As my summer holiday approaches (no work until September!) I'm starting to think about my film viewing programme. The Movie Store in Sudbury will rent me 5 films, for a week, for £5. They have a huge selection and will even sometimes congratulate me on my choices, something that only ever happened to me once in a record shop.

I rented my first video in about 1982 (I didn't have to buy one but that was the order of the day in some places) and I well remember the £45 price tag that would seem like a lot today but that's equivalent to about £150 today!!!

I have no need to see a film immediately after its release on DVD so I simply wait a few months and buy it if I'm interested in it. The Lives of Others, for example, cost me £3 - I would imagine that this is about the same as I would have had to pay to rent it.

However I discovered an independent rental shop in Oxford (now closed) that had a fantastic selection of - forcing myself to type ghastly phrase - 'World Cinema'. I rented several classic Italian films that weren't available for purchase such as many of Pier Paolo Pasolini's works. So I suppose they still serve a purpose if they can offer people something they can't get elsewhere.

They may well survive in other countries. Buying DVDs in Italy is a seriously expensive business. They all come with little shiny stickers on them featuring the title of the film and the logo of SIAE (Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori). This adhesive bombshell is basically a tax which means you end up paying through the nose.

There was often something a bit seedy about little video rental stores-a vibe that was ( I imagine) closer to an old Soho gentleman's shop than any record store. I think it was the presence of a lot of dodgy videos that were needed to meet profit margins. Back in the 80s, parents were initially suspicious of our teenage selves going to these places with rental cards, which would never arise over music. Also, unlike the better record stores of yore, I never got much sense that the proprietors were passionate about the medium they sold, or had any good advice on obscure films to try out, and so I cannot look back on them with that much affection-although maybe I was just unlucky in my humdrum hometown.

was my number. It's probably not a good thing that the staff at Video Shack knew it off by heart, but in those days the pizza delivery firm recognised me from my 'hello' on the phone too.

It took about a month to exhaust the decent films at the Shack, but I still scoured those shelves for hours looking for classics I'd missed and over the years went home with more and more desperate and panicked choices. Once you'd taken the trouble to wander round there, you couldn't just leave empty-handed and go and do something more constructive.

There was a whole industry dedicated to producing misleading artwork for video boxes. Quotes from obscure publications ("A nerve-jangling thrill ride" - LA Film Journal) and a suggestion of flesh which led you to believe you might just get a flash of boobs. If a major star made a two-minute cameo, theirs would be the largest face on the front of the sleeve.

Of course we get our films by different delivery methods now, but I think that the decline of these stores is probably down to one factor in particular, and that's the easy access to internet pornography. Or so I'm told. That nervous sidle up to the counter - with a magazine in the '70s and a video in the '80s - is a lost rite of passage now.

Nothing.

renting Amelie and the assistant saying to me 'you do know it's subtitled, don't you?' Apparently they'd had a lot of disgusted returns...

I remember my mum joining Video Magic in Cobham, around 1983 or 1984. My brothers and I asked her to hire Flash Gordon. We nearly walked out of the shop with Flesh Gordon: a misunderstanding that meant very little to me at the time. I remember those enormous plastic, moulded VHS boxes that they used to come in. The fact that the covers were blank white made them feel like some kind of illicit bootleg.

I got a prerecorded VHS for my 14th birthday: it was a documentary called James Dean: The First American Teenager. I remember thinking, before I unwrapped it, that it must be a book. And then, shock at the extravagance: you bought a video?!

6 months for Video Shuttle's only copy of For Your Eyes Only to come in and then it was broken.

Actually I loved the process of badgering Mum for the £50 deposit cheque, and the trepidation of whether they would let a ten year old rent Porkys 2.
I was always slightly jealouse of the surly beanpole whose job was watching vids all day and who behaved like God: "Sorry mate, that one's out" spat out with some relish.

I'm not sure this thread is about missing them but the effort to make a journey, browse, select and purchase was more rewarding.

purely so we could record my brother's picture of some West Ham footballers in The Gallery on Take Hart. My three year old takes it as read that live TV can be recorded, rewound and paused as and when she desires, yet my brothers and I at 12,11 and 10 years old, could not have been more awestruck by the ability to capture and rewatch a ten second snippet of footage.

