Video cassettes

any video cassette or video rental memories?

i began to watch 70s american classics on video cassettes in my teenage years in the early 1990s. we used to have many video rentals in kerala (india) back in the late 80s and 90s.  back then, it was hard to find foreign movies in india. i would look at filmographies of de niro and brando on IMDB (we had slow dialup internet connection) and wish i could watch all their movies. but they were unavailable where i lived. or thats what i thought. there was this video rental called VIDEO PORT which had many hidden treasures. they had APOCALYPSE NOW and ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA in two cassettes each, both with faded blue sketch pen labels as if the gods had conspired to make it hard for me to find them. i dug them out from somewhere in the back of the video shop. even the people who worked there were unaware of their existence. i still remember being excited to watch such "rare" movies in my teenage years praying that the video cassettes would not stop working. frankly watching these movies on netflix or blu ray (now easily available on amazon india) cannot match the excitement of discovering these seemingly unattainable films with huge star casts on video cassette. video cassettes would not have subtitles and i remember having to rewind many times to understand BRANDO's final speech. i remember being mesmerized by APOCALYPSE NOW. wtf was i watching? i was innocent back then and would brag to my friends about watching this obscure american movie about ooooh the darkness that resides in the american heart (stuff i read in articles). i enjoy watching movies to this day but not the way i used to when they were hard to get on video cassettes and you had to work hard to watch them.

all the video cassette shops shut down by the late 90s or early 2000s when CD's and DVD's became cheaper.