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It’s easy to consider household names like Walmart, Amazon, and Netflix and say, “Those companies are going to be around, like, forever.”
Allow me to introduce you to Blockbuster Video.
In its home video-fueled 2004 heyday, Blockbuster ran more than 9,000 stores (Walmart, by comparison, now has about 5,000). Some 83,000 people worked for the company stacking shelves with thousands of tapes and DVDs, checking out rentals, and best of all helping customers curate their home movie watching experience.
Today, there is one count it, one Blockbuster video store left, sitting at a lonely end of a strip mall in Bend, Oregon. The last Blockbuster does business the same way Blockbuster always did, its walls still painted in that garish, Cub Scout-like blue/yellow color scheme that at first lured you in and eventually chased you back out to the street.
In celebration of the worldwide DVD/Blu/VOD release of The Last Blockbuster this week (written, directed and produced by Bendites Taylor Morden and Zeke Kamm, and with an appearance by yours truly), I decided to make it a Blockbuster night. Nothing streaming was tickling my fancy and I m literally two blocks away from the last Blockbuster in the known universe, so I put on my mask and headed to the store to try to find something weird. Did you ever do that as a kid? Pick the movie you wanted to watch just based on how cool the box art is? Well, that s what I was after: a bonkers cover that promised me 90 minutes of insanity.no trailer, no buffering, no expectations. In the new releases, I found something so strange and wonderful that my 12-year-old self was finally able to die happy. The cover was bright psychedelic yellow and looked like someone s face was melting, which was perfect because I was looking for a movie that would actively melt my face.