Local VHS Rental Stores Were Our Pyramids

By Destro Designs – Viper Den Studios

Y’all have heard me wax poetic about the G.I. Joe Movie in multiple articles. But that video, as iconic as it is, came from a place that was as magical as the Pyramids of Egypt.

Your local VHS rental store.

Now, I am not talking about Blockbuster, which was an amazing place in its own right. But Blockbuster shared the limelight with affordable DVDs, flash drives for computers, and other blossoming tech of the early 2000s.

I am talking about those places that were apartments turned into rental shops. The old tax place down the block that one day opened its doors to everyone who had a membership.

Mine was called Lansingburgh Video.

Mine was an old storefront that started as a corner store and morphed every couple of years into different things. As the roulette wheel of businesses spun through the building, it stopped on a live round with the video rental place. Google has it listed at 124th St. and 2nd Ave., but it was actually 112th St. and 2nd Ave., in full view as you crossed the Cohoes-Lansingburgh Bridge.

It was an 18-foot-by-18-foot space packed from floor to ceiling with what I imagined was every single VHS available on the market. Handmade signs pointed you to the genres of films that were stacked on shelving that was almost certainly bought at an old pharmacy closeout sale.

There was a whole section, 4 feet wide by 8 feet tall, that had every single Nintendo game released to date. The guy behind the counter with the glass eye and goofy-ass soul patch would boast about it every time I walked in.

And I loved it. The dude was very nice to me. My mom is a pretty lady, and back then she was about 24 or 25 years old when I first started going there, so I was always getting an extra game or movie to take home on every trip.

I can remember humming with excitement, similar to how I would be when headed to Kay-Bee Toys in Latham Circle Mall to get some Joes. It was awesome.

They had a special box built on the front of the counter so the kids could step up and be eye level with the countertop, as it was built insanely tall for whatever reason. But they came through for us small fries with that special step-up.

I would proudly slap my chosen boxes onto the counter as my mom fumbled around looking for the membership card through her purse, which served as a gateway to some outer-dimensional space for storage. That woman would have an entire life’s worth of necessary supplies to live: car keys, driver’s license, and about $220,000 in change, all silver.

The hyperdrive from Event Horizon was in that motherfucker, opening the gateway to a place no one was ready to go. But my mom somehow mastered its secrets and used it to her advantage like an interdimensional footlocker.

And of course, like all local video stores, it had that secret room. And by secret, I mean it was a super obvious room that was barely separated by a cheap pair of saloon-style swinging doors that themselves were basically see-through because they were louvered. And in that room were things I didn’t fully understand. But the more I was kept from it, the more I would walk by, slow my pace, drop my VHS box, and stare underneath the doors at the naked women until I could feel the heat of my mom’s gaze, or the guy behind the counter would give a stern clearing of the throat.

I loved it there. So many NES games. So many movies. Hell, a large portion of my cultural upbringing was rented from that place. I remember renting the first edition of Metal Gear, as well as Blaster Master and Bionic Commando, from there sooooo many times that eventually the owners sold them to my mom at a massive discount and a loss of revenue to them.

This is when society took care of each other. It wasn’t all about the dollar. It was about helping each other, even if sometimes that meant you got less.

And, like all good community-style stores of the ’80s and ’90s, it was ruined by corporate horseshit and greed. The place was bought out by a company that emptied the porn room and made it so they could have four or five copies of the same VHS tapes and fewer NES games.

The owners I knew were gone, and now some underpaid jerk-off high school kid in a maroon vest and a name tag worked the counter. The fun was gone. Overnight, it was gone.

It ended officially when the new regime tried some for-real crazy shit. My mom rented the Tom Hanks movie The Money Pit and lost it in the trunk of her 1988 Ford Probe. We couldn’t go back until she found it, and when she did, they tried to tell my mom, legitimately, that she owed like $3,200 in late fees.

No bullshit.

There wasn’t any “cost of the video and doubled for lost rentals” type of shit. They wanted every dollar for every day of, like, 18 months. Totally dead serious on that one.

Mercifully, Blockbuster and other mom-and-pop rentals had sprouted up at that time, so I wasn’t at a loss for a rental place during those 18 months. But that place, the first iteration of a VHS rental place on that hot corner of 112th St. and 2nd Ave., was my jump-off for take-home media.

It was a piece of pop culture that made so many of us smile. It was small, personable, and just awesome. It will forever have a place in my heart.

Shoutout to them owners. Y’all made Little Destro happy as a motherfucker in his little Viper Den Studio at home.