SV Archive dba Scarecrow Video

He was a big cinephile.

Anything he could find at like a Goodwill, Scarecrow video, he would bring home and we would sit down and watch, whether that was The Omen, The Believers, or Surfing in the Rainbow.

These are all movies that I remember watching before I was in kindergarten.

Perfect.

Yeah.

Anything you wanna promote? I know Scarecrow Video D- Day is coming up, right?

Yes, Video Store Day on October the 17th.

We're doing a ton of cool stuff at Scarecrow all month long.

I became a Twilight Zone person far too young.

My family would go... gonna betray my age when I say this, my family would go to the video store when I was a kid, Scarecrow Video in Seattle, it's still there.

It's just the absolute best video store out there.

But we would go and it was this moment of immense freedom for me because it would be like, okay, everybody gets to pick something.

How does a theater like this that sticks to the classics help Seattle's film scene?

You know, I work at Scarecrow Video part time and it's been really cool to see how many young people are coming through and renting theaters.

you know, art house masters and foreign film and stuff like that.

And so I feel like, you know, Seattle has this community of people who love film that, you know, rages from young to old.

And you've got a lot more freedom.

It's not hard to feel like Seattle's movie landscape might be bouncing back here despite some Kind of rough years, man.

The Egyptians returning Scarecrow video pushed through its financial hardship two times.

The Grand Illusion is taking over the old varsity theater space in the U District.

I mean, the access.

We used to talk about it because we both spent most of our lives growing up in Seattle, right? It's like we talk about like you'd have to go down to Scarecrow Video or there was the cinema books or there was these places that maybe you could find a copy of.

It's like now it's like it's all right there.

Like, what do you want to watch?

Yes.

Scarecrow Video is, like, an amazing destination for movie nerds, and it was really part of my movie education was they had all the movies that nobody else had.

Mm-hmm.

And now they still do.

... 100,000 other movies, none of them did.

Yeah.

So I drove 10 minutes to Scarecrow Video, and I watched Thieves Like Us with Keith Carradine and Shelley Duvall-

Oh

Yeah, luckily I had a genteel elderly Canadian to kind of hold the door open for me.

But famously, and for those of you who aren't like really deep into the video rental stores of Seattle, there's a legendary one called Scarecrow Video, which is, and we've talked about it a lot on the Omnibus, where they have really made an attempt to collect

You described the...

A Library of Congress-like attempt to have everything that anyone might want, to have one of everything that's ever been available.

That's not true.

Scarecrow video was open at the time.

But how he wanted to be the cat.

He had his identity crisis about being the cat.

It's the nostalgia, though.

A lot of

people don't know what Scarecrow video is, and they've never experienced it.

If you don't, by the way, you want to tell them, I'll tell them.