When I was growing up, the best thing that we could do as a family was family movie night.
Back when I was really young, family movie night was fairly complicated.For one, we only had twelve channels.The channels that we did have, at least three of them were fuzzy. Cartoons were only on television on Saturday mornings with the rare exceptions of Sunday night wherein we would watch the Wonderful World of Disney and The Raccoons. For our family to truly enjoy family movie night in the 1980s we needed to drive to the video store.
In the Hart, we were fortunate to have two independent video stores, Barry's Video and Hart Video - one store for each strip mall. Mike's eventually shut down and Hart Video was shut down by Roger's Video, which, as you know, also collapsed in the fire and brimstone of streaming movies on the internet.
Family movie night in the early days involved actually renting the VCR (or Beta, I guess, but I'm too young to remember that). Dad would open up the giant suitcase-like box and turn the TV around and fiddle with the wires with infinite patience and only minimal cussing.
Then we would be able to watch the movie that was carefully chosen after a half an hour of walking up and down the aisles of the video store. By carefully chosen, I mean we usually watched The Neverending Story and if one of my parents managed to get in the store before me and hid it, then we would watch one of the Merrie Melodies collections.
I was thinking about video stores the other day and it occurred to me that my children will have no idea how much of an event it was to go to the video store.
Late into my twenties, before the video stores disappeared completely, I would still pop into a store and browse the aisles looking for something interesting.
Now we can do that from the comfort of our own homes and it is a little isolating.We would always run into someone that we knew at the video store and we would be able to ask for recommendations or judge the other person's picks.The best we can do now is to log on to someone else's Netflix account and judge what they have been watching.
So I was feeling quite nostalgic about video stores when we ran into the Nechako branch of the library last week.But the first thing that my kids did was run up to the movies to borrow and each pick a movie they wanted. I strongly encouraged them not to get Curious George but I was outvoted.
The library is their video store and that is not a bad thing. Although next time, I'll make sure that my husband runs in to the library and hides the Curious George and Caillou movies before the kids see them.
