Dear God! Harry Has Found Movie Lover's Paradise aka If Only Blockbuster Had A Brain It'd Be Called SCARECROW VIDEO!

Hey folks, Harry here in Seattle. The Emerald City. And upon my travels in this wondrous land in my blue and white plaid skirt, I stumbled across the SCARECROW VIDEO. Wowzers.

Man... Sometimes as a geek you walk into a place that just feels like home... or what home would feel like if expanded to one's wildest dreams. I'm a film geek... It is my fetish of choice and walking into a video store with a selection of over 70,000 different titles... DEAR GOD!!! I want to make a tornado to lift SCARECROW VIDEO up and place it a block from my house in OZ-tin, Texas.

I got into Seattle yesterday and was instantly greeted by MissMel and Norm. I didn't know anything about Norm, but Father Geek informed me that he was some sort of supergenius at Scarecrow Video. So, having heard of Scarecrow by reputation, I enthusiastically shook his hand and thought well of him. We part our ways, Dad, MissMel and I head off to the W hotel (NOT THE WESTIN) and Norm I'm sure went to some secret back alley meeting to score more rare videos. But we were to meet up again at the ALIBI ROOM with a selection of other cool Seattle Geek Types.

Long story short, Norm and I started talking over dinner and I realize the man speaks fluent film geek, given I'm well versed in this lost pre-Latin language, we begin exchanging bits of film lore into the late hours of my first night in Seattle. He invited Father Geek and I to drop by SCARECROW VIDEO today to check the digs out and to discover why this video store is considered by many to be... THE GREATEST VIDEO STORE UPON THE PLANET EARTH.

Well, today I did my book signing at Borders which was great, then some University of Washington Talk Radio program, then it was off to SCARECROW VIDEO. I was preparing myself to be disappointed. When folks often talk up their homegrown places of choice, I find myself many times disappointed. I mean... Austin has some great friggin video stores, Los Angeles has some great friggin video stores (DAVE!) and why on Earth would the greatest video store on planet Earth be located in Seattle? Not that there is anything wrong with Seattle, but why would it be there? Of course people often wonder why the Alamo Drafthouse is in Austin, and generally I say because we have Tim and Karrie League's parents in a deep dark dungeon and they know what will happen if they leave. But I think SCARECROW started out as all things do... Just a store trying to find its niche and growing... and growing... and growing... It kinda happens...

From the outside it doesn't look like much, the sign doesn't even have a scarecrow on it. What's up with that? In fact, nowhere in the place did I actually see a scarecrow, that was kinda odd actually. I walk into the place and instantly see the Used DVD Sell Rack, which instantly draws my crutches magnetically. Now, your typical video & dvd store's used rack is populated with titles like SOLDIER, EVENT HORIZON, SHE'S ALL THAT, BOYS & GIRLS and the type of crap that creates a glut in land fills everywhere... But here... They have 9 used copies of Osamu Tezuka's METROPOLIS!!! There were discs from foriegn lands, Regions 1,2,3,4,5,6 and RED, which I can only assume is from a near alternative dimension with a holographic digital encoding technology which only Scarecrow's Interdimensional Super DVD players can decode.... Ok, so maybe the parallel universe dvd region was made up, but the rest was true. I mean, flat out insane.

Now, I've ordered a couple of things from Scarecrow.Com over the years... most notably their amazing LEGEND OF THE SACRED STONE disc, but nothing on that site prepared me for the enormity and the savantism drool that came from my face as I began walking the endless aisles of SCARECROW. I swear to God my film collection penis lost several inches as I wandered through their director and foreign lands sections. I mean... from Albania to Zaire? WHAT THE HELL? THEY MAKE MOVIES IN ZAIRE? And they have literally every director of note... fleshed out to the umpteenth in their director section. I mean, when's the last time you saw a JACK ARNOLD section at a video store? And their Argento run was positively annoying to no end. I mean, they had everything... OH and to make it more annoyingly perfect... They don't divide their DVDs and VIDEOs... They are all together, so if you are wanting to have that night of Argento bliss and you want to see all the stuff he's ever done, including his latest available only in PAL Region fucking 2... Well they have it.

Then there was the upstairs section... I was beginning to go a little faint, because frankly... it was way too much. I mean, it was like finding the perfect retirement home for movie geekdom. They need to buy up all the land around them, build geek condos - and every geek with a 401k can just spend their golden years with a home, medical care and SCARECROW's Video Selection.... I mean, it would make catatonia rule!

When I left Paradise (aka SCARECROW) I had my brand spanking new All Region PAL/NTSC dvd player, the lost Orson Welles' DON QUIXOTE, THE COMPANY OF WOLVES - a title you can't get in the U.S., the French VIDOCQ, METROPOLIS, KAIRO and three of the epic Babycart Samurai films in PAL - BABYCART IN PERIL, BABYCART IN THE LAND OF DEMONS and the classic WHITE HEAVEN IN HELL. That was just a start, I'm returning on Sunday for my talk and signing at SCARECROW VIDEO at 11am - and before I leave, I know my bank account will be diminished further.

If you're a real filmgeek, and when I say that, I mean someone that will experiment, get weird titles, old films, the stuff nobody has ever told you about, the movies that your film professors at college are too fucking snobbish to inform you about, but are the very films you need to see to develop a style different from all the other cabbages sitting in that class, that have graduated from that class or will graduate from that class one day. The employees? Well they all seem to have a healthy dose of the savantism of film knowledge. Although I was pleased to stump them when I told them about my favorite little known noir title SPLITSECOND -- You can bet that Norm is looking for a copy... Right now! Wonder if he'll have it on Sunday? Naaaah, he can't be that fast.

I'll see you folks on Sunday, till then... if you have any idea or blackmail information for how I can get SCARECROW relocated to Austin, please email me at Harry@AintItCool.Com!