Preface: this is a truncated version of an essay that I’ve submitted to a book published by director Mike Lombardo for his 2026 independent film Dead Format, in which I’ve chronicled my personal anecdotes of renting video tapes in 1990s, as well as my experiences working as an art designer for the production. The full version of this essay can be seen in Lombardo’s book.
Behind the scenes of the movie shoot on set in summer 2025, taken with an authentic 1990s film camera which was used for taking pictures for props. Mike Lombardo is standing on the left, I’m on the right.
Where to begin. So my earliest memory of renting tapes at a video rental store must have been some time in the late 1980s when I was a small child. I remember my parents, older sister, and myself going to a small locally-owned video rental place off Manheim Pike in Lancaster. We were each given a choice to rent a tape, and I chose to rent a tape of Donald Duck cartoons, after checking out some Three Stooges tapes.
Flash forward a few years later and my parents divorced. My mother’s new boyfriend was a guy who had a job at a nearby video rental store called West Coast Video, located in a strip mall adjacent to the McDonald’s where my mom was the night manager. For those of you from Lancaster, PA, the McDonald’s was the one on Columbia Avenue and the strip mall was that place with the Sherwin Williams paint store.
Anyway, the new boyfriend let us rent tapes all the time, and I remember my older sister and I picking out titles on the first night where he babysat us. My sister rented a copy of that made-for-TV movie about My Pet Monster, whereas I rented a compilation of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles episodes. I remember on subsequent nights my sister would rent a tape of New Kids on the Block concert footage whereas I chose a compilation of episodes of Voltron.
I remember distinctly when a new Blockbuster Video had its grand opening near us. The year must have been about 1992, and it was the location in Chelsea Square off Manheim Pike; this is coincidentally the same location where Mike Lombardo would frequently rent from, as it was near his house in East Petersburg. I remember this particular event where the Blockbuster mascots made an appearance in costume, and I got a free balloon that I accidentally popped.
In the next few years my family and I would often rent tapes and NES games from that specific location in addition to a nearby A-Z Video. Another Blockbuster Video would be built over top of an old abandoned house on the corner of Roherstown Road and Columbia Avenue in Lancaster. At present day this place is now an Urgent Care clinic.
Friday nights for us would involve us picking out a tape or video game to rent for the weekend. My older sister would usually pick music video tapes, I’d generally just get NES games of varying quality, and my baby sister really liked Dr. Seuss cartoons. Some games that I frequently picked out were those extremely difficult Simpsons NES games like Bart vs. the Space Mutants and Bart vs. The World, which 7-year old me could barely figure out how to play, but nonetheless tried his damnedest.
Later in the ‘90s when I was in my early teens, I had a best friend named Skot who lived in a small town called Landsville. He also worked on the visual effects for this movie, and even created some of the cartoon graphics such as the Movie Knight mascot and the Little Boots Pizza symbol. When we were teens, I’d spend the night at his place very often, and although there wasn’t much to do in that town, there was a locally-owned video rental place called Video Ink in the town center. Each time we’d have a sleepover, Skot, his brother Shawn and I would walk to Video Ink and pick out a tape.
I remember one particular night when Skot and I were about 14, and he rented a Cheech & Chong movie whereas I rented Led Zeppelin’s “The Song Remains the Same” film. Then we stayed up all night designing homemade 2-D sprite games on his computer and gobbling snacks from CVS. Video Ink closed down permanently sometime in the 2000s, I believe.
In fall 1998 right before my 8th grade school year, a new shopping center was constructed on Fruitville Pike – Red Rose Commons. When they announced the opening of a Hollywood Video store, my stepdad [a.k.a. mom’s boyfriend from earlier] immediately applied for a job as a manager and got hired. My older sister and I were invited to hang out at the store for the grand opening, which I remember was really desolate; very few customers showed up that day, as the shopping center wasn’t entirely completed yet. Subsequently I recall some small quirks about that store and its employees, like how when Titanic was released on VHS, my stepdad and his coworkers arranged a huge store display of VHS tapes in the shape of a boat.
From 1998-2001 we used to rent any movie or game that we wanted for free, since my stepdad was an assistant manager. We were also allowed to keep slightly damaged games that weren’t suitable for rental; I got a free copy of Castlevania 64 this way, and played the hell out of it and considered it one of my favorite games of all time despite the negative reviews. I also remember renting a SEGA Dreamcast for a weekend back in 1999 and playing many hours of Crazy Taxi.
My stepdad also had access to rent “screener” copies of movies, which were special promotional videos intended for store-usage only. The tapes were usually early pre-releases of movies, and to prevent resale the picture would shift back and forth between color and black and white. His store connections would also allow us to view rare, out of print, and sometimes banned videos. For example, my stepdad obtained a bootlegged copy of Disney’s “Song of the South” this way.
In addition to scoring damaged Nintendo games and illegal Disney cartoons, we could also keep random promotional material from the store such as cardboard cutouts of Star Wars characters and electronic light-up poster displays with the blinking lights, like the kind you’d see for Broadway musicals. We even snagged a lenticular display poster of Species 2 that would shift the image from the main character as a human to an alien.
