Ya know what? There’s something on the wind right now. I can just feel it, a creeping, insidious feeling about Blockbuster. I’m not sure what, but there was a Netflix documentary about them a couple years ago and I saw an article about them recently and if you look at Twitter it’ll be trending every so often. I don’t like what I’m seeing and I just want to nip it in the bud: Blockbuster sucked. They were total bullshit. They sucked at the beginning, they sucked at the end and they sucked in the middle. Just total bullshit.

If you’re having a sense of nostalgia for them, I want to make it clear: that’s fine. I don’t understand how brains work. Sometimes I’ll grab a pack of Sno-Balls at the grocery store, and it confuses me. We like the stuff we like and I understand that, I just also need to make sure this doesn’t get out of hand.

Listen, I’ll admit I’m a little fussy right now, please know that I am painfully aware that I’m turning into Andy Rooney, but I am not feeling great about the corporation movie fad; movies about Tetris, Nike and Blackberry. I’m sure they’re fine. There’s a lot of cute costumes and sketch comedy wigs in them, and I guess that’s a good enough reason to make a movie. But if this is a trend, and it seems like it is, I just want to make sure we don’t do this with Blockbuster. Because while Tetris is a fun game, Nike makes cool looking shoes, and Blackberry was, uhh, a phone, Blockbuster was bullshit.

Sidebar: Personally I’d rather we didn’t have movies about brands at all. I think it’s weird, and I’d rather watch something about a Jurassic Park or an Austin Powers or really just something that isn’t the origin story of a thing I don’t give a shit about. “How’d the shoe guys ever think of a new shoe?” Shit I dunno, it seems fuckin’ easy to me, but go off.

If you’re drawn in by the siren’s song of this bullshit company ask yourself why? They provided a service you loved! Access to movies, and video games. Things that everyone understands rule. Maybe you have memories of going there as a kid, looking at the cool box art, wandering the aisles imagining yourself entering new worlds like House or House II!

This is all normal stuff! But let me tell you: what you love is the art, and the movies, and the exhilaration of having weird little wire shelves be the closest thing to the internet in 1995.

But what you don’t love is Blockbuster (the bullshit corporation).

You probably also liked candy or board games or Nerf guns when you were a kid (or now!), but would we stan Walmart? Wouldn’t we think that was a little weird and sad? Do we want the Walmart biopic?

Why are we doing this?

I know everyone didn’t have this growing up, but I had the local VHS rental place, SRO. I never know what that stood for as a kid (standing room only, as it turns out), but it didn’t matter. They sponsored my little league team, they had a Xeroxed calendar to put on the fridge and every day of the month there was a special promotion, answer a trivia question for a cheap rental or something. Weekends, they’d have a big bucket of local beer available for customers to drink while they roamed the store. You could rent porno there (in the 90s it was called porno)

And I know not everyone had this, but now that you know this is not only a possibility, but one that Blockbuster killed in every single town in America, well, I guess all I can say is fuck that shit.

We don’t need to bring Blockbuster back, it would be like Pet Semetary but if the little boy sucked before he died. Sometimes dead is better, and sometimes never born is best.

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