My Dad proudly told me he'd taken advice and was assured that Betamax would be the winning format since technically it was considerably better than VHS. As you will doubtless recall, Betamax lost fairly decisively in just a matter of months, and so what I recall about the early days of video shops is that if you weren't on VHS, the choice was really very limited indeed.

Historic ‘Blockbuster’ Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past

Sloth, corruption & idleness, -Brilliant ! whoever thought of that should consider writing for a living.

My local store here in a very small town in the middle of New Zealand does a roaring trade. It has a good international section (ie movies not made in the USA, NZ or the UK), a wide selection of classics (I watched Maltese Falcon and Arsenic & Old Lace with my daughter on the weekend) and about 50 copies of Avatar. In short, it does ok and provides a great service to the town. If it closed, I'd miss it.
And David, if you can't remember how to rent a movie from a shop I suggest you start taking Sanatogen?

is an even rarer beast than the local, independent record shop, but it'd be a sad day if they were to disappear altogether. When I was at university, the guy who worked in the rental shop clearly adored films and would often congratulate me on my choices or chat about similar films he'd seen and enjoyed. I once had a ten minute conversation with him about what a great film Etre et Avoir is.

To answer the original post, I won't miss anything about Blockbusters if it folded in the same way that I don't miss anything about Virgin/Zavvi, but I certainly would miss those local shops that go the extra mile.

I remember that we had a Betamax fairly soon after VCRs came out and whilst it was still a legitimate choice. I also remember that on Saturday, if my parents wanted to rent a video, we'd have to drive 45 minutes to the nearest video rental place (Surbiton) - which wasn't a dedicated video rental place, but a electrical/hardware store. There were a small number of shelves with maybe 40 or so videos to choose from.

It was a relief when upstairs of S. J. Clear & Co. in Dorking (a mere 3 miles away) started renting videos (again, upstairs in a small, local electrical shop). I remember they had a brick-sized video of "Hannah and Her Sisters" for almost £100.

My local video rental place growing up was- bizarrely looking back- in the back of a Smiths the Bakers. At the back of the shop were racks of those enormously chunky rental cases. Since then I have always associated renting out films with the smell of stale cakes and bloomers.

I don't miss the video rental experience. When I lived in Hammersmith, I once rented the Wim Wenders film Kings Of The Road and someone had recorded over about thirty minutes right in the middle with a game show. I suppose it's interesting that you had a media that could be altered by a form of audience commentary...

ever sold in Australia. He picked up the technology that early there were NO video stores, none, they did not exist. When one opened we were amazed, "Hey you can rent these things! What'll they think of next?"

At one stage going to the nearest video store was quite a journey. I only went with him once or twice. It was a half hour train ride, change trains and then another half hour train ride, THEN a long walk from the station to the store, pick from the pathetic selection (all the films seemed to have the word "Blood" in the title) then go home again. All up it was easily a three or four hour round trip.

Now there are two video stores within strolling distance of my house and I haven't set foot in either in years. I just can't be arsed. I get films delivered direct to my TV.

don't own many dvds (around 20 mostly ones given away with the paper or kindly as gifts) as opposed to 100's cds. If I want to see a film I go to the pictures normally or watch them on tv and increasingly on Iplayer.

I have Always prefered the "event" of going to the pictures and the tension of the unrelenting rolling of the film forcing you to concentrate for fear of missing something. The whole thing of stopping/starting dvd's pausing and reviewing etc is a different way of watching which may have benefits but does lessen your immersion in the film and engagement with it to my mind. Also the collective experience of watching in the cinema is also appealing watching with family is one thing but the reaction of a wider audience also has appeal.

I Can see the point of video store if you live in the "sticks" although think I'd prefer one of these mobile cinemas that show films in pubs and village halls myself.

I've not been to one in years. The last one I was a member of was Blockbuster at Clapham Junction station. Before that I was a member of the oddly named Para Video in Battersea Park Road, but was banned because an acquaintance got out Three Men And A Baby specifically to show us one supposedly subliminal scene in which a man is seen fleetingly with a gun in a child's bedroom, and didn't take it back, and I ended up paying the price.

I think the last time I went to the video shop DVD was not yet in vogue, so it's a while ago.

