VCR Philly
Ice Box Project Space
1400 N American St.
Philadelphia
Nov. 6, 2026
In the 2020 documentary The Last Blockbuster, director Taylor Morden delves into the iconic chain’s history while focusing on its last remaining store in Bend, Oregon. While the memories and the film’s framing of Blockbuster at the center of a broader American monoculture is warm and fun, it only tells part of the story. Coexisting alongside chains like Blockbuster, West Coast Video and Hollywood Video were countless mom & pop video shops peppered throughout small towns and cities everywhere. As the ‘90s gave way to the 2000s, the writing was already on the wall regarding the future of physical media ownership. Peer-to-peer file sharing offered a mass delivery system that allowed fans of music and movies to completely circumvent the need for physical media. While it would seem that this upheaval in the system would signal the death of any commercial industry around films and music, capitalism found a way to mutate and survive. The degree to which the subscription-based streaming model has “solved” the problem of media has been primarily to the benefit of multi-billion dollar corporations. For most people today, the consumption of a film or a song is divorced from the experience of touching or owning a piece of physical media or having to interact with others at any point in the process.
Social media is full of nostalgic posts about going to the video store on a Friday night, grabbing a few snacks and renting a movie to watch with friends and family. The stores themselves were not really the point. People miss the communal experiences that once orbited them. VCR Philly (VCR Video Collection and Resource) is an experimental video lending library that is bringing back the connection and fun that once accompanied the home movie-viewing experience. Located at the Icebox Project Space in the Crane Arts building, the lending library offers free membership and a wide variety of VHS, DVD and Blueray films to borrow. Ice Box/Crane is close by in my neighborhood, so I walked over to check VCR Philly out and browse their selection. Immediately, I noticed a handful of some of my favorite films; Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, Robert Mugge’s Sun Ra: A Joyful Noise, Rhino’s classic documentary about Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life and many more. Conveniently divided up into genres, the collection has a nice selection of films by Black directions (including a few titles by Marlon Riggs), queer cinema, documentaries, dance, experimental films, animation and a section simply called “Movies” that includes some popular narrative films like High Fidelity, School Daze, El Topo and more. Like many others, I’ve also been looking for a way to lessen my dependence on streaming for video content and it seems like VCR Philly would be a good place to start. I signed up and got my membership card before I bounced. Now the only thing left to do is buy a VHS and DVD player.
