The Great Blockbuster Mop

In which we steal hundreds of video cassettes...

There was a time when the rental industry was turned on its head. I’m not talking about streaming services. The mom and pop shops at every strip mall were the kings and queens. You could find the most wild shit there, it was the wild west. But walking into one felt like being at your favorite dive bar or local Mexican restaurant.

Then, Blockbuster Video comes on the scene. Like a swarm of locusts, they occupied the country and choked out the lovely and comfortable local shops. Because of their size and buying power, Blockbuster would negotiate deals with the distributors to buy a fuckton of movies for mega-cheap. If the new release of ‘Last Action Hero’ or whatever bullshit came out that week, there would be an entire wall with shelves lined with a thousand copies.

Blockbuster became so omnipresent and convenient that it choked out the independent stores. But for many movie fans, it also choked out our access to interesting films. Blockbuster refused to carry anything unrated or NC-17. Many indie movies choose not to go through the MPAA. It’s an expensive, exhausting, and limiting process.

Many of the board members of the MPAA are priests, and it’s a very discouraging and conservative and baffling system of rules. Aside from their blitzkrieg across the country, Blockbuster was popular for being a family friendly place that was bright and gleaming. There was overpriced popcorn and snack at the counter, just like you’d see at the movie theater!

As Blockbuster scrubbed out all the stores that would rent teenagers ‘Faces of Death,’ it became our default go-to. A few of my friends in high school went on to work there and even work their way up to management.

They were allotted a certain amount of free rentals every week. We’d have sleepovers and pick out an armload of tapes and stay up all night drinking store-brand cola and watching movies.

Then, DVD entered the scene. THE FUTURE! As the format started to pick up, Blockbuster thumbed its nose at my beloved VHS. They decided to phase them out in what can only be considered a genocide to me: Take every tape in the building, smash it with a hammer, and drive them all down to the dump. They called it a ‘mop,’ I called it a travesty.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic, but you have to understand that there are many films that ONLY exist on the VHS format. Some great companies have come along to restore and save some of the films, but there are rarities where if all the VHS disappear, they’re just gone.

As film lovers, and also freeloaders, we could not abide. Since half of the staff there were in my close friend group, we met up and made a plan. It was a teenager amateur Oceans 11 heist. Instead of smashing the tapes, they would put them all in trash bags and throw them into the dumpster out back.

A few of my friends and I waited in a parked car with the lights and engine off. Once we saw that the Blockbuster had closed and the door was locked and all the employees left, we made a run for it. We all started pilfering the giant bin, struggling to pull out hundreds of pounds of tapes and running them into the trunk of an white 80s-model Ford Thunderbird that was belovedly known as ‘Little Soldier.’

The trash bags were thin. The waste level at Blockbuster is more suited for paper and fast food bags from the staff’s quick lunch break at the Braum’s across the street. This was heavy duty stuff, filled to the brim with clunky black plastic bricks containing reels of tape. They began to burst like water balloons. We were scrambling to collect the VHS that fell to the wayside and tossing them into the trunk.

After everything was retrieved, we reconvened at a friend’s house. It took many trips to bring everything from the trunk of Little Soldier into the house. We spilled them out across his bedroom, it was a Scrooge McDuck wealth of movies. You could have dove into it like he does with his vault of coins.

We began the process of organizing the tapes and divvying them up. It was like a fantasy sports draft where we went around and each picked one that we wanted, until there were no tapes left. No matter how your draft went, you walked out feeling like a wealthy man.

In fact, most of us ended up pawning a large amount of our tapes because they were garbage that took up way too much space. I’ve still got a couple in my collection, most notably ‘Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii’ (1972), but it was mostly extra baggage.

But the point is that’s it’s important to preserve physical media, and even though that wasn’t our conscious thought (we just broke teenagers who wanted free shit), we goddamn did it. This caper was perhaps more about the thrill than the hunt. But if life hands you a bag of VHS, make VHSaide.

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