March 26, 2025

A Return to Analogue

I remember the friction of pulling that tag off the shelf, its plastic a perfect fit inside my palm, and how it felt like I was holding a key to something vital. I would carry the tag to the counter where it would be traded in, more often than not, for the 1988 Lily Tomlin/Bette Midler vehicle Big Business on VHS, a video my sister and I rented from our local corner store so many times that when I watched it again more than 30 years later, I knew the whole thing by heart.

Video rental was such a big deal for the first 20-some years of my life, its high stakes made clear by the FBI warnings that preceded every film, the responsibility to be-kind-please-rewind, and the sinister curtains behind which the dirty movies were kept, not to mention how a certain title’s availability or otherwise would have the power to make or break one’s sleepover party.

I could chart the course of my life by video stores, from the pre-chain hometown joints, to Bay Street Video (which lives on!) during my university years, to our local video store in Japan where we’d pray for subtitles, and then the Queen Video locations we frequented back in Toronto until the last one closed in 2019—although it wasn’t very frequent by then because we didn’t have a DVD player any longer.

But at the end of January, we bought another one, part of a grander plan to combat the overwhelm (at which we’ve not always been successful, I’ve got to say; sheesh, it’s been a time) by cutting ties to corporate entities where possible and focusing on tangible finite things. Streaming services never once delivered the satisfaction I’d received from bringing my plastic tag up to the counter, and they also made my children wrangey and frustrated as there was never anything they wanted to watch enough but always something to suggest they should not give up trying.

So we went back to DVDS, and I want to tell you about the joy of heading to the library DVDs shelf with my 11-year-old daughter for the very first time, about what it felt like to recall the sweet serendipity of this kind of selection and to have her experience it for herself. At dinner the night before, her dad and I had been remembering the 1986 movie Flight of the Navigator, and there it was on the shelf. She also borrowed a collection of Pixar shorts and Inside Out 2, and we felt so lucky and excited at finding these—for free, even. We’re currently #850 of 1125 on the library holds list for the DVD copy of the Wicked movie. We’ve got time and are happy to wait.

Our local secondhand/overstock bookstore has an entire basement full of tapes, CDs, records, VHS, and DVDS, and more, and I’d never been there before a couple of weeks ago when I went to scratch my new DVD itch, and descending those stairs was like arriving back in time (it didn’t help that the walls are the same shade of orange as the High Fidelity poster). We got Four Weddings and a Funeral because my Paddington-watching children have never known floppy-haired Hugh Grant, and Midsomer Murders, and the first season of Glee. There were no Velcro tags in the place, but I could almost imagine them, especially when I closed my eyes and listened to the sounds of flipping media all around me as customers were shuffling and riffling, almost paradise (and yes, I picked up a copy of Footloose while I was there).

-Check out “I don’t want to live in a world without video stores” from the West End Phoenix

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