About 20 years ago, this is what we’d do on the weekends in the California Gold Rush town where we lived before we moved to central Pennsylvania. We rented videocassettes and a videocassette player, picked up a you-bake pizza and voila, instant Family Movie Night.
The machine was slightly smaller than the state of Rhode Island, but still, what a thrill to be able to pick a flick and watch it without commercial interruptions. The only tricky part, surprisingly, was finding kid-friendly movies.
On one occasion, we went with a sure-fire film about the adventures of animal pals who were trying to find their way back home — either ‘The Adventures of Milo and Otis’ or ‘Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey,’ I can’t remember which. As the noble and endearing beasts encountered peril after peril, Sylvie, who was probably about 6, became deeply distressed.
‘They’re never going to get home,’ she fretted.
I assured her that against all odds, the plucky pets would arrive home safe and sound.
‘How do you know?’ she asked.
‘Trust me,’ I said, only I laughed as I said it, which did not inspire trust at all. Here was Milo or Sassy or whoever the hell it was, about to be washed over the falls or devoured by a bear, and her idiot father, obviously incapable of grasping the gravity of the situation, was laughing.
I couldn’t help it, though. The idea of a nasty little kids’ movie in which the heroes all come to a bad end struck me as very funny.
‘Have you seen this movie before?’ Sylvie demanded.
I confessed that I hadn’t.
Then how do you know?’ she asked.
How do you explain to a little kid that if you see enough movies, you develop some sophistication about plot and genre? I couldn’t. She refused to watch the rest, thus depriving me of the opportunity to prove that I was right about the safe return of Otis or Chance or whoever the hell it was. I doubt the happy outcome would have vindicated me. Since I hadn’t seen the movie, it could only have been a lucky guess.
In any event, like all good Americans, we eventually decided that owning made better sense than renting, and installing made better sense than lugging so we acquired our very own VCR. Only to find, soon after, that the VCR had been supplanted by the DVD player.
By this time we had moved to State College, where we experienced our second great kid-unfriendly movie experience. We prowled the aisles of Hollywood Video and emerged with ‘Ghostbusters.’ Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Rick Moranis. Uproarious, right?
Unfortunately, we had forgotten about the scene near the beginning where the librarian ghost morphs into a sharp-toothed fiend. Quicker than you can say ectoplasmic entities, Rosa was up the basement steps and out the back door.
‘It’s OK,’ I told her. ‘We turned the movie off.’ I waggled the cassette at her as proof.
Mistake. She retreated. Her non-negotiable demand: The cassette had to be removed from the premises. Having hidden in the bathroom from ‘Invaders from Mars’ when I was her age, I couldn’t refuse.
Apart from boring my son to tears, I don’t remember any other unfortunate movie rental experiences until a couple of years ago, when I had the bright idea that the French high school student we were hosting would get a kick out of seeing the American high school experience as depicted in ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High.’
All was pretty much well until we got to the scene in the school cafeteria where a girl uses a carrot to give her friend a tutorial on the fine art of oral sex. Fortunately, our jeune Francaise had fallen asleep. Unfortunately, my daughters had not. As they would say: Awkward.
Overall, though, thanks to Hollywood and Blockbuster and Mike’s Video, I spent many an entertaining Family Movie Night at home in State College instead of hanging out in some boring old jazz club in New York. And now, those video rental stores are gone, Netflixed and Redboxed onto the scrap heap of history. Poof!
VCRs came on the market in the mid-’70s. Blockbuster started in ’85 and at its peak had more than 4,000 stores. Now it has a few hundred. Hollywood opened its first stores in 1988 and went bankrupt last year. Has any other industry risen and fallen so quickly?
I’m reminded of the song, ‘Daddy, What’s a Train?’ and of my dad’s career in the now-defunct letterpress printing business. I’m imagining my children’s children asking, ‘Daddy, what’s a newspaper?’
Ah, well. At least Milo and Otis and Chance and Shadow and Sassy all got home safe. And I’m sure that after just a few more years of therapy, my daughters will recover from the traumas they suffered as a result of their father’s ill-considered commerce with the video rental industry.
