• Registered: 2015-06-21
  • Posts: 799

Topic: The Return of Blockbuster Video?

A mystery has started getting some discussion:

https://www.polygon.com/23654120/blockb … ite-update

“We are working on rewinding your movie”

I honestly wonder if this is following the recent fad of going backwards.  Similar to the resurgence of vinyl records, could Blockbuster be looking at a way to rewind movies by downgrading them to VHS quality?  Modern movies have never been seen in that format at all.

Arcade 1UP has been working on this with their nostalgia arcade cabinets - a CRT mode that adds scan lines and re-creates the feel of tech available 30 to 40 years ago.  The same could be applied to movies and tv shows.

It would definitely be a novelty that people would talk about for a time.  And at the very least, it’s an idea worthy of a parallel reality.

  • Registered: 2015-06-21
  • Posts: 4,302

Re: The Return of Blockbuster Video?

Over in the DVD thread, RussianCabbie and I once considered that the 'best' way to watch Episodes 102 - 109 of SLIDERS might be to watch it on a CRT television or apply ffdshow filters (scanlines) to make the image look like a CRT display. I vaguely recall some April Fools jokes about THE X-FILES receiving a 'vintage' VHS release that would require a truck rental and a storage space to carry the complete series home.

On a tangent, one recent sitcom that I adored which got cancelled on a cliffhanger: BLOCKBUSTER, a Netflix half-hour comedy about a fictional Blockbuster and its staff trying to keep the store afloat. Critics loathed it, audiences were indifferent to it, I thought it was nice and inoffensive and charming but a bit short on ideas for how a Blockbuster could stay open in this day and age except as a sort of pioneer village equivalent of 90s video stores (which I think is how the actual Last Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon stays open).

The show had a season finale cliffhanger where an internet outage causes people to flock to the Blockbuster, but then a fight breaks out and the store is trashed. This melancholy setup for Season 2 unfortunately never got resolved. I wish Netflix had shot at least the Season 2 premiere that could either serve as the start to a new season or the end to the last one, but their algorithm (sigh) encourages cliffhangers so that viewers will feel compelled to watch something else on the service.

However, the cancellation spurred lots of jokes about how Netflix had killed Blockbuster for the second time.