes stayed on the shelves. This was a pain in the ass because you would have to check with the clerk just to see if the movie was in. This was about the time when the major Hollywood studios began to finally release all of their movies on home video. All the B movies quickly moved to the For Sale bin as stores sought to get rid of them to make space for real movies. This was also about the time when video stores gave up on asking for paid memberships. Originally you would have to pay anywhere up to $100 just to join a video club in order to rent movies from each store. The explanation for this was that if you lost or broke or even stole a video then this was the only way a store could be sure to reclaim their money. By 1990 video stores all offered free memberships and the latest Hollywood hits. Most of them would be done in in the months to come by the expansion of stores like Hollywood Video and Blockbuster, companies that in turn would be made obsolete by Netflix.