Blockbuster Video Quotes

About 20 years ago I told an Exec to tell her friend, an Exec at a big entertainment company that they should develop a video library where anyone can pull up a film or tv show when they want to, from home. This was before Video On Demand. Before Netflix went streaming. Before Amazon Video and Hulu. That entertainment company I told about my vision for a VOD-type of service to was Blockbuster. But because I was a very young Executive, a woman, and Asian; they didn't listen. Look where Blockbuster is now. - Don't take Good Advice for Granted. Futurist - Kailin Gow

I remember reading once how some Stone Age Indians from the Brazilian rain forest with no knowledge or expectation of a world beyond the jungle were taken to Sao Paulo or Rio, and when they saw what it contained-the buildings, the cars, the passing airplanes-and how thoroughly at variance it was with their own simple lives, they wet themselves, lavishly and in unison. I believe I had some idea how they felt. It is such a strange contrast. When you’re on the AT, the forest is your universe, infinite and entire. It is all you experience day after day. Eventually it is about all you can imagine. You are aware, of course, that somewhere over the horizon there are mighty cities, busy factories, crowded freeways, but here in this part of the country, where woods drape the landscape for as far as the eye can see, the forest rules. Even the little towns like Franklin and Hiawassee and even Gatlinburg are just way stations scattered helpfully through the great cosmos of woods. But come off the trail, properly off, and drive somewhere, as we did now, and you realize how magnificently deluded you have been. Here, the mountains and woods were just backdrop-familiar, known, nearby, but no more consequential or noticed than the clouds that scudded across their ridgelines. Here the real business was up close and on top of you: gas stations, Wal-Marts, Kmarts, Dunkin Donuts, Blockbuster Videos, a ceaseless unfolding pageant of commercial hideousness.

But can we talk about Euphoria the show for a minute? I mean, first of all, Zendaya is everything, but that show so gorgeously captures the thrashing, beautiful, frustrated, sensual, stupid, fun, crazy, sexy, dangerous, dazzling meaning of young adulthood unleashed. I hope people watch it and go, “Oh, yeah, maybe my kid’s not as out of bounds as I thought she was. And maybe the world my kids are growing up in is a bit more complicated than the Blockbuster Video family-friendly aisle I grew up in.

The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' 'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")

I always loved Woolworth’s because of the pick ’n’ mix; the memory of all those cola bottles, cherry lips, and flying saucers still makes me smile. Lily’s favorite shops were Our Price, where she went to buy the latest cassettes and music posters, and Tammy Girl and C&A, where she and Rose shopped for clothes. I always enjoyed our trips to Blockbuster Video—even if I was rarely allowed to choose which film we would rent—and visits to the little independent bookshop with Nana were my favorite outings. Buying books was the only form of shopping she ever enjoyed. It makes me sad to realize that none of those shops exist now. So many high streets are more like ghost towns these days.

It is the simplest phrase you can imagine,” Favreau said, “three monosyllabic words that people say to each other every day.” But the speech etched itself in rhetorical lore. It inspired music videos and memes and the full range of reactions that any blockbuster receives online today, from praise to out-of-context humor to arch mockery. Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition. There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption (Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or, most simply, an A-B-A structure (Sarah Palin: “Drill baby drill!”). There is antithesis, which is repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas (Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). There is parallelism, which is repetition of sentence structure (the paragraph you just read). Finally, there is the king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, which is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” There are several reasons why antimetabole is so popular. First, it’s just complex enough to disguise the fact that it’s formulaic. Second, it’s useful for highlighting an argument by drawing a clear contrast. Third, it’s quite poppy, in the Swedish songwriting sense, building a hook around two elements—A and B—and inverting them to give listeners immediate gratification and meaning. The classic structure of antimetabole is AB;BA, which is easy to remember since it spells out the name of a certain Swedish band.18 Famous ABBA examples in politics include: “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.” —Benjamin Disraeli “East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.” —Ronald Reagan “The world faces a very different Russia than it did in 1991. Like all countries, Russia also faces a very different world.” —Bill Clinton “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” —George W. Bush “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” —Hillary Clinton In particular, President John F. Kennedy made ABBA famous (and ABBA made John F. Kennedy famous). “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind,” he said, and “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms; each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension,” and most famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Antimetabole is like the C–G–Am–F chord progression in Western pop music: When you learn it somewhere, you hear it everywhere.19 Difficult and even controversial ideas are transformed, through ABBA, into something like musical hooks.

