Schlock Busted

My one regret about Blockbuster's financial troubles is that Blockbuster is a corporation and not a person. If it were a person, instead of going bankrupt, it would die. I could then take a piss on its grave while screaming, "HERE'S YOUR LATE FEE, BASTARD!" at the top of my lungs. The author of the article linked above says he hasn't been to a Blockbuster in five years. For me, it's been much longer. Blockbuster stood for me as a symbol of everything that's wrong with, well, everything.

Blockbuster has dominated the video rental industry for decades now. That power gave them the ability to act like assholes if they so chose and man, did they chose...so choose...you know what I mean. Sure, everyone who has power eventually acts like an asshole. Most people have had a boss who yells at people for no reason or encountered some bully who pushed you around just because he could. So it is with Blockbuster. They acted like assholes simply because they enjoyed doing so and no one could stop them. In fact, I'd go so far as to speculate that 90% of the assholes in this country started acting like that after they got charged at Blockbuster for failing to rewind their tapes.

One of the biggest problems with Blockbuster is that they're run by a group of Puritan idiots similar to the Coors family who literally changed the way movies were made. Like the Salon article says:

The chain may never have actually censored movies, but its family-friendly public image was so stodgy that no one had trouble imagining it did ("We have heard that for years," a corporate flak told Salon a couple years ago), and its available titles stuck pretty carefully to the less objectionable areas of the MPAA ratings.

Their denial is completely bogus. Many movies with sexual content literally had to edit their movies before Blockbuster would put them on the shelves. These movies were even famously known as, "The Blockbuster Version." I'm not just talking about soft core pornography. I'm talking about films that can truly be called Adult Movies. These would be movies like Henry and June that dealt with issues like sex seriously and in an adult fashion. These can also be called "movies that are very rarely made anymore" because Blockbuster won't carry them, at least not without editing the scenes that gave the movie meaning. When the MPAA replaced their X rating with NC-17, a move partly done to appease Blockbuster, Blockbuster responded by immediately announcing that they would never, ever rent an NC-17 film out of one of their stores. Again, this was an asshole move done because the people who did it enjoy being assholes.

I laugh my ass off now at how they're being brought down by their own arrogance. Netflix and Redbox are burying them and they never saw it coming. Thing is, you just know that at some point some mid-level Blockbuster executive probably proposed setting up an online DVD rental operation or putting machines in supermarkets and that management simply laughed at the idea. Hell, they probably thought such things would actually be bad for their business. I can imagine those ideas being roundly dismissed at some high level meeting.

"We make out money off of stores. Why would anyone come to our stores if they could just stay home and browse a much larger selection on their computers that would be conveniently delivered to their mailboxes? And so what if another company goes off and does that? We're Blockbuster, dammit! We'll crush them just like we've been crushing tiny rental operations for years. Nothing will stop us ever. To celebrate that, let's go wipe our asses with money."

And so, here we are with Blockbuster a quarter billion in the red and trying to copy everything Netflix does and the only way I could be more pleased is if some of their stores are behind in their lease payments and their landlords charge them a late fee. That would be to my schadenfreude what Monterrey Jack is to my tuna casserole.

Um, I like Monterrey Jack on my tuna casserole. I forgot you didn't know that.