Embedded Files
So right around the beginning of the month the Nintendo Switch came out. As did the new Zelda game.
And about a month later, this is why I can't get anything DONE. @_@ But enough about my inefficiencies, let's get to the March Dinosaur Dracula funpack which has a nostalgic theme of the empire we used to call Blockbuster Video. There wasn't a single person I knew that didn't have a membership to the place. My mom and stepdad had one and we used it to rent movies as well as the selection of video games that I played to death but never got the chance to own until recently (looking at you Earthbound and Christmas NiGHTS [yes I know you weren't supposed to be able to rent that but we had awesome stockers at our store in Manteca]). I had a lot of positive memories of Blockbuster rentals, so this box was a huge hammer of nostalgia to the face.
Much like my new puppy. @_@ Luna is a puncher.
My bad guy bag has Hobgoblin hanging out in it, so I had to ask the boyfriend about him since I know nothing of many Marvel comics and their denizens.
Me: What do I need to know about Hobgoblin?
Him: (after a long silence) He's like a Mexican copyright infringement/Chinese knockoff version of the Green Goblin.
Me: Makes sense to me.
Then we went back to looking at numerous plot charts about Bioware games having the same plot twists and the like because we're not huge fans of Bioware. Any company that proudly brags they follow Joseph Cambell's models should be ashamed of themselves because we should be beyond that, but then again, I'm elitist like that from college XD.
OMG THESE WERE FRICKING AWESOME.
That is all. :3
On the left more cards, which is good because I've been hankering for more Skeleton Warriors cards and TMNT ones. The New Kids cards totally speak to me as a girl growing up in their era. Man, I woulda killed a head of state for those back then. To the right are these odd smiley stickers. I always thought the smiley face craze thing was like...the 70s? I dunno, I think it was supposed to be before my time but these ones look like they'd have come out of a vending machine XD (ironically the last month's theme of funpack). There are interesting ones to say the least, but I do like the Joker-esque one in the second row, second card, and the have a nice death amused me to no end. When i opened it, the bubblegum included looked like a slab of Pinhead's flesh. I mean, Matt explicitly says not to eat the gum as these are original packs from way back when, but I can't say they remain appetizing after all these years. @_@
The month's mini poster contains a haul of horror movie VHS covers, which makes me giddy beyond belief. These are the things i always had to chance in my video rental days. Some covers were too creepy for my wimpy mind, and I'd have more nightmares about some of the covers than the movies they represented. Fun personal fact: my aunt and uncle live in the town they filmed Arachnophobia. I've only seen the movie once, cuz I'm afraid of spiders, so I always joked with them, "hope they found all the spiders before they left". My aunt always teased me saying, "you never know" but Cambria is super woodsy anyway so I'm sure there are big spiders there that weren't even related to the movie. Also, lovin' the Dinodrac sticker too.
In the upper right hand corner is a cover for the movie House, which I'm fairly certain is the same movie he reviewed on XE, so I've stoked on that. I think its on Netflix so I think I'm gonna have to try it.
Also, the Bloody Birthday cover reminds me of this foam Halloween decoration we have that's made to look like its decorated with severed fingers, eyeballs and ears. I hate the damn thing but my dad loves it. Some how the cover to the movie is less grotesque than the one I own.
"Make it a Blockbuster night!" I still remember that jingle to this day. Maybe its nostalgia, or maybe its cuz a few eps circulating for MST3k on youtube still have bits of the commercials embedded from people recording them off tv. Your choice.
The pièce de résistance of the pack this month is a throwback box containing bits of the franchise. Like, literally. Inside the tiny box is a bite of the era. I love the packaging touches, especially the sticker on the front. Holy cow, these are from WAY BACK, kids, before DVDs took up a bulk of the spaces, cuz of a little thing I like to call "rewinding". Seriously, nothing squares your breasts more than after you've gone through the trouble of unhooking the phone, changing to sweatpants, snuggling in with a big bowl of microwave popcorn under your living room couch's afghan than having to get back up and rewind the tape you just rented. The movie Be Kind Rewind is lost on the generations behind Decon's, and he's still savvy with my age group to know what I mean.