One particular event that stands out for me from my stepdad’s Hollywood Video days was for Halloween 1999 when he and his coworkers all dressed up in costume at the store. My stepdad and his general manager Tanya dressed up as Darth Maul and Queen Amidala from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, but one of the random employees dressed as Alex from A Clockwork Orange for some reason. The Darth Maul getup was done surprisingly well and made from scratch.
The free rentals at Hollywood Video came to a bitter end in spring 2001 when my family would experience Divorce Part II: Electric Boogaloo which resulted in my stepdad moving out permanently. From there on in, we just went back to renting tapes and video games at Blockbuster Video the old fashioned way. By the time the DVD era came in full swing – circa 2004 – my sisters and I would rent DVDs and GameCube games, until my older sister kept using my account to rent movies without returning them, and I got stuck with the late fees.
Due to desperation of dwindling sales, as independently-owned video rental stores declined in the later 1990s, it was common for them to incorporate secondary businesses inside their stores to recoup lost income. Typically the stores would also offer tanning beds or small gyms as their secondary source of revenue. Our local chain of A-Z Video was eventually rebranded as A-Z Video/E-Z Tan.
This reminds me of a similar and strange situation where a specific local video rental store tried to incorporate a second business in addition to renting movies. Back in the 1990s in Lancaster, there was a short-lived business venture called Dink’s Chew & View, which was a pizza place that had a small video rental selection as well. I guess the whole gimmick was that families could get their essentials for Friday night movie/pizza night at a singular location. I remember their mascot was a cartoon hippie giving a peace sign, ha!
By the mid-2000s I gradually grew out of renting movies and games as my interest waned for modern video game consoles, and then finally in 2006 the A-Z Video store went out of business permanently. I remember going there with Mike Lombardo and snatching up a bunch of old VHS tapes on clearance.
Right now the location where Blockbuster once was is currently a women’s clothing store next to a supermarket. Every time Lombardo and I go to Weis Market to run errands, we always walk past that store and spark up conversations about our memories of picking up tapes from Blockbuster as kids. Little details like the cobblestone pattern trash cans outside the women’s clothing store were relics from the Blockbuster days. The former site of Hollywood Video where my stepdad worked is presently a Verizon store, I believe.
So that’s my trip down memory lane of renting tapes and video games during my youth. As much as I had fond memories renting video tapes and games from various rental stores in my youth, my memories were more utilitarian in nature; in those days, you had no choice but to rent from video rental places, and as soon as the technology and culture evolved, the stores became obsolete for me. With that being said, I wish I could be a bit more nostalgic about video rental stores, but I’m not nearly as big of a movie aficionado as Lombardo is!
Now that we’ve covered the nostalgic parts of my youth, let’s get into the specific details of my involvement with Dead Format. A lot of my creative work with this movie involved a ton of graphic design for props and various elements of the film. To start, I was tasked with creating the Video Castle logo, which was directly inspired by the A-Z Video logo and branding. The basis of the design was partially inspired by the U.S. Army Engineer Corps insignia of a castle. Using that basic idea as a starting point combined with the overall look of A-Z Video tape cases, I chose a unique in-universe branding with gold and purple for regal colors.
I was really proud of the Video Castle logo in how it was simplistic yet realistic enough to be a sort of basic clip-art style design seen in 1990s-era businesses. For Lombardo’s birthday in 2024 I got him a custom cookie cake with the logo drawn on it in yellow and purple icing! We even used the logo to make a neon sign from a cheap LED sign manufacturer overseas, with the intention of displaying it at the fictional Video Castle store in the movie.
I then created layouts for the T-shirts for the store employees. We went with gold shirts with purple print, but I initially suggested we coordinate the uniforms similar to the Starfleet officer outfits in Star Trek: I figured maybe the gold shirts could be for general employees, and purple shirts could be for managers. Maybe black shirts with yellow print could have been for night shift workers. Due to budget constraints we just went with gold with purple print for all employees, and then had a bunch printed for IndieGoGo backers as well.
A little detail I wanted to do which was scrapped in the final movie was to have some subtle differences in the amount of Video Castle franchise locations, which varied by year to emphasize their decline. For example, I suggested that in the ‘90s flashback sequences the stores could feature a jingle that flaunted Video Castle’s 15 locations in the tri-state area. Then in the modern day as the store was about to go out of business, the T-shirt designs would only display three locations – York, Harrisburg, and Lancaster – a subtle hint at their dwindling stores.
A lot of the reasons why Lombardo nixed my suggestions for establishing the Video Castle brand more thoroughly had to do with the setting only playing a minor role in the film, and not being a frequently recurring location. Had this movie revolved more around Video Castle as its central setting – such as, let’s say how the Quik Stop convenience store was in Kevin Smith’s “Clerks” – then Lombardo would have most likely chose a more coordinated and branded system for the Video Castle stores as an in-universe business, such as the details for the uniforms and dwindling locations.