When my parents lived in Bahrain video shops were the staff of life. All British TV and films taped off the telly and sent out as soon as. All films were pirated and we got everything that was new. I was proud to have seen ET about six months before all my schoolfriends. We'd get a whole month's worth of Top Of The Pops at a time, vital for a music fan like me stranded in the middle east all summer long.

I'll possibly miss the the chance to buy up odd "pre-viewed" foreign-language film or other obscure stuff to view at leisure. I'm someimes mildly surprised that things of this nature were stocked in the first place. Probably not a lot else, and that kind of purchase has been on dvd for a long time now.

The video player went off to the great recycling centre in the sky a while back, which conveniently stops me from being tempted by the VHS glut in the charity shops. When it comes to clutter, a pile of old VHS tapes is difficult to justify, even if the content may be weird and wonderful.

I haven't been to a video shop since Halloween 2004. The last thing I rented was House of 1000 Corpses which, although utter dog tod, wasn't a contributory factor in my ceasing to use video shops. Sky Box Office and the ability to buy great films for no pounds in the HMV sale did that.

I very occasionally download films from iTunes, but mostly I just buy DVDs once they become cheap. And even then, we're only talking about one or two, every few months. I used to be such a film buff - cinema twice or three times a week - and now I hardly ever watch a film.

But once the kids are bigger and the GLW and I regain the ability to go out in the evenings, we'll probably start going to the cinema again. Blockbuster, though? Nope.

(Also, I'm with the Captain on this one: when I was 13, the main function of the video shop was to enable me to go and look surreptitiously at the "adult" section, and if I was feeling VERY brave, to try and pass for eighteen by renting something. That something, if I was successful, would probably have been about as explicit as Driving Miss Daisy by today's standards, but to me at the time it was possibly the most exciting thing that could possibly happen, ever, to anyone.)

I remember the new releases used to come out on a Friday back in the 80s. We used to rush off to our local video shop, called Pop In, to try and get the latest release.
Ghostbusters and The Killing Fields were the first movies we rented out. If I remember correctly, we also rented our video player also...

Alex Higgins was a regular in Brandlesholme Video Shop in Bury and he once pushed in front of my mum and I when we were in the queue to take out Adventures In Babysitting in 1988.

Mundanity plumbs staggering new depths.

and honestly can't recall ever having gone into any such emporium. (I'm 52.) I've bought records and CDs, videos and DVDs, books and tapes. I've borrowed them from the library or friends. I've had them given to me at Xmas and birthdays. But I've never rented a video or a DVD.

(On the other hand, though, I probably go to the cinema more often than average. BTW, the view from under this photo of Elizabeth Shue is simply...)

reckons Elizabeth Shue has a daughter called Stella Street.

had no staff. It was little more than a hole in the wall and you had to put your hand against a pad on the outside and have your fingerprints scanned to access the films! Back in 1996 this was so futuristic it was like living in space!

However, having no staff did mean I made off with Muriel's Wedding when I moved cities a few months later.

... when the warning about not showing my DVD on an oil rig came up again and I couldn't fast forward through it. I often think about it when a DVD forces me to watch trailers the first time I play it. That apart, I don't miss videos (not least because they look ridiculous now, in a way that cassettes don't) and going to the video rental was always frustrating, depressing and smelly. But it does surprise me that the end solution has not been reached yet: until I can stream any film I want as soon as it's released (I'm talking legally), I don't think the rental has been properly replaced. Lovefilm lets me choose 20 films and sends me the one I don't want first. Buying them not only costs but fills all those shelves I've just cleared of vinyl, cassettes and CDs. So why hasn't it happened yet?

In Northern Ireland during the early 90s, cinemas were few and far between outside Belfast, and didn't even show many UK releases. Rental stores in provincial towns helped plug this gap, especially since many people were still wary about the safety of travelling into the city centre at night.

The possibility of renting a video brightened up many wet summer holidays off school. Stepping into the fusty carpet-tiled Ards Video Library - the dangerous, forbidden world of Steven Seagal, Van Damme and the nightmare on Elm street series - always a treat. I remember when ET came out on video it was passed around the neighbours in our street who made time to watch it before being returned the next day, such was the demand.

Was it only Northern Irish sabbatarianism that perpetuated a policy of being able to return a video on Monday if you hired it on Saturday night? I'd be interested to know if it was the same in the rest of the UK. was the video library/tanning combination similarly UK-wide?

