It all started, as all great things did back in 1993, with a night out at Blockbuster Video. I was just eleven, but by now I was already a stunning physical specimen, a little preteen Zeus, standing at five foot five with three pounds of hair cascading down my back like bubbling black steel and a thick layer of ebony peach fuzz above my upper lip that I called Slick Junior.

By this time, Dr Disrespect was a local gaming legend. I dominated every pool hall, arcade, Sega Genesis, and Super Nintendo around. I even found the few tools who owned Sega CDs and I beat their asses too. Everyone could get it.

But I was getting too big for this town, baby! I was bored with my success, tired of being so damn superior to every gamer around, sick of being the biggest fish in such a teeny, tiny little guppy pond. And besides, people were starting to look at me kind of funny in my wraparound shades and my child-sized tactical vest. By which I mean five-foot-five children, because I was huge.

I needed to break out of that place and find a way to dominate on an elite national stage, but I didn’t know how.

The only thing I had, the only thing that made any kind of sense anymore, was hanging with my bros at the local Blockbuster.

Now, let me tell you about Blockbuster Video back in ’93, okay? You think Netflix is big? You got yourself a little hard-on for Hulu or Pluto or Fubo? That streaming crap has nothing on Blockbuster in the nineties, all right? Nothing!

Those big ballers with their blue-and-yellow logo and their Twizzlers and Milk Duds and their New Releases wall told us to make it a Blockbuster night, and we made it a Blockbuster night. Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Saturday night for all the virgins out there, which was all of us—they were all Blockbuster nights. We stood there and we looked at those rows and rows of Home Alone 2s and Jurassic Parks, and we stared at Sharon Stone on the boxes of Basic Instinct and got our baby boners, and we flashed those little laminated membership cards, and that was power, baby! That was freedom! That was the $1.99-video-rental experience, even if all that effort got you was a copy of Hudson Hawk that no one wanted! That, my friends, was Blockbuster.

There was just one problem on that steamy August night as I stood outside those glass doors with Ramrod and One-Eyed John and Steve and Razor Frank, who I think was actually Ukrainian in this dimension,I and I stared longingly at A Bronx Tale—and with more than a little interest in The Piano, because I had a weird thing for Holly Hunter.

I couldn’t go in. Because I’d lost a video.

That video was The Wizard, starring teen prodigy Fred Savage.