Memories from the video rental store

[Cross Face Chicken Wing]

I spent some time in a Family Video store the other day. Walking around and browsing the shelves brought back memories. I made my way over to the "sports and fitness" section to see what the wrestling selection was like, and it was pretty weak. Family Video must sell their wrestling DVDs not long after they get them.

 

Anyway, video rental stores were a big part of me becoming a wrestling junkie. Here are a couple of my video rental memories:

 

• My family didn't have cable and we didn't have a VCR until I was in my teens. Once every 3-4 months, my parents would rent a VCR and a couple of movies. When I was about 6, we rented a VCR and my dad rented Wrestlemania III. I may have watched wrestling on TV before, but watching Wrestlemania III w/ my dad on our rented VCR is my first wrestling memory. From there, I discovered AWA TV on Sunday mornings, WWF TV on Saturday mornings, and the rest is history.
• Starrcade '86 was my first exposure to the NWA. I always saw the Starrcade '86 cassette on the shelf among all the WWF videos. I wondered what the hell it was. After I had watched all the WWF tapes available at my local video stores (many of them multiple times), I rented Starrcade. I loved it. The scaffold match hooked me immediately. Since I didn't have cable, I couldn't follow the NWA or WCW. I was stuck with only WWF and they dying AWA. I would do my best to keep up with the NWA and learn more about their wrestlers through PWI, The Wrestler and other wrestling magazines I could convince my mom to buy me at the grocery store.
• In the early 90s, The Great American Bash '87 tape popped up at one of my video stores for some reason. That first War Games remains one of my favorite matches to this day. I rented that tape repeatedly and wish I just would have bought the damn thing before the video store went out of business.

[Ricky Jackson]

I can still remember the day I discovered the video store Flicks and its awesome selection of CHV tapes. This was the late 80s and we had just moved to a new neighborhood. The video stores I frequented in my old neighborhood had some CHV's but far from all the tapes. Flicks basically had all of them, including the awesome history of the IC title and history of the WWF title tapes I had not seen before.

 

The store closed around 1997 and had a sale of all their tapes. For some stupid reason I didn't buy the CHV tapes. Regrets...

[Lust Hogan]

I remember the Crockett tapes being hardest to find. War Games and Bash 88 seemed to always be gone. Those were my favorites.

[soup23]

My go to was a local mom and pop video store called Greene's Video. They had pretty much everything WWF/WCW tucked away in a separate section along with the adult section. They did a 5 for $5 deal that I was able to share with my brother and load up on stuff. In addition, i still miss the Kroger carrying videos and I would use that and Movie Gallery if Greene's didn't have what I was in the mood for renting.

[Cross Face Chicken Wing]

I was in a small town of about 6,500 people and my video stores were Video Update and See It Now video. Video Update had their wrestling just outside the entrance to the porn section. Since it was a small town, people I knew would often come in as I was browsing the wrestling videos. I heard countless jokes about me liking wresting as a cover to hide the fact that I was heading to the porn section.

[(BP)]

My town had a small store that was put out of business by West Coast and Blockbuster when I was ten. The sports/fitness section was right next to the porn curtain, and it was comprised of WWF stuff from about 87-93, Jane Fonda workout tapes, and Foxy Boxing. There was no WCW, and the only NWA tape they had was Starrcade 86. I remember renting it and being disappointed as it only had one of the closed circuit feeds and was missing a bunch of matches advertised on the cover.

[hammerva]

I remember going to a local rental store and they had these wrestling tapes with covers that had guys like Rick Rude and King Kong Bundy and Macho Man as cartoon drawings almost. I watch it and it looks like it was this dangerous outlaw promotion that I probably shouldn't have watched as a kid. Little did I know it was mostly Memphis footage. I know there was like 4 or 5 series of these kind of tapes but forget who the distributor was

 

When I moved to the northern Virginia area in 1994ish I went to a Hollywood video in Manassas I think and I thought I hit wrestling heaven when they had the two tape Best of Starcade set and the Great American Bash War Games VHS tape side by side. As a kid you were lucky if saw any non WWF stuff

[Ricky Jackson]

Ha...yeah, I had a friend in high school who bought the Randy Savage Memphis tape while on a trip to the States. Savage piledriving Morton through a table blew our minds. Probably the first Memphis I ever saw I guess.