Speaking of, there's a small bag of stickers from the video kings themselves, rewinding stickers, rental stickers, even a few genre stickers, in case the covers to the tapes were REALLY obtuse and you weren't sure you were renting a romantic comedy or a documentary. I'm super excited for those. There's a Blockbuster keychain, in all its yellow and blue glory (props to Matt on the packing material this month, with its Blockbuster deep blue. I love that shade of blue). And in its original packing is a Beetle Borgs pencil topper that moves, which is Blockbuster branded, and brings you back to a time when Saban meant harmless if appropriated kid friendly entertainment, and not useless money thrown at political campaigns and questionable movie decisions. This little box brings to mind the stark white lighting, the metal shelves full of crooked VHS tapes and the "special section" that only adults got to go into, but sometimes you'd sneak a peek at the nudie cuties cuz you were a rebel when you were 10.
DON'T EAT THE GUM. Just wanted to put that out there, folks.
The art challenge this month is to create a horror movie VHS cover that doesn't exist. Since I've been sitting on the title, Zombies Ate My Neighbor Totoro sounds like a great place to start.
The essay on Blockbuster really was great. Now as he put it, a lot of people in his age bracket (not far from my own) taps the haterade for the chain for putting their mom & pop video stores out of business, and for some places, I can certainly see what happening. But by the time renting movies was something I did on my own as much as I did it with family, Blockbuster was the only kid in the block, excepting one thing: foreign movies.
If I went to a mom & pop video store, it was with my mom, and we rented filipino movies that never had subtitles and were in a language I never understood or was able to learn (my mom wanted my sisters to speak english). While I did enjoy watching them, my mom rented filipino movies (from more than one place, if I remember correctly) so my grandmother--her mother--could watch movies she could follow without needing her own subtitles. Grandma Tucay spoke good english, but she was more familiar and comfortable in her native tongue, and while I still don't know any, I know I always understood her even when she wasn't speaking english. By the time she was living with us, Grandpa Tucay had passed and she was lonely. I remember going with my mom, and she'd choose most of the movies, but sometimes I'd point to the tv in the shop, which would always have one movie on, and ask her to get that one. I think Grandma preferred dramas but once in awhile she liked comedies, and I recall always watching those ones and having to ask her what was going on, who these characters were (these were my first experiences with the filipino heroes Darna and Captain Barbell, whom while familiar looking, have become their own filipino icons in their own way), and what everyone's names were.
One other mom & pop place I used to frequent was the oddly named Vallejo Baseball (sadly long gone), which sold anime goods alongside baseball cards (which must have been their original business model), and had racks on racks in their tiny shop full of VHS fansubbed anime. I was binge-watching series before that was a thing (said the aging hipster XD), when all you could fit on a tape was 2 hours worth of episodes, and you had dozens of tapes to go through (it wasn't until later that I was literally 2 EPISODES away from finishing Fushigi Yuugi and Blue Seed but no one returned the tapes and with FY, I just gave up cuz goddamn that series felt longer than it was). When i say "i've been watching anime since I was a kid" I wasn't joking; I first saw the Sailor Moon R and S movies on VHS with really hard to see subs, and DAMN did that open my mind up from the dub I had grown up on.
To this day, around San Jose, and the bay area, these mom & pop stores still exist, cramped full of rental DVDs (some VHS too, if you're lucky), offering a glut of foreign movies that, yeah, you can find online, but they still get decent business for cheap rental fees (only a few still do memberships) and cater to patronage that still watch these movies overseas, for a taste of a country they may have left behind, or remember from childhood.
Blockbuster was my childhood for video games and all those weird horror movies and movies I missed in the theaters, where watching movies with my parents, even though they were divorced, still was something I could do in both households. I'll always hold Blockbuster up as my gateway into that very short SHORT time laserdiscs were introduced (FUCK YEAH RANMA 1/2 laserdiscs ftw). But those mom & pop shops were also a part of my childhood, connecting me with a generation and a culture I still wish I knew more about. I'll ask my mom sometimes about the movies and things we'd see back then, and while she doesn't always remember all of them (we rented A LOT of filipino movies, and come to think of it, a lot of them were similar in structure XD), it helps me connect.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a stack of DVDs I've borrowed from a film friend of mine that I need to return. Thank god he doesn't charge late fees.
--Dio (3/29/17)
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