Clerks at Hollywood Video oversee the closing of Ewing’s last video store June 11. (Photo by Ryan McLelland.)

By Ryan McLelland

No longer can a Ewing resident look at someone and say, “Let’s go rent a movie.” Why? Because Hollywood Video, long a staple adjacent to the Shop Rite on Olden Avenue, and the last video store in Ewing Township, has gone out of business.

In the mid eighties, you couldn’t turn a corner in Ewing without running into West Coast Video, Star Video, the video store at Glen Roc or Blockbuster Video.

There was a huge celebration when Choices opened across from the old GM plant. The massive rental store brought in Philadelphia Phillie Von Hayes and the clown prince of baseball Max Patkin to celebrate the grand opening of West Trenton’s first video store. Over the years, Choices became Moovies which morphed into Video Update before being bought out by Movie Gallery who closed the store because they also owned Hollywood Video.

As a kid, I would walk down aisles in awe, looking at each videotape, wondering what I could rent this time around. Renting a movie was just as great as going to the movies, it was just as great as ice cream, and almost as good at getting McDonald’s.

But in the last few years, video stores have become obsolete. We can rent movies on demand the very same day they are available in stores. We can go to the grocery store and rent a new DVD from the Redbox for a dollar. We can shoot over to the Ewing Library and check out three DVDs for the weekend. Wal-Mart is selling brand new movies for $5 apiece. Even stores at the mall sell used DVDs so cheap that it is sometimes cheaper to buy than it would to rent the very same film.

One by one, the video stores dried up in Ewing. West Coast Video moved across the street only to close just a few years later. Blockbuster opened a second store near Marrazzo’s but just as quickly went away. The Blockbuster on Olden Avenue, where I worked at as a teen, was next. The places I revered so much growing up were suddenly dinosaurs in the modern technological world.

Customers weren’t allowed to walk down the aisles on the store’s last day. The shelves were near barren, quite an eerie sight for a place where you are supposed to go for movies. Anything left in the store was 12 DVDs for $10 - an amazing deal that I myself had to take part in while visiting the store. Some were in the store looking to buy the fixtures, completely unaware that they were picking the bones of the last place in Ewing to go rent movies.

The clerks behind the counter looked sullen. When I asked them if they would miss the video store, they said that they were glad the store was finally closing. After weeks of liquidation and hundreds of questions about their own futures, they would finally be moving on. When I asked them what their plans were they just shrugged, simply happy about this chapter coming to an end before going on to their next endeavour.

With Hollywood Video’s closing, Ewing residents have little choice but drive to Princeton or Trenton if they want to rent a film. Or they can do nearly a dozen different ways to watch a movie. Even my iPhone is filled with Pixar movies so I can hand it off to my son Tyler to watch while we are driving around in the car. When Tyler wants to go rent a video game for the weekend it kills me to have to tell him no. The thrill of walking down those aisles, looking at all those film and game boxes in awe, those days are now gone for all of us.

Ryan McLelland writes for entertainment juggernaut Ain’t It Cool News and blogs at www.EyeWannabe.com. Ryan’s newest comic book ‘Grunts: War Stories’ is now available at comic stores and bookstores everywhere.