Scarecrow Video is an independently owned, non-profit video sales and rental store. It is one of just two video rental stores still operating in the Seattle city limits after the closure of the 32-year-old Video Isle store in January 2019. The other is Reckless Video in Seattle’s Maple Leaf neighborhood.
Scarecrow offers a wide selection of foreign DVDs, over 5,000 anime movies, and DVD players and other media devices for rental (including PAL, laser disc players and region free DVD players). 14,676 items are still on VHS. 263 items are on laserdisc.
Located in the University District of Seattle, Washington, the store was opened in 1988 by Rebecca and George Latsios as well as John McCullough. From the beginning, the store was known as a welcome, open place for film lovers to find rare titles and be greeted by Latsios’s trademark “Hello, my friend.”
As of 2019, Scarecrow’s collection held more than 132,000 titles, about 4,100 of which were added in 2017. Many of them are out of print (some require deposits that range from $150 – $1000). Of the top 100 rarest titles (cross-checked against various institutions’ lists), 88 of them are not held by the Library of Congress. The total number of “very rare” titles in which Scarecrow may have the only publicly accessible copy is 77 out of 100. There are 129 foreign country sections, featuring about 126 languages aside from English, available in store. The earliest original release date in their collection is from 1891.
Today, Scarecrow Video continues to operate its video rental store business in its second Seattle location with the added mission of maintaining “full public access” to its extensive media collection. (Its original location was on Latona, in the Ravenna neighborhood). Scarecrow now offers free community film screenings in its private screening room, a weekly children’s story hour at its store, summer outdoor movie events at Magnuson Park and other community events, and Silver Screeners movie discussion groups at Seattle-area public libraries and senior centers.
According to en.wikipedia; scarecrow.com. Source of photo: internet