The main street where we live in Belfast is still dotted with video libraries living on borrowed time - trying to flog hundreds of old videos, while renting out bootleg DVDs of the latest cinema releases. One business recently partitioned off part of its shop for a computer repair centre.

Yep they will be missed!

Scarier than any 18 video you could rent

who came to our house and we perused the videos available from the boot of his Morris Ital. They weren't in proper boxes just had the name of the film written in marker pen on the spine. This would have been about 1981 so I was only 10 but I'm sure I still managed to tick off The Exorcist, I Spit on Your Grave, Last House on the Left and various Cannibal related films by the time I reached the ripe old age of 11.

Happy days indeed.

I am still a member of Blockbuster although they are a tad expensive so I use my local authority library. The new releases are £2 per week and 'older issues' are a £1 per week. I am confused about the original posting, if you don't rent DVD's what do you do? You can't go to the cinema to watch all the films you like or buy every DVD you want to watch so rental makes total sense to me. It's also eco-friendly while supporting your local council.

...and thinking it the best film ever. Parodies of Enter The Dragon, porn films and a fair bit of tit and bum too? A hormonal teenager's dream. (looks a bit dated now mind)

As someone else who grew up in a Betamax household, it was sad to watch the Betamax stand in the local Radio Rentals slowly wither away

I was a Betamax user, because I was nerd enough to think that "technically better" automatically made it a better choice. Before that, my first VCR was a Phillips VR2020, which used the V2000 (or "VCC") format. The Wikipedia article on the format actually illustrates that very VCR. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_2000

And before all that, when I was growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, television did not exist in the country. (The government did not want people to have easy access to actual information.) So a "film library" was somewhere you hired a 16mm film and the projector to show it on!

For a while, a loophole in the country's draconian censorship laws meant it was perfectly legal and common to be able to rent uncut or banned films; a popular activity! In those days, a shot of a bare breast or the use of a four-letter word would be cut from a film, and much more than that could get the film actually banned.

I worked part-time in such a library for a couple of years as a student, and managed to feed a serious film habit. So when I saw a film recently in a tiny local private cinema, where you could hear the project whirring away in the background, it took me back to my youth.

There used to be quite a few video rental shops when I was growing up in the 1980s, but they all died off by the mid-90s thanks to the advent of Blockbuster, which had the space and range that the independents just couldn't offer. Our one in the village was like a broom cupboard, and the counter was always piled high with tapes because the shelves were full to bursting. When I was little, we had a pretty good system going - I'd go with my Dad to the video store, he'd rent something for he and my Mum to watch on Saturday night, and something for me to watch on Sunday morning (I was always up at about 6am for some reason). I started off with the usual assortment of cartoons and suchlike, before going through a phase of renting out the four 'Fawlty Towers' videos on constant rotation. I couldn't get enough of them.

I remember trying to rent 'Short Circuit' (now a forgotten footnote, then the sequel was hot property), and the proprietor letting me take out both that and 'Short Circuit 2' for the price of one, as he thought the first film's tape was on its last legs and might not be watchable. Ironically, it was the sequel that turned out to be unplayable, and for years it acquired a kind of holy grail status in my mind, as it would be years before it turned up on TV, and actually *buying* the tape was well beyond my means. It's a shame we've lost that, really - nowadays it's the easiest thing in the world to go online and find that film you're looking for - even something fairly obscure - on some online DVD store, or even via less legitimate means. So we can't really appreciate the rarity of stuff any more.

I don't think we can write rentals off altogether, though. The online / postal-based version of the rental store seems to do decent business, although it can't help that prices for anything other than the very latest releases crash to bargain level pretty rapidly these days. Probably the big growth area is with download rentals - iTunes and umpteen other providers are offering the ability to stream or download films for a price comparable to an old-school rental. I've got a Playstation 3, and the Playstation Store even offers rentals now - in HD, too. And of course, libraries have increasingly branched out into this area - with CDs, DVDs and Blu Rays taking up shelf space where old-fashioned books would once have ruled the roost.

The choice was usually derisory and it was an unpleasant experience going there. There were times I'd leave without anything, such was the dire choice on offer.

These days its Lovefilm, or films recorded off TV (eg Film 4). That's good enough for me.