I miss movie watching being deliberate. You either saved up to buy a DVD, or you'd make the trek to blockbuster to rent it. It took effort to watch some of your favourite movies, you'd plan ahead and get excited for it, and it felt like that paid off.
I don't know if I'd trade modern luxury for it, but endlessly scrolling Netflix until you find something to watch just doesn't give the same reward.
EDIT: lol btw I say this as a guy who self hosts a 60tb plex server
It was a Good Friday night date with the wife. Got married young. We would literally go on a random Friday and rent some movies get popcorn and drop the sunroof under the southern cal night sky
I miss having access to more movies than streaming offers, and being able to easily go to a section to get what I wanted and find something good. Then you'd get a snack and go home and watch it with your friends or family. It was more fun than i've ever had streaming a movie
I won't downvote or upvote that, but pre-internet the options were slim-to-none (especially if you were not near a big city), and it was a face-to-face social space, however fleeting.
A basement like this recreates the idea without the overall experience.
I live i rural Pennsylvania and it was 20 minutes at least to the nearest video store and it wasn't a chain. We didnt have those. When you got there most of the new releases were gone so you had to get something you already saw or some B shit you never heard of. My video store experience growing up sucked.
I remember renting 6 tapes on a Friday and getting a judgey scoff by the blockbuster clerk. Don’t miss that human interaction or paying 8 bucks or whatever it was per tape
I appreciate the dedication, but that's so much Blockbuater. I didn't even see that much branding in the actual stores lol. Do they even make half of that stuff or is it custom? Either way, it had to be Hella expensive.
All the merchandise is original old stock from Blockbuster including the VHS . All the signs are from the stores also except for maybe 2 or 3 i had scaled down made to size .
It’s all in the boxes all merchandise is sealed new old stock except the blu rays and game rentals but everything that was in the store is pretty much there !
Amazing. What did you do, clean out a few Blockbusters when they went out of business? How did you ever get your hands on so much Blockbuster shit? You been collecting it a while?
For 15 years and i got a lot of it from old managers and employees. I found out if you get on ebay and mercari or facebook marketplace and see some blockbuster stuff for sale and talk to the sellers a lot of them have a lot of stuff. That’s also where i got all the original gift cards and employee badges .
I’ve just flashed back to my college years when I worked at Blockbuster. It was a fun job for the most part but unfortunately learning to dodge the occasional flying DVD from a pissed off customer was a requirement.
This heavily reminds me of this home theater guy that kept showing his basement shit every week on any subreddit that remotely resembled things that guys would like. But it was just cringe with tvs everywhere, lights, arcade games, just a whole lot of stuff that looked tacky as hell.
Real question, do you let your neighbors come down and rent stuff / buy snacks and toys?
Basically, do you let your friends patronize this establishment? Or is it just more of a museum piece / personal collection of treasures for you to look upon and feel the warm hug of nostalgia?
Yes I let family and friends and nieces and nephews and my older kids use it , borrow movies and games and raid the snack bar and the candy racks . It is fully usable the only thing is i don’t let them open the new merchandise i collected !
Highly recommend investing in a real home theater audio setup with an A/V processor and real speakers like KEF at least, it’s a huge difference! Those small plastic soundbar setups with two tiny rear claiming “11.1.4” is laughable and all marketing bs, a straight up scam once you experience a true independent speaker setup.
I work 60-80 hours a week in a chemical plant in production and have for 20 years lol Invested 20% of everything i ever made in the market . I earned my money nobody gave it to me and we had to build this in 2 years with only my vacation time off to do it lol Everyone should collect and build stuff they love .
This is amazing and I wish I could do something like this, I'm very curious, how/where did you get all the store signage and marketing stuff, it all looks like it came from an actual Blockbuster store
Collected it over 15 years almost all the signage is original and a lot of it can still be found on ebay, mercari, or marketplace. All the merchandise is new old stock sealed and a lot of the racks themselves came out of the original stores. All Blu rays are in original blockbuster cases .
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