We have always loved movies, and back in the early 1980’s we were starving to see some. I always liked to read movie reviews and I anxiously awaited the opportunity to watch the ones with good reviews, but alas, at that time, tiny and isolated McBride had no movie theater.
In 1983, we were one of the first families in McBride to buy a VCR, but at the time, there was no place in the village to rent a movie video. In our desperation to watch movies, we would rent them in Prince George when we went up there to shop, and then we had to return them to the store by shipping them on the Greyhound bus.
Renting and showing movie videos became an important part of our social life. We always had friends over to watch movies. Sometimes they would rent the videos, and come over to watch them on our VCR. One friend of ours still jokes about all the people watching movies at our house be we just had a small portable color Sony Trinitron to watch them on. Everyone was so eager to watch films, that the size of the screen didn’t matter.
Eventually, Steve’s Men’s Wear, a local store started to rent a few movie videos. At the time, the market for them was low, because very few people had VCR’s, in McBride. As families bought them, Steve’s Men’s Wear began to developed a good business renting them. Then what always happens in a tiny community where all the stores struggle to make a living, all the other stores in the village began to rent movie videos.
In 1992, we were renting and watching movie videos once or twice a week. One Saturday, my wife figured it was time to clean out the inside of our car, which had become an embarrassment.
When she did, she made an interesting discovery. Under one of the front seats she found the VCR movie video of “Memphis Belle,” which was three months or so overdue.
On Monday, during my lunch hour at work, I dropped off the Memphis Belle video at the Bigway Grocery. When I got home from work I got a call from Bigway, who informed me that the Memphis Belle video had not come from their store and should have been returned to the Country King Store, so I had to drive back into town and correct the mistake.
Returning a rented video to the wrong store was one problem that was created when so many stores started renting them, the other problem that was created was with such a saturated video rental business, soon none of the stores were making much of a living off of doing it.
The photo below is an early one of our living room shortly after we had bought our house, but it does show our small TV that all of our friends would gather around to watch a movie video
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