So when you guys get married and she squeezes out a litter of brats for you, you're going to have to come up with a better meet-cute than that. I don't think the kids will want to hear that you held mommy's hair while she puked up pills. I'm no expert but I could see that scarring a kid. You know, maybe pep it up. You two locked eyes at a Blockbuster video and you were fucking done for. Then they'll ask what the fuck a Blockbuster is and you can move on to other subjects." "Frate," Edison said, brows raised like he thought the man was out of his fucking mind. Which he was, so it was a valid thought. "Who the fuck did you trade your balls into for the information about what a meet-cute is? First fucking Cyrus with his Michael Bublé, now this fuck with his rom-com comments? We're a sad excuse for bikers at this point.

The best entrepreneurs don’t just follow Moore’s Law; they anticipate it. Consider Reed Hastings, the cofounder and CEO of Netflix. When he started Netflix, his long-term vision was to provide television on demand, delivered via the Internet. But back in 1997, the technology simply wasn’t ready for his vision—remember, this was during the era of dial-up Internet access. One hour of high-definition video requires transmitting 40 GB of compressed data (over 400 GB without compression). A standard 28.8K modem from that era would have taken over four months to transmit a single episode of Stranger Things. However, there was a technological innovation that would allow Netflix to get partway to Hastings’s ultimate vision—the DVD. Hastings realized that movie DVDs, then selling for around $ 20, were both compact and durable. This made them perfect for running a movie-rental-by-mail business. Hastings has said that he got the idea from a computer science class in which one of the assignments was to calculate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of backup tapes driving across the country! This was truly a case of technological innovation enabling business model innovation. Blockbuster Video had built a successful business around buying VHS tapes for around $ 100 and renting them out from physical stores, but the bulky, expensive, fragile tapes would never have supported a rental-by-mail business.

In America a child can no longer visit the place where she was born a shopping mall stands there instead. In America a grownup can no longer see the school where she learned the art of growing sad a freeway goes through there now an overpass her memories of brick turn to glass the suburb goes from white to black and time speeds up so much she has to stay young forever and reset the clock every five minutes just to know where is there and there is everywhere because she lives in time and not in any space! In our country here the future is in ruins before it is built a fact recognized by postmodern architecture that grins at us shyly or demonically as it quoted ruins from other times and places! There are no buildings in America only passageways that connect migratory floods the most permanent architecture being precisely that which moves these floods from one future ruin to another that is to say freeways and skyways and the car is our only shelter the architecture of desire reduced to the womb a womb in transit from one nowhere to another!” Saddened by his own vision and sensing smugness in the audience, Wakefield is revolted by his desire to please the foreigners. He coughs. He is portraying his own country now for the sake of… what? Applause? There isn't any. He veers down another path. “The miracle of America is of motion not regret in New Mexico the has face of Jesus jumped on a tortilla in Plaquermine a Virgin appeared in a tree In Santuari de Chimayo the dirt turned healer a guy in Texas crasahed into a wall when God said Let me take the wheel! And others hear voice all the time telling them to sit under a tree or jump from a cliff or take large baskets of eggs into Blockbuster to throw at the videos the voices of God are everywhere heard loud and clear under the hum of the tickertape and all these miracle and speaking gods are the mysteries left homeless by the Architecture of speed and moving forward onward and ahead!” Wakefield throws his hands into the air as if to sprinkle fairy dust on the room; he is evoking the richness of a place always ready for miracles.

Yeah! American Classic Voyages, Carnival Corporation, Royal Caribbean, and Vail Resorts seem like they might be in the ballpark. But there are also other interesting companies on the list: Blockbuster is where I get videos;

Nos sentamos todos alrededor de una enorme mesa de cristal y, tras unos minutos de charla, Marc y yo planteamos nuestra propuesta, esto es, que Blockbuster comprara Netflix y nosotros desarrollaríamos y gestionaríamos Blockbuster.com como su división de alquiler de videos online. Antioco nos escuchó atentamente, asintiendo con frecuencia, y al cabo preguntó: «¿Cuánto tendría que pagar Blockbuster por Netflix?». Cuando oyó nuestra respuesta, cincuenta millones de dólares, se negó en redondo. Marc y yo salimos de allí desanimados.

To put it simply, blue-sky opportunities are about skating to where the puck will be, not where it is now. Sometimes blue-sky opportunities arise by thinking more broadly or reframing how you’re approaching a problem: Blockbuster saw its business as “video stores” and was locked into handing customers tapes and DVDs. Netflix focused on “content delivery,” and it didn’t matter if that content came from the mail or streaming video. By thinking about how to let customers watch movies and TV shows in a different way, Netflix saw a means to exceed Blockbuster’s local maxima and find a new global maxima.

