This St. George business owner is offering VHS rentals for nostalgic experience

ST. GEORGE — Walking into Legacy Media Digital in St. George is a lot like stepping back in time — a time when shelves were lined with VHS tapes and the checkout counter had stacks of candy and popcorn ready to take home for a Friday movie night.

Recently, store owner McKay Murdock has made his VHS collection available for the public to come and rent videos for an experience he believes should be brought back.

"These are occasions where everybody's together as a family, making those memories of going to the video store," Murdock told KSL. "We kind of wanted to bring back the nostalgic feel of the whole family going to Blockbuster to pick out a movie and a treat. We also rent out VCRs."

Legacy Media Digital is a Kodak-authorized dealer for film stocks and motion picture film. The store also develops 35-millimeter film for those wanting to shoot analog.

Stepping back in time is what Murdock does for a living, as most of his business is dedicated to digitizing photos and videos from the 1940s through the early 2000s. He said his goal when he opened the store in 2009 was to bring families together.

"I always loved family history," Murdock said. "My mom always had a family history room where she had thousands of photos and hundreds of video cassettes. It's been so great to do this for my family and to provide the service for others."

The past several years, however, Murdock has seen his business struggle — not because the need for digitizing has dropped, but because of what he deems a faster-paced way to get a "lower quality product."

"We digitize everything, and our film scanners are the same film scanners they use in Hollywood for motion picture films, versus a lot of the other digitizing companies," he said. "We have huge flatbed scanners and high-speed scanners and the same imaging systems they would use at the Smithsonian or the Utah historical society.

"Because our quality is so high, we have the contract with the state of Utah for any time they need extra help digitizing a project."

He said it's been an uphill battle fighting larger companies who he said he "can't beat the prices of." He did say, however, that he is really trying to "lean in" to what brought him into the business in the first place: family togetherness and nostalgia.

"I have a 20-year-old (child) all the way down to a 6-year-old, and I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, it's Friday night, and we're all on different screens in different parts of the house," he said. "I was like, 'How cool would that be to be able to go in, pick out a couple movies for the weekend, and have just a fun experience with the family?'"

His oldest daughter, Haylee Murdock, works at the store and designed the entryway complete with snacks like Cracker Jacks and Big League Chew. Even though she didn't grow up in the VHS era, she said, it has been fun to hold something tangible.

"I wasn't quite into this era, but it's still a great thing to be able to experience because my generation has been more of the streaming," she said. "It's been so fun to be able to pick one, pull it out of the case and put it in the VCR and not have any distractions in the background when it comes to streaming. I feel like I spend more time scrolling than I do actually watching the movie.

"It's been so nice to be able to say, 'Hey, let's pick out a movie together, and we all turn off our phones and we're all together in the same room," she added. "It's kind of a cool bonding thing, even if it's as simple as watching a movie."

Murdock said he realizes the irony of the situation — a company that specializes in digitizing media, inviting people to experience un-digitized media. He said, however, that his business was never about getting rid of old things, but making memories accessible.

"It's been cool to just immerse myself in the emotional interactions of the people I do projects for," he said. "It's really rewarding when you're able to digitize stuff and get their feedback and see their reactions when they see family and relatives that they haven't seen for decades."

And while he said that renting out $3 videos, a VCR and a few candy items won't be a "big money maker," he hopes that doing so will eventually have a greater impact on how people spend time together.

He also said that his extensive collection of VHS tapes is another way he tries to give back — to the environment.

"I have 500 videos available to rent and thousands in storage," he said. "I've been trying to save them from the landfill. A lot of secondhand stores won't take them, and we are just trying to upcycle as best as we can. I built our candy display out of VHS tapes.

"Throwing them away is a travesty on the environmental end, but also a loss of what these items are and what they meant to so many people."

Each of the video and VCR rentals is done on an overnight basis, with Friday rentals going through the weekend as the store is closed on Saturdays and Sundays.

"We're one of the last little guys out there, and we're seeing the effects of larger corporations, and we're trying to get ahead the best we can," he said. "We need people to make a conscious effort to support the small professional shops that have amazing things to offer."

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