(This blog has a lot of nostalgic rambling, but I eventually get to the point)
Well it finally happened. After several years of slow decay, one of the last video stores in my area finally, inevitably, shut down. Video Ezy shut its doors after a slow march into obsolescence. To be honest I rarely went there. The prices were steep and the selection was mostly just alright (though they had a decent 'foreign film' section). My biggest issue was with the staff; they were often uninformed teens who knew nothing about DVDs and constantly made mistakes. By mistakes I mean giving you the wrong film (like a sequel instead of the original). They were also often quite rude, and rarely knew anything about movies.
In the last days they had a clearing out of all DVDs, Blu Rays and Games, so I swooped in and took a fair few titles I'd been interested in. It's the most bittersweet part of a video store shutting down. You're essentially a vulture scavenging from a corpse, hoping to take whatever you can before other vultures swoop down too.
The sale actually made me feel nostalgic for those brief times when video stores would get rid of their out-dated stock. It happened in a major way when VHS switched to DVD. It often happened with video games; when a console was replaced by another one and games stopped being released, video stores would sell all the used games at ridiculously low prices to get rid of them. That's where I got most of my Sega Megadrive/N64 games, from video store sales.
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With the slow march of time, There were five video stores in my area, and now there is only one.
One of the first was a video store connected to a general store. The VHS tapes were amongst bags of chips, car tools and the freezer full of meat and beer. This one was a special one because it had all sorts of weird, rare horror movies. the types I've never seen outside of it. In fact, the vast majority of their movies were really cool horror flicks. This store, sadly, shut down during the VHS era. Where it once was there is now a Pizza place and a Fish and Chips store.
Movieland was a generic member of a chain. It shut down during the VHS era as well (and I got the vast majority of my N64 games and VHS tapes during the shutdown) and was absorbed into the next door TAB. Blockbuster was nearby and didn't last long at all. Barely two years from memory, then it turned into a surfwear store that folded a few years ago and is now a Vietnamese restaurant.
Video Ezy was the most recent one to open, and is the most recent one to close. It opened shop around when the Xbox 360 and PS3 started coming out. It had a slow burst of popularity, as any new store does, which
There is one video store left. Network Video. It's the first video store I'd ever gone to, and has lasted longer than any of the other stores I've listed. It's also, somewhat, the weirdest.
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I remember back in the VHS days where they used to have a porno section. I was a kid back then, so I used to head in that direction out of curiosity more than anything. When nobody was close by I'd go check out the backs of the covers. This was in the VHS days, where the rules for packaging were almost non-existent so you'd be seeing a lot of nudity and sex on the back covers.
The store was slow to switch to DVDs, which is when I briefly moved on to the other stores. When I went back it had a pretty decent selection, and even now it has sections that were, for whatever recent, mostly absent in the other video stores (like a section for westerns, war films, arthouse, documentaries).
When I first got my drivers licence I used to go there weekly, particularly when I was at university, turning up on $1 Tuesday to take out whatever new releases there were (it was one of the first places I learned to drive to). When they eventually began 50 cent Thursday (for weekly movies only) I was there more often. I'd take five dollars in change and rent out ten movies, and have them polished off by the next week. Doing this I managed to view the vast majority of the movies they had there. Those were the good times.
Then there were odd times. The owner of the store is a man who I will simply refer to as M. M is a guy in his forties who thick-rimmed glasses, a neckbeard and a ponytail. M wears a 'Network Video' branded T-shirt that looks like it's from the eighties. None of his employees (almost exclusively high school girls) ever wore a store T-shirt. He has a black hummer with a personalised plate that he parks out the front of the store.
M knows my name, but I've never told him it before and it's not in my account (that's another story). In the last eight years I've never shown him my store card, I've never given him my phone number and I've never been asked for my password. I've been there so many times, for over two decades, that he just knows me. He seems like a nice guy, but having an actual conversation with him about anything is a physical battle. I've tried to talk to him about movies, and he is not forthcoming with anything.
When he isn't dealing with a customer, he sits at the counter and watches movies on a small monitor he has on the desk. He watches just about anything, from action to horror to anime. He used to be in the store a few days a week, but for the last few years, as video stores have slowly succumbed to inevitable progress, he's fired all his employees and runs the store himself, so he's there from nine am to nine pm, seven days a week.
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And this is where we, finally, tie in to the blog title. Network Video, for whatever reason, had a thing for hentai - Japanese cartoon porn. Back in the VHS days they had a few hentai tapes. I remember because, as a kid, I used to home in on any cartoons. I even remember some of the titles and covers. When they eventually killed the porno section (presumably after complaints that kids, like me, were lurking around), the tapes went completely. Only they didn't destroy or remove them, they sold them, so for a brief period of time I could still get my pre-teen perv on. From then, for over a decade, it was devoid of smut. Then something happened...
They started to get in hentai DVDs. There was a period of about six months maybe six years ago where the store would get in hentai DVDs. Not a few, a bunch of them, almost weekly. They'd put them amongst the new-release titles, filling the top row of the shelves with cartoon sluts with giant eyes and watermelon breasts. It was baffling. I'd never actually seen any hentai DVDs before. Like anywhere, not even in the anime/manga store in the city that sells NTSC DVDs and oddly specific anime artbooks. Anyways, the video store had them in abundance.
So there were a few things that weirded me out about this.
1. They would have had to order the specific tapes in. Video stores had to order their tapes in. Back in the VHS days some stores would get in videos if they were requested enough. These sorts of DVDs are the kind that I'd assume would have to be specifically ordered in.
2. There would have presumably been demand for this. You don't get in over a dozen cartoon porno DVDs if there isn't a market for it. So presumably there was demand somewhere. How did this happen? Did somebody once go into a video store and as for some cartoon porn? And once rebuffed would whatever employee who got the request then follow it up?
3. Despite #2, I don't think I ever saw any of the tapes having been taken out. This store is the type where, if a new release tape has been taken out, they put a little tag on the DVD case to tell you the tape is out. I never saw this on any of the tapes at any time. So the DVDs never got rented but they kept getting more in.
4. The area I live in is basically a retirement village. We have a few actual retirement homes and a store that sells those little electric chair scooter things elderly folks drive around in. Our council actively prevented a hamburger store from opening up in an empty lot because they thought it would attract gangs of wayward teenagers (I'm not even joking). This is the area I live in, and the video store is in the centre of it.
5. The DVDs never went to the weekly shelves or the 'for sale' rack. After maybe four months, 'new release' DVDs go to the regular weekly shelves. There was no longer a pornography section, but the store had an 'anime' section (filled with popular stuff, like Cowboy Bebop, Full Metal Alchemist and Naruto). They have a rack where they put the DVDs they were selling, and at this time I was at that store maybe twice a week. When the DVDs disappeared from the shelves I never remember seeing them anywhere. Not that I really looked, but my memory is usually quite good.
So for six months there were a bunch of hentai DVDs at my local video store. And then, at the end of the six months, they disappeared completely. Why? How? Were they removed because of complaints? Were they simply removed due to lack or interest? Did some weirdo just ask to buy them directly?
I have a theory.
It was M. He wanted the tapes, so he ordered them in through the video store, put them out to rent (knowing nobody was going to rent them), and then simply took them home. Now this is mostly built upon the weirdness points built up over two decades of light interactions with the guy, but it sort of makes sense. He owns the store, and has owned it for as long as I've been going there from what I can tell.
Of course I have nothing to back any of my crazed conspiracy theories up with, but it makes sense to me.
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