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DESPITE BEING AT THE CUTTING EDGE of a major technological shift within movie culture, one of the earliest home video distributors in the United States took a name that invoked retrospection: the Nostalgia Merchant.1 Founded in 1977 by country music producer Snuff Garrett, the Nostalgia Merchant specialized in "classic" feature films and movie serials, which it released on both Betamax and VHS ("General News" 16; Traiman 78). The company also sold such titles on 8mm and 16mm film (American Film 79). The Nostalgia Merchant's video business was part of a more extensive effort to capitalize on movie culture. The announcement for the company's founding described it as "a multi-faceted firm dealing with the merchandising of a variety of nostalgic movie items such as films, stills, lobby cards, and posters" ("General News" 16). Just as the company promoted these prints as precious objects to be collected by nostalgic movie fans, so too did it promote their home video releases as collectable merchandise.
The Nostalgia Merchant thus illustrates how video technology has been entangled within "residual" and "emergent" cultural practices (Williams 121-23). Although the company promoted the use of magnetic tape, it did so by offering consumers access to films from a previous era, mixing an excitement for technological novelty with an appeal to nostalgia for lost cinematic experiences. Likewise, the company continued to serve the existing market of private film collectors, who bought and traded movies on 8mm and 16mm, while simultaneously offering movies on tape, thereby expanding and altering the market for privately owned movies. Extending from this, the company treated movies-on-tape as collectable objects; while the company promoted the particular contents of these tapes, it simultaneously, if implicitly, highlighted their material properties. Movies were now physical objects, not unlike signed posters, film stills, or lobby cards.
This last point appears particularly antiquated when contrasted with contemporary video technologies and the ways in which people are increasingly using them. Since 2006-07, when Amazon began offering movies via Internet download, Netflix began streaming movies, and several media conglomerates created Hulu as a venue for streaming television and movie content, the mainstream media industry has largely shifted toward digital delivery. Although many people still buy DVDs at various brick-and-mortar retail locations or rent discs from one of...