In today’s era of digital transformation, every organization and every industry are potential partners. Consider the taxi and entertainment industries. Ninety percent of Uber riders wait less than ten minutes for a driver, compared with 37 percent of taxi riders. Netflix costs its viewers $0.21 per hour of entertainment compared with $1.61 per hour with the old Blockbuster video-rental model.

Craig brought a business model to H-E-B and Video Central that was like kryptonite to Blockbuster. Prices were lower, and inventories were larger and much better managed. We ran it just like H-E-B ran grocery stores. Define what matters most and relentlessly pursue perfection in those areas. And do your best to make it fun for employees and customers.

But unlike Blockbuster, Prime was open to listening to another point of view, especially to someone from H-E-B, a company with which they were familiar. In early 1993, they called me to talk about managing their stores, and since H-E-B had made it known Video Central was for sale, I jumped at the opportunity to talk.

The fate of the two companies was starkly different, as was its leadership. In its 25-year history, Blockbuster had five CEOs, none of whom had much interest in the inner workings of the video rental business. Netflix is still run by its Co-founder, Reed Hastings, who wrote a $1.9 million check 23 years ago to start the company. He is a self-described “math wonk,” and it shows in the company’s obsession with following the numbers to what its customers want. Blockbuster had thousands of times more data about movie watching than Netflix but rarely used it in productive ways. Even though Netflix was a fraction of the size, its obsession with data created a knowledge advantage that became its ultimate weapon against Blockbuster.

Although it’s mostly just annoying, self-infantilisation’s pervasive existence in the culture could also be the harbinger of something more sinister. Last year, the comic book author Alan Moore suggested that the popularity of superhero films represents an “infantilisation that can very often be a precursor to fascism”. This might sound hyperbolic, but it’s true that a certain kind of kitsch infantilism was always a feature of Nazi art, which was hostile to moral ambiguity and formal complexity. Hitler himself was a Disney adult. If the desire to relinquish responsibility for your own life can be considered an infantile trait, it’s easy to see why this would make you more susceptible to authoritarianism. Today’s white nationalists – with their cartoon Pepes and their ‘frens’ – are as smooth-brain and babyish as any online community, while right-wing reactionaries have recently taken to eulogising 90s video games, Blockbuster and Toys R Us – a glorious past that has been robbed from us by wokeness.

The biggest miscalculation the tyrants and despots had made was to convince themselves that their citizens scorned the Western way of life, when in fact the opposite was true: Western ways were the envy of the world. Not only did people want to be able to choose their own leaders, enjoy a free press, and speak their minds freely and openly without fear of reprisal, but they yearned to look and live and love as they pleased. They wanted to wear the current trendy styles and fashions from the US and Europe, follow the exploits of their favourite celebrities, play the newest video games, watch the latest Hollywood blockbusters, binge on television box sets, view pornography, and download the hot new pop songs and videos.

The long tail is a myth, a fact evidenced by the current music business, in which 80 percent of the revenue is generated by 1 percent of the content. Even at the height of the early blockbuster era, spawned by Michael Jackson’s Thriller, 80 percent of the revenue was spread among the top 20 percent of the content. So even in a different winner-takes-all scenario, the revenue was spread out among more artists than it is today. Economists have noted that winners “take all” in many sectors (including hedge funds), and that this has clearly contributed to global income equality, but in the digital media business it seems especially Darwinian. In a world where four hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day, the commodification of what was once considered an art (or at least a craft) has become inevitable. For all the stories promoted by Google about YouTube millionaires, the traffic statistics tell another story. Most YouTube videos have fewer than 150 views.

Deaths from P-type loonshots tend to be quick and dramatic. A flashy new technology appears (streaming video), it quickly displaces what came before (rentals), champions emerge (Netflix, Amazon), and the old guard crumbles (Blockbuster). Deaths from S-type loonshots tend to be more gradual and less obvious. It took three decades for Walmart to dominate retail and variety stores to fade away. And no one could quite figure out what Walmart was doing, or why it kept winning. S-type loonshots are so difficult to spot and understand, even in hindsight, because they are so often masked by the complex behaviors of buyers, sellers, and markets. In science, complexities often mask deep truths: mountains of noise conceal a pebble of signal.

At Blockbuster, we clearly saw the rise of DVD delivery, vending, and online streaming, but even when those signals grew strong, they could not drown out the soothing mantra of the status quo: Nothing can ever replace the in-store video buying and renting experience. Until something did.