Who was the king of video rental?
- Thread starter ClonesTwenty1
- Start date
I think the only video store I visited more often than Blockbuster was Video Warehouse in Des Moines. Corner of Merle Hay & Franklin? They had a bunch of really bad & obscure horror movies.
I picked family video, only because there were two stores fairly close to me that were still open until a couple of years ago. One was down the street from me, the other was about 10 miles away. The Blockbuster has been gone for 15 years.
The "King" has to be Blockbuster as that was by far the biggest and most popular.
But my family was a MovieGallery fan when we lived in Alabama as it was attached to our grocery store, Bruno's.
Then when we moved to Ohio, the grocery store chain Giant Eagle had their own video rental stores attached as well. Iggle Video. You could earn free movie rentals from grocery shopping which we used almost weekly. We'd rent 3 movies (1 each) and watch them over the weekend together pretty regularly.
I remember talking with my dad and the reason why he liked Movie Gallery and Iggle so much was you could rent for 5 or 7 days at the same price as Blockbuster did for 3 days. Made it easy for him/us to drop off videos without late fees.
I miss video rental stores. I know it's not even remotely practical anymore but the anticipation of checking out what was gonna be available to rent and just scoping out all the movies and that stale popcorn smell mixed with whatever smell that VHS tapes made. So many memories
But my family was a MovieGallery fan when we lived in Alabama as it was attached to our grocery store, Bruno's.
Then when we moved to Ohio, the grocery store chain Giant Eagle had their own video rental stores attached as well. Iggle Video. You could earn free movie rentals from grocery shopping which we used almost weekly. We'd rent 3 movies (1 each) and watch them over the weekend together pretty regularly.
I remember talking with my dad and the reason why he liked Movie Gallery and Iggle so much was you could rent for 5 or 7 days at the same price as Blockbuster did for 3 days. Made it easy for him/us to drop off videos without late fees.
I miss video rental stores. I know it's not even remotely practical anymore but the anticipation of checking out what was gonna be available to rent and just scoping out all the movies and that stale popcorn smell mixed with whatever smell that VHS tapes made. So many memories
My small home town mom and pop store will always be my favorite, but the real magic of the video store wasn't even the movies for me. It was video games. Nothing was better than when mom would take me down to the video store on a friday so I could rent a Nintendo game to play for the weekend.
I remember renting movies from Cub Foods, they had little baseball card sized pictures of the movies in little plastic sleeves that you'd take to the counter.
Blockbuster was nationwide and sponsored a college football New Year's bowl game. Redbox killed them. Before that I remember our town having a local business that rented out VHS tapes. Then Hy-Vee got into the movie rental business.
For me, The Movie Place -- downtown Boone, next to Cardinal Cleaners. I doubt I could count the number of movies we checked out there over the years...
Used to rent Baseball Stars (edit, actually Bases Loaded now that I think about it) and/or Contra any Friday it was available.
That era doesn't feel like it was that long ago.
Okay, it was. I am old.
Okay, it was. I am old.
Still have my cartridge. I can't imagine how many hours I poured into that franchise mode, acquiring and developing players. This game was so far ahead of its time.
Yes! The team management was simple but revolutionary for the time. Nothing was better than winning a game and seeing a big pile of cash fall into your managers arm, then going to improve player stats and build an unstoppable juggernaut of a team. Loved that game!
Moovies, not sure how it was spelled, in west Ames was the goat, and then Hollywood video was a close second.
Hy-Vee did this also back in the day. Not all stores, but definitely the one I worked at in Urbandale.
