Summertime used to be when everything was a bit slower and felt like it stretched out forever. Living out in the country there was plenty of time and no reason to hurry. It was visits to the grandparents and short vacations, daytime movie trips, the alluring fragrance of a freshly watched VHS tapes, character cereal-with no need to wolf it all down(no bus-no rush), pool days, and not to mention no frickin’ school.
Somewhere along the line, there was an epic jostling of the world (often called reality) and for some reason every person has to piss me off even more than normal during these originally coveted summer days. Whether its a sudden influx of vicious movie texters/talkers, A/Cs not working, or traffic jams, summer is pretty much a hot sticky waste of my time.
On the other hand the ladies tend to show off a bit more skin so that helps.
Growing up near Ocean City, MD, the road to get there went straight through my town and getting anywhere on a Friday or a Sunday was joke. Sometimes it was an accident, other times it was just stupid people all trying to speed on a two lane highway. But enough about the negative aspects lets talk about the positives.
5 Movies 5 Days 5 Dollars:
Video Land:
Once, long ago there existed a movie rental shop that had a special where you could rent 5 movie for 5 days for the low price of 5 dollars. This place filled my summers with many, many, many movies for years. The catch was you could only rent the movies with the orange and blue stickers; not the white ones. White stickers were the new releases, whereas the blue stickers were relatively new/older movies, and orange stickers were family/kids movies. You had better believe I abused the hell out of this deal. Sometimes, finishing all the movies in one or two days and begging my mother to take me back for another load of movies. This rarely worked but sometimes I would bring the movies with us just in case we happened to drive through that part of town and make a point of telling her I had them and we were right here so we might as well stop and turn them in. Only just before begging for another $5 to make another purchase. There are times when this worked and times when it didn’t. My mother understood that even if I said I wouldn’t be very long, she knew damn good and well, if unprovoked I would be in there for hours scouring every single aisle and rack looking for hidden gems to feed my movie addiction. It’s location changed a few times over the years. Here was its final location:
Chinese food. Another of my favorite things, but clearly not a 5-5 for 5 movie deal. The previous location is now a liquor store, and the location before that is now a Motorsports store. Lame.
Video Junction 1 & 2:
Another awesome video shop with two locations as well. The only one I could get a picture of was this one.
Video Junction was also converted into a Chinese restaurant a buffet this time. Sega Genesis games, game boy games, and VHS cover boxes like you had never seen. They had buttons and flashing lights, and bumpy raised covers. Quite epic. Quite. Not to mention at the other location they had pinball machines and arcade games(which sometimes the owner (Mr. Terry) would flip up the panel and let me and my dad play and beat it with no quarters(up until that moment the thought of playing arcade games for free hadn’t ever crossed my mind). Pretty awesome stuff. Sad to think about it now, but Say La Vee(no you are wrong that is how you spell it).
So that was pretty much summer for me. Until I became an adult and grew to hate people. Anyway thanks for reading.
Check out some more Summertime fun with the rest of the League:
Brian at the League Headquarters gets excited about Summer Blockbusters!!!
Super Powered Fiction is excited about…..Summer Blockbusters as well!!!
Knives Tales has a rather unhealthy attachment to ice cream!!!
Space for Rent is a lunatic and lives in Las Vegas and doesn’t leave during the summer!!!
The Nerd Nook gets crabs, beer, comics and gets a salmon high!!!
Go Play Listen urges you to throw on some cool tracks for the hot days of summertime!!!
Until next time.
-Hank
That Yellow Duck 
VHS, oh wow, that takes me back. Video rental wasn’t big in my country, and when my brother and I were kids, my mother amassed a collection of, no joke, over 900 VHS tapes. We even bought a rewinder and thought we were hot shit for it. We used to spend summers fast-forwarding tapes to see if there were any old movies taped over (VHS tapes were often reused, I guess?), and one time we found the ending to an alien b-movie after fowarding through a copy of Cats Don’t Dance. Hilarious.
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Oh wow I don’t know what I would have done without rentals!!! And yes people would buy blank bus tapes and record TV and movies on them a lot of times rerecording over other things. Awesome collection 900!! Thats a whole hell of a lot.
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