[Zoo Enthusiast]

I grew up in a town of 175 people (legit) that had a gas station that rented tapes. They usually just had a few WWF shows. I was able to get a lot more in the next town over, though pickings were still pretty slim, and no WCW. Once wrestling got hot, tapes were easier to come by, but my dad and I were already ordering every PPV by that point. Obviously, I taped all of them. I grew up almost entirely dependent on weekly TV, pre-1996/7, or so.

[JerryvonKramer]

So are there actually still video rental stores in the US?

 

Here we had Blockbuster and seemingly they just vanished overnight one day about 6-7 years ago never to be seen of or heard of or even thought of again.

 

Occassionally, I'll see the empty husk of one in a town or something, but always long gone and long out of business.

 

It really does seem like something from last century in my thinking now.

[Zoo Enthusiast]

Very few left. Family Video is the only chain that I know of in my area. Otherwise, I think Redbox is what most people use to rent physical discs.

[jdw]

I was reminded recently by a fellow fan out hear in Los Angeles (Jorge Oseguera) about how I hipped him to going to Little Tokyo go get New Japan and All Japan weekly television from a video store that was located there. I have fuzzy memories of doing that for a few folks back in the 90s, and it's really cool that he remembered.

 

I remember the lady who ran one of the stores down there. She was always nice and friendly to the gaijin who came to the store for puroresu. If there was a rush on tapes one week, she'd always stash one behind the counter for me when I came in, busting out a smile to tell me:

 

"All gone... I save one for you!"

 

Wondeful woman to treat one of her crazy customers like that.

 

I remember the trainee from our parent company who took me to one in Torrance in 1989 where he got his weekly fix. Life altering moment. Don't recall when I thought to swing by downtown to pick them up as well. Probably during the few short years I lived in Pasasdena and thought about Little Tokyo while driving up the 110.

[PhilTLL]

Family is the only major chain left in the US, yeah. If you can call less than 800 stores major--compare to the multiple chains with thousands of locations in the 1990s.

 

We didn't have any local stores that I can recall, but I always got a thrill out of finding (relative) rarities at different chain stores around town. It helped that my mom enjoyed the same thing, just not for wrestling. I remember a lot of Video Update locations having a peculiarly large and varied selection; at one I was shocked to find the Demolition and Hart Foundation CHVs. And at the one Blockbuster in my grandparents' town I found my first taste of SuperBrawl III, the GAB and Starrcade compilations (!!!), Royal Rumble '90, and several others I never could find in OKC.

[shoe]

I remember going from store to store buying original VHS tapes for like 5 bucks a tape because no one was renting them. It was my start as a collector.

[Zoo Enthusiast]

I remember going from store to store buying original VHS tapes for like 5 bucks a tape because no one was renting them. It was my start as a collector.

Same for me. Supertape '92 was the first one I remember buying.

[JerryvonKramer]

 

I remember going from store to store buying original VHS tapes for like 5 bucks a tape because no one was renting them. It was my start as a collector.

Same for me. Supertape '92 was the first one I remember buying.

 

A lot of Mooney gold on that one.

[thebrainfollower]

My parents bought a Betamax for the Christmas of 1987. The reason being the local video store owner talked them into it, as he thought Beta would win the format wars and heavily invested in it. They had a pretty reasonable selection of WWF tapes, all the PPV's except Wrestling Classic up to WM V, and about ten random tapes, mostly from 86-88.

 

We upgraded to VHS in 93 and that opened up a lot more possibilities including a handful of WCW tapes. I ended up buying virtually their entire WWF VHS inventory for $2 a pop in 2004, which amounted to about 50 tapes from 85-92.

