Is Your Nostalgia Wrong?

I was watching a video on YouTube recently in which someone visits the last Blockbuster located in Bend, Oregon. This nostalgia overdose left me with oddly mixed emotions. As a card carrying 90s kid, I should have been glowing with joy as I did when Ecto Cooler was briefly brought back in 2016. You rarely, if ever, get to relive the past in such a genuine way—after all, Ecto Cooler wasn't just the same flavor under a different name and lacking the Ghostbusters branding; it was the real deal. Similarly, the last Blockbuster revels in its retro-ness, right down to letting you buy merchandise such as Blockbuster cards and fannypacks. However I think it's become clear that as nostalgia has become more and more of a mainstream phenomenon, sometimes people get lost in their memories and can't step back enough to separate the good nostalgia from the bad. Perhaps I should say, to evaluate whether the thing they're pining for is the thing itself or their fuzzy memories of the thing itself. Ecto Cooler still tasted great decades later, but does going to a video store really hold up?


First, though, let's talk about Blockbuster as a company. They deserved to go out of business and we all seem to have forgotten this in the wave of post-Captain Marvel 90s worship. Remember how Blockbuster passed on buying Netflix because they couldn't see where technology was heading? Remember how Blockbuster, at their height, were one of those pseudo-monopolies that edged out mom-and-pop video rental stores? Let's also think about how their strategy was to overwhelmingly focus on new releases and the most popular movies, so that their selection was always very limited and tailored to mainstream tastes, thus eliminating the ability to explore the history of film and the variety it offers.

Now, let's talk about the movie rental experience. Have we all forgotten and taken for granted how superior the online streaming model is? Have we all forgotten going to Blockbuster and they either didn't have the movie you wanted to see or they were out of copies to rent? Only 90s kids remember how rad limited availability was, bro! s clearly superior to pay like $5 to rent one movie for a couple days instead of paying like $15 a month for unlimited access to hundreds of TV shows and movies. In all seriousness, even with Netflix's increasingly sparse selection compared to its height in the early 2010s, it's still a much better value than Blockbuster or other video rental stores could ever match. In the aforementioned YouTube video, they didn't even like the movie they rented, so that's $5 wasted. Sure there's a lot of garbage on Netflix, too, but you're not paying $5 a pop to try your luck on crap like Tall Girl or Zumbo's Just Desserts.

All of this brings me to the important point I want to make about nostalgia: ask yourself if you really miss the thing in and of itself. Do you really miss going to a physical location to rent a movie, or do you miss the warm safety of childhood that surrounded this experience? I, personally, used to have a huge amount of nostalgia for the NES and its games, yet with a handful of exceptions, all of those games have aged poorly and are frustrating, badly designed, time wasting pieces of shit. By and large when it comes to my nostalgia for the NES, its really longing to relive my childhood, the experience of discovering what videogames were for the first time. Sometimes I long to return to Phantasy Star Online on the Dreamcast because of what a new and revolutionary experience it was, yet if I think about the game itself I'd much rather play something that isn't so clunky, slow, and grindy. All of this said, obviously I do miss certain games because they do hold up today and are still great experiences, such as Chrono Trigger or Streets Of Rage 2. They're nostalgic and actually worth being nostalgic about.

Blockbuster? Not so much. True, I prefer books over reading on computers/phones/tablets, and I prefer vinyl records over digital music...but I do utilize all of these things to some extent. They aren't either/or propositions; they complement each other and offer unique upsides and downsides. This isn't so with going to Blockbuster vs. streaming online. Other than physically seeing the boxes, there is no upside to videostores, and actually you can do this at Best Buy or used game/video stores, so...what's the point, other than misplaced nostalgia? While I will concede that not every movie/TV show is available online, somewhere, to stream, the vast majority of them are available, even if it's video on demand or buying the physical release on Amazon. True there is the immediacy argument, that you can go to a video store and have it in your hands right then and there, but this is also assuming they carry the title(s) you want and that they have copies available.


The point of all of this isn't to rain cynicism down on someone else's nostalgia parade. People are allowed to be nostalgic for whatever they want, and maybe some people do have genuine love for Blockbuster, for whatever reason. I just think that sometimes we allow nostalgia to blind us to the obvious faults in things from the past, as if everything that doesn't exist anymore somehow automatically transubstantiates into a valued brand or item. What's next, will people be nostalgic for Best Buy when that great lumbering beast finally goes belly-up in the murky waters of modern retail? People are dumb, so probably, yeah.