The success of Blockbuster video may have in part been due to its cleanliness, but from my experience it was because your mom 'n pop shop would have two copies of a new blockbuster movie so you'd never get to see it, and Blockbuster would have a hundred waiting for you. These old movies are awesome, they bypassed the MPAA and touched topics that a studio would've considered too risky for general distribution, indie VHS really took over where drive-in movies left off. But in the end most people didn't care, they just wanted to watch the Matrix and Blockbuster had two shelves of it stacked two-deep. I don't know what's taken over since VHS. Maybe crowdfunding could fill this gap, but nothing will have the "feel" that these movies did, because nowadays with the Internet nothing can be truly "obscure" for very long.

When I lived in Iowa City in the 1990's, I used to go to a tiny video store called The Tofu Hut (How's that name for a deep 90's culture reference) which did a marvelous job of picking a selection of foreign movies, anime, fetish pornography and independent and exploitation films. There will never be places like that again. They existed in a small gap when VHS was thriving and Blockbuster wasn't dominant.