Don't Know What You've Got, Until It's Gone.

I could drone on and on about things from my past I've lost that now I wish I had back, but one is a bit more widespread than just to myself. Today's topic kind of pertains to video rental stores. Now, I was never a Blockbuster member, nor did I rent there. The closest I came to Blockbuster was the bassist in my high school band worked there, and I went in a handful of times looking for used video games. My childhood bestfriend's Mom may have rented us video games from there on one of my many, many stayovers at his house on the weekends, but beyond that I didn't grow up a Blockbuster patron.

We had a local chain that had four stores throughout their existence that offered it all, and was pretty quick to add new stock. The chain in question was Movieland USA, with their main building in Mooresville Indiana. I remember going in and seeing video games before I saw any of the movies, the latter of which I really had no interest in anyway. My childhood bestfriend's Mom would rent us a video game or two for the weekend and we would make the best out of it from two days. Later on I purchased a few video games they were selling to clear out old stock. I believe they were $5 each or three for $12, and of course I always bought three NES games at a time. All of them came with their original boxes and manuals, albeit with a sticker stain, but they were all in good shape. I purchased a CIB Wayne's World for the NES from there, which I stupidly sold to FukyuLand, I mean FuncoLand, many years later, but I've already told that story.

 Years passed by, I moved out of state and on the odd visit I would sometimes drive by the old Movieland building, which was a historical building on main street in downtown. Movieland must have started feeling the strain of more competition such as RedBox and Netflix, before they were a streaming service, and moved into the basement of the same building, and closed all their other store. They stuck it out and stayed in business until about 2018 and finally called it quits, closing up shop for good. If you want to read the full story you can find it here.

Since then the owner has passed on and the former building in Mooresville was destroyed by a tornado on the 8th of April 2020. There's absolutely no going back, even for a quick nostalgic trip, the heart and soul of the owner, and the physical location of the building are both gone. I'm not sure if I still have any of the NES games I purchased from them all those years ago, but I believe I might have some of their SNES games. It's hard to tell as they're in the boxes, with Xeroxed manuals and only the circular sticker stains would be a sign of having been their rentals, but I can only guess whether or not that's from Movieland USA. So amongst the many things I've lost in my life, it may seem silly, but one little rental store in a small rural Indiana town still calls to me from the past, yet there is no way for me to answer that call.