‘Recapturing that magic’: The unassuming garage that’s become a replica Blockbuster video store

1 month ago 16

Walking into Mark Bishop’s garage in Mornington feels like you’ve entered a time warp.

Neon lights shimmer and giant movie posters hang from the walls, catchy jingles play from arcade game machines, and shelves stretching all the way to the back are lined with DVDs.

Mark Bishop inside his home video store.

Bishop, who works full-time running his popular YouTube channel, has been an avid pop culture fan for as long as he can remember.

Disinterested in the books offered up in primary school, he avidly tore through the Superman comics his mum bought him to encourage him to read. During holidays and weekends, he would watch movies with his sister, constantly rewinding and replaying to rewatch their favourite parts.

This early love of superheroes and films led the 42-year-old to begin collecting pop culture merchandise from the age of five, starting with comic books and action figures and eventually moving to DVDs and film memorabilia.

When a Civic Video store in Frankston closed in 2020, he and a friend rescued a set of metal shelves that were put to good use a month later when he moved into his home and began to transform the garage space.

There are over 5000 DVDs in the collection.

“It just kind of hit me because I’ve always wanted to have my own video store ... It’s actually quite serendipitous what happened,” he says.

For decades, video stores were an everyday part of life, with chains like Blockbuster, Video Ezy and Civic Video having thousands of franchises across the country. But with the advent of rental kiosks, mail-order DVD rentals and eventually online streaming, the Friday night ritual of selecting a movie petered out.

Today, the United States is home to the world’s last Blockbuster, after the second-last franchise, in Perth, closed in April 2019.

For Bishop, who can still remember the first time he walked into his local Blockbuster Video store as child, video stores were always a happy place.

“I had never seen anything like it. It was literally like walking into magic land. It was double storeyed, there was a room for video games … I think I’ve been trying to recreate it ever since.”

He’s amassed his impressive DVD collection of more than 500 films through personal purchases and donations. One fan even gifted him a genuine prop from the cult 1958 sci-fi horror classic, The Blob.

“It’s all about recapturing that magic … of going to the video store on Friday, and just looking around. The atmosphere, the environment,” Bishop says. He points out the highlights of his collection: a replica of Marty McFly’s pink hoverboard from Back to the Future 2; a handmade Ghostbusters costume complete with a Proton Pack; a copy of The Shining script, signed by Shelley Duvall.

There is also an assortment of LaserDiscs, a lesser-known home video format released in the late 1970s, and Bishop says Japanese VHS covers are his favourite because of their artistic designs.

Bishop also has an impressive collection of pop culture memorabilia.

In 2022, large sections of the collection were destroyed when Bishop’s house was flooded. It was, he says, a challenging time. But it didn’t deter him from continuing his collecting.

“It’s probably the greatest thing I’ve accomplished. I am proud … I do get a lot of joy when people come over, and they see it,” he says.

With almost four decades of collecting under his belt, he says it’s impossible to estimate how much he’s spent in total. But, Bishop says, it’s not really about the money.

“It just makes me feel happy … because I feel like I’m preserving it. Pop culture and movies [are] important. It’s a part of our history,” he says.

And while the space is just for Bishop and his friends for now, he hopes that won’t always be the case.

“One day, maybe if I win the lottery or something, I’ll get a bigger property and have a bigger video store.”

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