By Jon Brooks, KQED News Fix
You have to keep in mind just how few options there were back then. I’m talking pre-’80s, before the VCR became the first in a long line of accessories to turn your TV into the culture’s central nervous system of escapism. You could go to retro houses or watch truncated old movies on television (interrupted by mood-shattering commercials). But those were essentially passive choices; you might find Citizen Kane, or it might be Abbott and Costello Meet The Mummy. You watched for a variety of reasons, one of them being “because it’s there.”
That is why I remember my first visit to a video store as a sort of cornucopian dream, a lavish spectacle that satisfied a deeply rooted desire. Dorothy’s first glimpse of Oz, exploding with color after a life of rural black and white. Or that famous Twilight Zone, when the suicidal bookworm and lone survivor of a nuclear war otherwise known as Burgess Meredith happens upon the intact contents of the New York Public Library.
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