The Blockbuster Chronicles - Introduction

There was a time when watching a movie at home required considerably more effort than clicking an app and spending twenty minutes scrolling through thumbnails before deciding there was somehow nothing to watch. In the early 1980s, the home video market exploded. For the first time, people could rent a copy of a movie, take it home, and watch it whenever they wanted. Today that sounds almost absurdly ordinary, but at the time it was revolutionary. Before VHS became commonplace, your options were pretty limited. You could see a movie while it was playing in a theater, wait for a television station to eventually air it, or simply accept that you might never see it again. Video stores changed all of that. Small rental shops began appearing everywhere, stocking whatever tapes they could get their hands on. Horror movies, action movies, comedies, exercise videos, children's cartoons, instructional tapes and an endless supply of strange low-budget movies that seemed to exist primarily…