Wasting time in the 80s (and some part of the 90s) meant that you'd probably spent considerable hours at your local video rental stores, be it for renting video tapes or just goofing around aimlessly with your pals among the massive library of video tapes before you finally decide which one(s) to rent and take home. For me it was both but many a times it was just the latter, great excuse to hang out with friends.
Be it on the VHS or Betamax format, one can take the magic of the cinema home albeit a deadline to return them back to the store on time to avoid late charges. These days, video rental stores are relics of the past and one can barely find one anywhere.
In the States itself, many video rental chains ceased their operations as they lose their battles with online streaming media. Blockbuster Video, once the world's biggest video rental chain, only has one remaining store in Oregon.
Many other like Redbox, Major Video, Hollywood Video and Family Video also went out of business when they lost the war against the rapid advancements on digital media sharing.
It's the same here in Malaysia. Although we never had any Blockbuster Video stores on our shores, there were many big ones like the Australian video rental chain, Video EZY....
...or the local SPEEDY video stores (although this one was more towards buying and not rental)...
....which have all since closed down and went into liquidation due to lack of business (although I could have sworn there is still a couple of medium sized SPEEDY stores left in town).
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But if you ask me, it's the smaller local neighborhood video rental stores that takes the cake for me. Nothing beats your own video neighborhood rental stores. These were where all the cool kids hung out to have intellectual discussions on the latest movies and newsworthy updates about their favorite actors and actresses. Endless browsing of the movie catalogues at the counter made us spoilt with choices and we'd usually end up choosing more than one to bring home with us.
These stores are usually a stone's throw away from your house and weekly/daily congregation between friends were inevitable. Remember how the store keeper used to give us previews of the quality of each video tape by playing us random scenes from the movie? Remember how there were aisles to separate the 'good copy' and the 'so-so quality copy'?
Picture ripped off the internet (where else?)....I think this was a video rental store somewhere in Singapore back in its heyday
Remember how you came back to the store just to 'extend' your rental on a particular video tape? I remember extending my rental of Forrest Gump and Pulp Fiction, because I was too blown away by those films at the time, just to name a few. There were also days when I would specifically go down to my local neighborhood store to endlessly ask the store keeper to play certain music videos like More Than Words (Extreme) and Two Steps Behind (Def Leppard) because they were by far my two most favorite acoustic songs at the time (still are!).
When the VHS and Betamax met their demise, laser discs, DVDs and later the blu-ray formats came to take their places although in recent times even those had a tough time to compete with digital streaming platforms. Extinct as they may be, let me remember the video rental stores for what they were, the cool hanging spots for the cool kids!
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