A key detail to look for in the 2000s-era scenes of Video Castle is how there’s makeshift store signage to advertise tanning beds. As mentioned previously, in real life, as local video rental stores began to lose customers, certain stores would double their businesses as tanning salons and gyms.
Fleshing out the store with prop video tapes was a heavy undertaking to say the least. We had to temporarily clear out Brian Keene’s former comic book store Vortex to use as the filming location, and then quickly reload the store with comic books after dismantling the set. I was supposed to play a customer in the store during shooting in spring 2025, but sadly was suffering food poisoning that weekend⁽¹⁾. Nonetheless, we successfully filled the store with hundreds of fake VHS tapes that were carefully designed, printed, and hand-crafted.
For accuracy, I actually used a real A-Z Video tape case to measure and get the exact layout constraints for creating my prop video tapes. Mike Lombardo would provide for me the titles and copy to use for a series of Adobe Illustrator files. We printed out dozens and these to use as slips for the prop video tapes. As for the VHS cases themselves, we actually stumbled upon a trove of empty tape cases in the basement of my mother’s house. I mentioned earlier that my stepdad was the manager at Hollywood Video and got to keep a bunch of random stuff from the store. I guess one day he brought home a large box of empty VHS cases that he planned on using to archive tapes at home, so back in 2024 during pre-production, Lombardo and I were digging through my old basement and found all of those blank tape cases. These were used for many of the props in Video Castle.
The creation of the front-facing prop VHS tapes was an extremely difficult undertaking that involved two major components: developing hundreds of layouts of images of the tapes, followed by Lombardo physically assembling them into prop video tapes. This undertaking took several months for the both of us. The first step for me was obtaining well over 100 or so images of book covers or indie movie posters, and then processing them into Photoshop layouts measured to fit inside VHS sleeves. Many of these images were low-resolution or in the incorrect aspect ratio, which required additional editing on my behalf.
After the layouts were designed, Mike Lombardo would have them printed in bulk on thick, glossy paper at a local print shop. Then he would use a paper cutter, an X-acto knife, and a scoring board to meticulously craft the layouts into VHS sleeves. Each sleeve was placed around a small rectangle piece of Styrofoam in the shape of a VHS tape, and ultimately shrinkwrapped with clear plastic and a heat gun.
Not all of the VHS sleeves were submissions from authors and filmmakers. Several of them were designs that I created on my own, based on inside jokes and other references under guidance of Lombardo. For example, as seen in the film, there’s a VHS sleeve for a fictional movie called “Gut Rot Pie”. This was a VHS sleeve that I designed myself using my camera to shoot photos of people such as Lombardo’s girlfriend Lex Quinn, along with our friends Mike James and Jason Gross. I visited Lancaster a few times in 2024 to shoot these photos and assemble them into the fictional VHS sleeve in Photoshop. Gut Rot Pie itself was a direct reference to a canceled Reel Splatter project from the 2000s, prior to when I met Lombardo. I would also use these same exact techniques of photography and graphic design for some of the featured titles such as Love You Vore, Weekend at Escobar’s, and Ace of Blades.
Aside from doing a lot of the movie’s graphics, I helped out a few times as a general production assistant and photographer. For instance, during the birthday party scene, we filmed at the O’Connor house in summer 2025, and I acted as the set photographer. A lot of the family photos seen in the background of the movie – including the dad’s obituary photo – were taken by me with my DSLR. During the scene where young Kevin is celebrating his birthday, he can be seen with a green cake. This was a green slime Nickelodeon cake which was originally featured as a recipe in Nickelodeon Magazine in the 1990s when Lombardo and I were kids.
After wrapping shooting for some scenes at the O’Connor house in summer 2025, this is a photo taken of the cast and crew using a real film camera from the 1990s. We deliberately shot and processed real film photos to use as background props. I can be seen sitting furthest on the right on the couch.
Lombardo and his mom baked two separate green slime cakes for the movie. Rather than wasting food, after shooting wrapped I ate half of the first green slime cake with Bob O’Connor, and kept the whole second cake for myself. I gradually ate the second cake over the course of an entire week, much to the chagrin of Lombardo who insisted I would get sick because it had been sitting out for several hours. The cake started to taste funny by the time I reached the last slice, but I felt fine⁽²⁾.
There’s a particular scene where adult Kevin goes through his dad’s personal items after his death. These were various knickknacks I bought at Roots farmer’s market. I wandered around the flea market section and bought several cheap things that look believable as small personal items that previously belonged to a middle-aged man. These were a pocket knife, a dolphin-shaped lighter, a wrist watch, and a volleyball championship medal from the early ‘80s. Lombardo used these all in the film except the medal. I insisted he shoehorned in a reference to Kevin’s dad being a champion volleyball player in his youth, but to no avail.
- This incident occurred in spring 2025, months prior to the birthday party scene. My food poisoning had nothing to do with the green slime cake.
- See above.