Here are some screenshots of the old Movie Magic website, which no longer exists.
Movie Magic was a video rental chain that existed in Ireland up until about 2007 or so.
During my early teens, Movie Magic was the store I’d visit whenever I wanted to rent a PlayStation game or a movie.
This was back in the good old days when you’d rent a VCR and then swear because the person who had it last was too lazy and ignorant to rewind it.
“Movie Magic is a 100% Irish owed & run video store. We have been operational for 15 years and there are currently over 90 staff on our Movie Magic Team at the moment.”
A pixelated image is all that remains of this mythical store.
Below is an original description of the website. This was written before it was taken down.
Stumbling upon the website is like stepping back in time.
As soon as you land on the home page, the site greets you with a wonderful flashing logo, a tasteful clouded background, and navigational buttons that rotate whenever you hover over them.
If you look at the source, you can see someone generated the site with Microsoft FrontPage 5.0, which was a WYSIWYG “website editor” that Microsoft officially discontinued after Office 2003.
Unfortunately, for those of us who are fond of taking trips down memory lane, the pictures of the actual store are too tiny and pixelated to make out some of the finer details.
However, you can still feel the “yellowness” of it all, and the “Top Ten” rental chart does provide us with a nice snapshot of the exact moment when the company ceased functioning properly.
After browsing the site and soaking up all of the nostalgia, I decided to try and figure out what had happened to the company.
To my frustration, I failed to find any news reports about its closure. The only information I could find was that it was officially dissolved as a legal entity back in 2008.
Judging by the time period that it stopped functioning, its demise may have had something to do with the global credit crunch.
If you have any further information about why Movie Magic in Ireland decided to shut up shop and close its doors, please make sure to post a comment in the comment section below.
This is fantastic material for a very cool Tumblr-Blog (or so). I think masses of people would love it. I’m stumbling about abandoned pages all the time, sometimes so unbelievable outdated that it’s nearly art. Full of bullshitty flash intros, stolen gifs, horrible HTML, java-applets (does anyone even remember java applets ?), insane iframe-in-frame sets, background music and super-cheesy slogans (WELCOME TO MY HOMEPAGE!).