Buh-Bye, Buh-lockbuster

It would be wrong for me to dance the jig I have imagined so very many times on the grave of Blockbuster Video. I have written here almost as many times about my antipathy toward the video rental giant as I have about Dick "Dick" Cheney. It was always an easy axe to grind. So much of what I felt was wrong with the home video business was engineered and proliferated by the big blue and yellow boxes that held all the movies you might ever want to see. If you happened to be a male, between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five, and believe that Jerry Bruckheimer is a genius.
But why should I, as a person who passed straight through that demographic once upon a time, still hold a grudge against an American business that was only catering to the whining demands of its paying customers. Give the people what they want. Supply and demand, after all. Just because I took some film classes in college and spent my years dreaming of a career behind the camera doesn't make me some sort of oracle. It was the advent of home video that made every Tom, Dick and Mary a film critic. That didn't mean that everyone spent their time immersing themselves in the greatest films ever made. Instead, they lined up at the counter for what was new, good, that they hadn't seen that was in that night. That counter happened to be inside one of those big yellow and blue boxes. For a shining moment, Blockbuster had the model everyone wanted. They were the the team to beat.
In the end, they beat themselves. The block is busted. Long live the block. Can I move ahead now and make peace with the past? It's not like Wayne Huizenga was targeting me personally when he set out to crush my VHS dreams when he got into the business. This guy who got his start moving other people's trash was just looking out for his own American Dream. His version included bringing ice hockey to south Florida, but that's what makes this country great, right?
No need to worry about Wayne, by the way. He got out while the getting was good. As in billions of dollars good when he cashed in with his partners at Viacom. I got out of my video store with my National Video polo shirt and name tag, along with a six-foot-tall stuffed Woody Woodpecker that had once terrified small children in our Kids' Section, neither of which made the move to California with me. But I'm sure that Wayne and I share some memories, even if I am still looking for my first major-league sports franchise.