“Streets of Fire (4K UHD Review)”, 2023-03-06 (; backlinks):
…Of course, time hasn’t been kind to most of us, but Streets of Fire abides. It’s certainly been an integral part of my own life ever since 1984. I worked at a small-town video store back in the late Eighties, and we had a big-screen television up front that had a halfway decent sound system in it.
One of the few videotapes that every employee could agree about for in-store play was Streets of Fire. We played it multiple times a week, and sometimes even multiple times a day, with the sound cranked up the whole time. We watched it many, many hundreds of times over the course of my tenure there.
The only problem was that it was sometimes difficult to finish, since it inevitably attracted attention from our customers. They would stand there riveted during key sequences in the film, like the butterfly knife scene or the sledgehammer duel, and they often asked if we had another copy of it. We didn’t, so we’d have to pull the tape out to let them rent it, and then wait breathlessly until it came back the next day.
I’d like to think that video store employees like us were an integral part of turning this box office bomb into the cult classic that it is today.
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