If you’ve got a love for the golden age of video stores and VHS movies, you might just want to look out for a new podcast from Quentin Tarantino and his Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary. The Video Archives Podcast will launch via SiriusXM’s Stitcher platform on July 19th and find the pair reminiscing about their days working at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California as they watch cult VHS movies.
Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary both worked at Video Archives back in the day, and when the store closed in 1995, Tarantino bought its entire library. In a joint statement, Tarantino and Avary said:
We never imagined that 30 years after we worked together behind the counter at Video Archives, we would be together again doing the exact same thing we did back then: talking passionately about movies on VHS. Watching movies was what originally brought us together and made us friends, and it’s our love of movies that still brings us together today. So we surrounded ourselves with the original Video Archives collection, where we both worked before we became celebrated filmmakers, and time-traveled ourselves back to the golden age of VHS. We love to discuss movies, and we want to welcome you into the Video Archives Podcast to hang with us and Archives’ new employee Gala, and discover the hidden VHS gems on our shelves.
Each episode of the podcast will find Quentin Tarantino, Roger Avary, and Avary’s daughter Gala watching one movie from the Video Archives’ VHS collection and discussing it. Some of the movies they’ll be covering include Moonraker, Dark Star, Demonoid: Messenger of Death, and Piranha, but if it doesn’t have a VHS release, they won’t be watching it. “We’re watching the videocassettes,” Tarantino said. “We’re not watching the Blu-rays. And if they don’t have a videocassette, they can’t be counted as a movie. It has to be from the collection.“
As video stores are rather scarce these days, it’s been a hell of a long time since I’ve been in one. But I still fondly remember walking up and down the aisles when I was young, trying in vain to decide what one movie I could rent that week. Now I spend an hour scrolling through streaming services before just watching Goodfellas for the hundredth time.