Biggest rental regret from back in the day?

[trevanian]

There was a store in Palo Alto called Videoscope that had a really good selection in the 80s, plus a section in back. My then-girlfriend wanted to see a porn movie (she hadn't ever seen one), so we rented something called THE *****INATOR Well, she made it about 5min in before yelling 'enough already.' (she was a real hound about good production values, and even though I warned her that would be a non-starter with adult entertainment, she still wanted to try.) As I recall, the porn titles were a lot more expensive than the rest, so it was probably a five or six buck rental, and this was probably 33 years ago.

The other funny thing about that particular store was that at one point they had A MAN IN LOVE in the new release section. This same girlfriend was almost a dead ringer for Greta Scacchi, and every time Abby passed by it, she would turn the box around to hide the cover because it looked so much like her (I think it was Greta and Peter Coyote together in profile.)

I think Videoscope was one of the first places I found that rented laserdiscs, too, which was awesome. I remember renting the Criterions fpr BLADE RUNNER and 2001 and watching them slackjawed with disbelief that you could get such high image quality AND in widescreen to boot. (I think we actually rented the laserdisc player from there too, before shelling out for a Sony something something 500, which let you do freeze frames on CLV as well as CAV disks. Great machine, but very prone to malfunction.)

EDIT ADDON: didn't realize the site's censor would blot out the porn title. Suffice it say, it rhymes with the word Terminator but is a synonym for ejaculate (though now come to think of it, if it censors the word ***** in *****inator it will probably censor ejaculate as well. Let's just say that the blocked out word is a synonym for something that sounds like the last word in ALL THAT JAZZ.)