[Johnny Sorrow]

Betamax was still around in 87? That guy was either insane or a total con artist unloading old Betamaxs. Cause no video store in the town I lived in still had Betamax tapes in 87. 😄

[ohtani's jacket]

The thing I remember most is when you'd rent a tape that was maybe Memphis or Mid South or something and be disappointed because it wasn't like the WWF. The folly of youth.

[clintthecrippler]

Local video store in my hometown carrying the first Hulkamania tape and my seven year old self seeingand becoming fascinated with the bloodiest match I had ever seen up to that point, the Minneapolis Massacre match against Dr. D David Shultz. Ended up begging my parents to rent that tape over and over again, and then two years later visiting family in another town and on a trip to the video store there having my mind blown finding out there was a Hulkamania 2 tape, which at the time was a bigger deal to me than knowing there was a Wrestlemania 2.

[flyonthewall2983]

We had two in town, and that's where I got my education when it came to 80's-early 90's WWF. There was one in the next town over that had an even bigger library of stuff (all in the Action/Adventure section), even including some WCW which you almost never found at the stores in my local shops.

[JRH]

Where i lived we had three. One was a combo video/pizza store (though the pizza store branced off, giving more room to the video section) that had a small, but decent amount of wrestling videos (mostly 85-87 coliseum stuff, though they also had a tape called USA All Star Wrestling which was full of NWA TV matches from 84-85, shocking as a kid to discover guys like greg valentine were in the NWA). We also had one in the city that had a bigger selection. Again, nothing past 1988 (aside from WMVI and Summerslam 90), but they did have the PWI Lords of the Ring tape which is where i first discovered Bill Dundee and Jerry Lawler, though i was surprised there was no WWF footage). Finally there was the one in the center of town which only had the Wrestlemanias and Summerslams and a few random Survivor Seroes (they stopped getting them in after Summerslam 93 though). Later, around college, we had two more video stores near the college, but those were slowly phasing out the vintage 80s/early 90s stuff for late 90s wwf and wcw tapes. Still, all those stores (along with the apter mags being eager to acknowledge wrestling history) helped me "catch up" when i became a fan in 1990.

[Matt D]

The biggest impact the video store had for me was around 98. During the summer of that year especially. For VHS they had a 5 dollars for 5 movies for 5 days deal with anything that wasn't a new release and that's how I filled in the gap from the time I wasn't super interested in wrestling (93-97 basically). They had a lot of PPVs but not a ton of CV videos. A few Supertapes and what not. Mostly the Hulkamanias which I didn't have a big interest in.

 

I tried to apply there to work the summer after high school before college started but times were tough or what not and I ended up working at a Borders instead.

 

As a kid it was probably more important for renting the WCW NES game than any actual video, but I'm sure I got Survivor Series 90 from there a bunch of times.

[Grimmas]

We had a Max Movies at the edge of town, where you would take the metal tag to the cash and they would grab the VHS tape from the back for you. My Dad would take me every few weeks or so and let me rent one movie, which was mostly wrestling but sometimes the Transformers movie.

 

The selection was the WWF ppvs and CHV. My favourite thing was renting the "Best of the WWF" series. There was also one PWI in Japan tape, which included New Japan matches with the likes of The Barbarian, Jimmy Snuka, etc.. with Gordon Solie announcing.

 

The worst was me waiting for WrestleMania 5 to come so badly! My Mom was so nice and picked it up for me the day it came out on her way home from work. One problem, she grabbed a Beta copy......

[Loss]

I remember paying 10 cents a page to have copies made of the pages of the wrestling section of the VIDEOLOG (music fans will also remember the PHONOLOG) and trying to figure out how much it would cost me to buy them all. I rented tapes here and there, but Bash '87 was by far the one I rented the most. I was excited when I got a used copy of that and Starrcade '86 from a video store that was going out of business many years later, but in the long run, mom and pop video shops with obscure titles like that closing shop really sucked. And I bought Starrcade '93 direct because for some reason, that was the only one that was $9.98. The rest were $30+ a piece.