ABOUT THE WRITER
Keenan Ketzner is a musician and an audio producer, who has many albums under his various pseudonyms. He has also crafted soundtracks for, and has mastered audio for independent films as well. He currently resides in Bellingham, Washington.
Hearing about the financial troubles of Scarecrow Video fills me with a certain dread about the near future. Possibly uncomfortably fucking near future.
Physical media is reaching a critical impasse.
Maybe I’m being dramatic, but there is no downplaying the changes that the modern landscape has made to the world of cinema. For better and worse, but continually leaning more towards the latter. Not only due to the narrowing of the visual and narrative languages employed in streaming media in order to yield a larger financial net, but also due to the bastardization of physical media’s perseverance by giving people fewer and fewer reasons to even be able to play physical media, and we can’t give them another. Streaming’s not the only culprit in this problem of course- let’s not forget the increasing greediness of property managers and good old American economic strain- but let’s not forget the methodicalness that comes with tangible mediums.
Scarecrow Video has been a noble virtue since the beginning, and continues to do so to this very day. From the sheer volume and diversity of their catalog, to their community involvement, to their rent by mail program, online media, and their courteous employees, it’s been a beacon of Seattle culture for decades. And not only for their regional importance, but also internationally as they have some material that can’t even be found anywhere else in the world. Not to mention a bevy of VHS film, a subculture of its very own that is falling apart faster than it can be preserved.
If anything, we need it to continue propelling the eternally satisfying waking sleepwalking that occurs in these kinds of establishments. I still remember the integral moments of roaming the halls of video stores. Shitty ones in the lobby of hotels forcing you to make brutal decisions for movie night, mid-level ones like the old dependable Hollywood Video, where you could find a wide range of major label films, and more virtuous ones like my hometown’s Stadium Video, where you could find more salacious titles like Dirty Duck. Looking at the new titles, seeing the old familiar ones. Deciding what I want to see Ernest do next. Locking eyes with the disappointingly absent-from-the-film figure depicted on the cover of Dead Alive. Find out what IS eating Gilbert Grape.
With everything modern times have taken from us, we must prevent it from taking any more of our culture.
You can donate to help rescue Scarecrow Video from closing here:
https://scarecrowvideo.org/sos