I had the best job in the world and I knew it.
Early eighties. Assistant manager at Movieland, the hottest video store in town. Friday nights, the line went out the door. I mean, we had 38 copies of Rambo for crying out loud. Families, couples, groups of friends, all of them counting on us to send them home with the right movie. The wrong recommendation and their whole weekend was wrecked. I took that seriously. We all did.
There were three of us running the floor most nights and we were, collectively, a walking encyclopedia of everything on those shelves. Marcus was our horror guy. If it had a mask, a monster, or a fog machine, Marcus had seen it twice and could rank it without hesitation. Dana owned the drama and foreign film section like it was her personal collection. And then there was me. The one who knew every frame of the big ones and could tell you exactly why Back to the Future worked and what made Raiders different from every adventure film that came before it.
I know... "Nerds!" Yeah, we were nerds. I'll wear that badge all day long.
Together we had every genre covered. Customers figured that out fast. When you came to Movieland, you found your person.
And during that time, there was so much to know. Raiders of the Lost Ark. Ghostbusters. Back to the Future. Return of the Jedi. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Romancing the Stone. Who Framed Roger Rabbit. And then 1989 drops Batman on an unsuspecting world and Tim Burton reminded everyone that a superhero movie could be something epic. A blockbuster didn't come out every summer back then, we had a culture changing movie come out every few weeks. Spielberg and Zemeckis changed the way the world looked to me.
We all stood behind that counter and watched people as they lived out the Zeitgeist in real-time. These weren't just movies. They were the shared language of an entire generation. Movieland was our town's culture center.
That's what the Blue Salamander Emplorium is built on.
Every now and then I'll pick up a figure from a new shipment and for just a moment I'm teleported back to standing behind the Movieland counter on a Friday night. The store humming. Marcus debating somebody about Carpenter vs. Craven in the corner. Dana complaining about all the returns we need to re-shelve. That feeling of being exactly where you're supposed to be, doing exactly what you love, surrounded by people who love it just as much.
Pops give me that. One brief flash of the best job I ever had.
Here at Blue Salamander, you'll notice we don't carry every Pop. That's intentional. The collection gravitates toward the properties that give me that feeling: the franchises, the characters, the moments that make me feel that...I don't know, "movie" feeling. That said, great pop culture didn't stop when Movieland closed its doors. If it's got that energy, if this character or this world or this moment gives that vibe, it has a home here.
If you think about it, we're just still doing the same thing we used to do back at the video store. Handing people a piece of shared experiences through cultural impacting memories.
Come find yours.
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