Gone are the days of Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, and such locally owned independents as Waterfront Video in Burlington and Video King in St. Johnsbury. Victims of online streaming services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime, in-person video stores simply couldn’t compete on convenience, image quality, and the sheer volume and variety of movies and television shows.
But like a Back to the Future sequel, some video store aficionados in White River Junction have resurrected the old-school experience of perusing film titles in person, then going home, popping a VHS tape into the VCR, and settling in for a night of movies and popcorn — bad tracking and poor sound quality be damned.
Junction Arts & Media, a public-access television station in White River Junction, has just opened Videostop II, a pop-up video store in the back of its offices where, through the month of December, people can check out movies for a week, free of charge.
Named in honor of a beloved video store in West Lebanon, N.H., that closed in 2013, Videostop II has more than 1,000 movies in stock. Most are in VHS format, though the catalog also includes a handful of DVDs, LaserDiscs, and, for a truly arcane experience, Betamax and CED video discs. That last format was a largely unsuccessful analog playback system from the 1980s that used a stylus to read a vinyl disc.
Haven’t fired up your VCR or cathode-ray TV set since Ronald Reagan was in the White House? No worries. Videostop II has a few of those old units on hand that you can check out, too.
What’s behind this embrace of the retro video store experience?
“The idea is something that’s been percolating for a while,” explained Chico Eastridge, JAM’s technical director and senior producer. Each month, JAM hosts a different in-house exhibit, and for December, he suggested opening a pop-up video store.
Eastridge, 39, was a teen during the transition from VHS to DVDs. He also had a bunch of friends who worked at Videostop, which he remembers as “a place to hang out, steal stuff, break things and ignore customers.”
About 15 years ago, as many of the local video stores started going out of business and selling off their inventories, Eastridge started buying up movies for pennies on the dollar. In no time, he amassed quite a collection. Then he and a friend, Ben Peberdy, a collage artist from Montpelier, started hosting a weekly movie club on Tuesdays called Revenge of Movie Night.
“We’d try to find the weirdest tape we could and started watching them every week,” he said. Fifteen years later, the Tuesday-night movie club is still going strong at Main Street Museum in White River Junction.
On a recent weeknight, a woman from South Royalton came into Videostop II. She said she doesn’t have a computer at home and only watches movies on VHS, Eastridge reported. And because she only started watching movies in 2010, she has a lot of catching up to do. She checked out The Cars That Ate Paris, Peter Weir’s 1974 cult-classic horror comedy, and Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, a 1988 documentary from Australia.
“I love the video store conundrum of [deciding] where does a video live in the store,” Eastridge said. In that regard, Videostop II has genre sections up the wazoo. Among them: “Dracula,” “non-Dracula vampires,” “non-vampire blood suckers” and “non-sucking blood consumers.” The store also has a section titled “chain saw duels,” “a guy with a sword” and “I can’t believe it’s not Star Wars.”
“The video can only live in one place,” Eastridge added, “so you’ve got to find where its home is.”
Are there staff disagreements? Naturally. Does the animated cat movie go under “animated movies” or “cat movies”? According to Eastridge, the latter: “Cat movies seem a little more niche than animation.”
Bigger picture, why would anyone choose an unquestionably inferior video format? After all, many, if not most, of the movies available at Videostop II can be found in digital format online.
“I think it’s fun. In some ways it’s similar to a vinyl record, where there’s this ritual to it,” Eastridge said. “But mostly, it’s this ridiculous thing.”
Perhaps. But for those born in this millennium who want to rent, please abide by standard video store etiquette: Be Kind Rewind.
Videostop II, at 5 S. Main St. in White River Junction, is open Monday to Friday, 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Saturday, noon to 5 p.m.
